2024-08-19
Dominic Cummings isn't everybody's cup of tea, but he does (probably) do his own thinking - which may explain why he didn't last long in government.
In his latest substack offering, he digs deep into history to illustrate his points (I am no historian so I won't comment on this section).
He goes on to describe how he feels that the Cabinet Office and PM's Office and indeed the whole edifice of the Civil Service and 'Parliament by political party' are doomed by their own mentality to fail, and will indeed fight off all comers in order to continue that failure (after all, who is to hold them accountable?).
" ... they don’t win because they are not actually trying to win, they are just trying to be players in the rancid SW1 game and don’t want that game disrupted by attempts to change its basic rules and agreed goals"
I don't agree with Dominic's conclusions (he is too narrow in his thinking - for example, he makes no mention of how the party system fails the people, nor of whether the complex structure of local / national government that arose out of the 19th & early 20th century is appropriate for the future, nor of the Bank of England and UN/WEF/WHO whom many suspect of pulling all the strings behind the politics that actually matter and who are in no way accountable to the British people).
Nevertheless he does paint a very realistic and convincing picture of exactly why the whole rotten edifice of government needs to be swept away so that we the people can rethink it and rebuild it as we please (not that he is proposing that!).
We need a "we the people" that are involved in politics.
We need bottom-up variety in place of top-down one-size-fits-all.
We need representatives and public bodies of integrity transparency and accountability that are responsive to public needs, and we need a responsibility structure that devolves planning and decision-making to the lowest practicable level.
We absolutely need public bodies to share aligned incentives with the people that they serve.
In short, we the people need to rethink all levels of government from first principles and rebuild it over time as we consider necessary.
A tall order? Absolutely.
How? Up for grabs.
Impossible? Only if we unthinkingly assume so.
