Re-using this photo for another reason. These are our ‘elected representatives’. Have a look at the job sheet…
Re-using this photo for another reason. These are our ‘elected representatives’. Have a look at the job sheet of a modern democratic government, it’s enormously complex. What specific expertise do elected representatives bring to that complexity? Almost zero. This matters. /1 https://t.co/26T9AP1PHm
If you hire somebody for a job, competence or expertise in the area of the job is essential. But in politics, you hire somebody based on one measure only - their popularity. Meaning the most complex organisation in every country, its government, is run by people…/2 https://t.co/hqihpWyjyE
…with next to zero expertise in the actual work. It doesn’t work, and can’t work, and the reality that isn’t often spoken is that they *don’t* ‘run’ anything much. Their officials do that work, thousands of people with the actual expertise in how the country operates. /3 https://t.co/m8nKaPdDhb
It’s the civil service model we adopted from the UK, who in turn adopted it from the Chinese. A recognition that as nations got bigger and more complex, nothing would work without a large civil service with the skills and knowledge to run the country. /4 https://t.co/tml7oycaW5
The old days of Kings and nobles making arbitrary and ad hoc decisions was ended by these same Kings and nobles. It was they who *invented* the civil service, together with parliaments, in desperation when the problems they were being asked to solve overwhelmed them. /5 https://t.co/YUJezXFPcs
Ask anybody who works for politicians, and they’ll confirm that this is true. Politicians may be lovely, extremely hard-working people. But at the end of the day they’re utterly beholden to the expertise of their officials to be able to do anything at all. They don’t have the…/6 https://t.co/HLyJUmhesS
…first idea how anything ‘runs’, without those officials. What’s lethally dangerous to societies is that in the past 30-50 years, a political belief system emerged that ignored all of this, and decided to replace it with the populist idea that politicians DO run the country. /7 https://t.co/76Y4EFFW6k
N=1 politics. Neoliberalism. Whatever you want to call it. They fiercely attacked this civil service, labelling them as ‘bureaucrats’, and everybody now lines up behind this venom, nothing fires people up more than ‘bureaucracy’. Replacing it with pliable advisers, who turn…/8 https://t.co/zbvrUvcw1g
…a blind eye to all due process, all the expertise needed. And we wonder that societies are falling apart. As with public health and Covid, it’s also pig ignorance of the history. It was ‘the elites’ who invented the civil service, and parliaments, and public health. /9 https://t.co/Pv48wQECzO
They couldn’t fix any of the problems facing them, without these new bodies. We can’t elect our way out of these problems, because elections just replace one set of people with no idea with another set with no idea, no matter how well-meaning they happen to be. /10 https://t.co/IxLix5X5bs
We need expertise-based politics back. Where elected representatives serve their actual purpose, of personifying the process of government for the wider public, being the touchpoint for the public, in government. But not, ever, by ‘running the country’. /11 https://t.co/5MyrJaZtUV
By ‘bringing people along’ with the decisions that need doing, as assessed by that vast expertise working already in government, outside elections. /end https://t.co/oYzwNP0S8N
