How well are we governed?

Debates about the relative merits of the Westminster parliamentary system, the US presidential model or the grand bargain of the Chinese Communist system which trades individual freedoms for collective prosperity are usually the province of specialised academic departments. Very occasionally, something happens that allows direct comparisons to be made between different systems facing a common challenge and the obvious example is war, which is competitive politics played at the highest register for the highest stakes.

A more limited example might be the competition to achieve a single goal — climb Everest, put a man on the moon — which implicitly compares the virtues of different systems. But there has never in the modern era been anything quite so levelling as the Covid-19 pandemic. Almost instantaneously, nation states and the political systems that sustain them are facing a pitiless but uniform and undifferentiated threat that allows comparative judgements to move beyond the civics seminar and into the life and death decisions made by governments all over the world. So how are we doing?

The definitive answer will not be available until the Royal Commission — that must follow — delivers its report. But we can take a punt now, based on the available anecdotal evidence. To use a sporting analogy, if there were a global Covid-19 premier league we would be, at best, mid table and, at worst, on the edge of the relegation zone. Not great for a nation that has always regarded itself the conceit of believing its combination of muscular, adversarial parliamentary politics and a professional civil service provides a model others should seek to emulate. Has something fundamental gone wrong or is it like every war we fight: a bad start followed by a long slog to a triumphant finish?

Muscular, adversarial parliamentary politics first. Not for us the implicitly consensual round or horseshoe-shaped legislative chambers favoured by the global wimp tendency. We like our politics red in tooth and claw, contested at the despatch box by gladiators armed only with the speed of their wit and the turn of their phrase. The obvious advantage of a first past the post system is that it can, as in the recent December election, deliver a mandate for decisive government under vivid leadership. How relieved most of us felt that we were over the enervating torpor of the May/Corbyn regime where both wit and fluency were crushed beneath the dead weight of Brexit. And, for the prosecution of policies that are fundamentally ideological, the British parliamentary system has much to recommend it. The People’s Budget of 1909, the Atlee Government’s social reforms or the Thatcher Government’s economic reforms were all delivered by single minded politicians armed with a mandate from the people in what looks like a series of historical vindications of the way we are governed.

But Covid-19 has no ideology. It’s not about winning the argument, it’s about beating the disease and that is an empirically-based process, not an ideological one. Indeed, empiricism, with its reliance on data and scientific method, is in many ways the antonym of ideology, with its reliance on conviction and rhetoric. As a result, what equips us well for the ideological hurly burly of conventional politics, perversely compromises our response to the unique challenge of pandemic. The point cannot be better illustrated than by the British and German experience of Covid-19. Britain is led by a classically schooled prime minister, known for his rhetorical flourish; it enjoys adversarial politics and has 21,617 dead as a result of Covid-19. Germany is led by a scientifically-schooled chancellor, known for her lack of rhetorical flourish; it governs by permanent coalition and has 6,314 dead from the disease, from a larger population.

It’s a cheap point but contains an important truth. That truth is not that a constitutional monarchy is a less effective system than a parliamentary republic but that each must be aware of its own intrinsic shortcomings and adapt when necessary. This requires a self-awareness not always associated with politicians or the systems they inhabit but it is why we have coalition governments in wartime and is a point that will be front and centre of the Royal Commission’s eventual conclusions.

Then there’s the professional civil service. A minister once confided to me that Yes Minister was less sitcom and more documentary. He had a point, but not one we need to labour further now. The Northcote-Trevelyan model of the civil service was introduced in 1870, drawing heavily on the experience of colonial administration in India, and, a frequent criticism says, it feels like it, with a distant class of gilded administrators directing the lives of the common people. It’s a frequent criticism, but probably an unfair one. The civil service has never lacked scrutiny, a tradition maintained today by the restless curiosity of Dominic Cummings, operating at the heart of government.

But if some of the accusations levelled at the civil service are lazy and formulaic why is it that the supermarkets have been so much better at stocking their shelves than the machinery of government has been in equipping front line medical staff? In a digital world that knows no boundaries, the traditionally recruited and generalist civil service looks oddly revisionist, tending to look inward to the structures and procedures it understands rather than outward to a world of increasing complexity from which it is progressively distanced and by which it is probably intimidated. How else can the parochial and tentative performance of Public Health England be explained?

It’s not as if other models of public administration are not available. In America, the more gifted civil servant (and politician) can trade a job in government for a board seat in commerce or a post in an academic department and then return to a future administration, without obstacle. The omnivorous experience this gives is regarded as an advantage, and, if the itinerant civil servant makes a few bucks, so much the better. In France, les enarques provide an administrative elite trained specifically for the demands at the top end of government. We enjoy neither the laissez faire advantages of the American system nor the Jesuitical intensity of the French and stick with a system with a tendency to self-limiting introspection which lacks the intellectual curiosity, imagination and confidence to take on the really big challenges — like the one we’re living through now.

Has something fundamental gone wrong? Politicians need to be more self-aware and civil servants need to get out more. These are remedial problems if recognised and addressed, but it’s getting late and relegation beckons.