Broken Record

If it ain't broke, fix it anyway

I’d fix it if I could…and I’d always win.

Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, ‘Fix It’

You may have heard that a week ago there was an election in the UK and the Labour Party won. I believe it was in the news. You may also have read my own pre-election musings, to the effect that if there could be said to be one overriding reason why Labour would win, it would be that the Conservatives had for 14 years made an essentially technocratic claim to be governing competently, and had failed to do so. Nobody has any affection for a technocrat, so while competent ones will be tolerated, incompetent ones will simply be vomited down the toilet of politics with neither pity nor mercy - and this is, sure enough, what has happened to the Tory Party.

Labour high-ups obviously understand this, both viscerally and intellectually, which is why from the moment of entering into government they have all been uttering the same refrain: that such-and-such a thing is ‘broken’ and that they are going to fix it. Hence, the prison system, we hear, is broken, the NHS is broken, the planning system is broken, and, well, all other public services in general are broken too, now that you mention it. If the new government has a motto, it would appear to be something like Move Fast and Fix Everything. Hence, Kier Starmer, we are told, will chair ‘mission delivery boards’ to make sure manifesto pledges are met, and his Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, Sue Gray, has been telling all and sundry that the new PM is ‘delivery obsessed’. This all of course follows on from an 18 month period in which Labour has been telling anyone who will listen that if they get to power they will be ‘mission driven’ (see also here).

This is a brave gambit, for all that it is the only gambit realistically available as a matter of political philosophy (how can a technocrat govern if not to promise to apply his technical expertise to making things better?). It is brave because it is founded on faith in a premise - that the State actually has it in its power to do much at all effectively, let alone lots of things at once - that has always been misguided, and which is growing less and less plausible yet as the decades go by.

That is to say, generally speaking across the country (and, I think, in other countries too), on average people are becoming palpably, measurably, almost proudly and barefacedly less capable all of the time. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it; you just have to open the front door and step outside to see it. So the idea that the organs of the State can be made more competent comparatively than they have ever been in the past seems on its face unlikely and, to put the kindest spin on it, can be best described rather as a touching manifestation of hope than a rational aspiration with respect to what a government might realistically achieve.

To put it in cruder terms: the pool of people who seem to know what they are doing in British society is visibly shrinking, both proportionally and, it seems, in real terms, and at an alarming rate. So what evidence is there for the assumption that the pool of competent civil servants can possibly be made to grow? Who is going to implement all of the ‘fixing’ that the country needs? And, more broadly, how is society going to recover its mojo once more, such that we return to the point in time at which we are able to look around ourselves and conclude that things, in fact, ‘work’?

Tony Blair, in the manner of a sleazy uncle photobombing selfies at a family birthday party, has barely been out of the news since Labour’s election triumph. He is staking the house on technology. AI, it seems, will - in the words of the ‘multiple experts’ who authored a recent report issued by Blair’s think-tank - help us ‘Reimagine the State’. From that report:

[A]dopting AI-era tech would boost long-term growth by creating a healthier and better-educated workforce, and lead to higher-quality public services and better outcomes for the public. [And] technology is advancing exponentially. That means even larger gains are possible in the future.

Within public services in particular, we are told, AI would:

• Save workforce time in the public sector and in turn allow the workforce to shrink, thereby reducing costs

• Improve the UK’s health services, especially in respect of preventive care

• Significantly ‘improve’ [note that word: improve] the way that citizens interact with government by deploying digital ID

• Boost educational attainment by something something improving teaching quality something something (the details here are somewhat hazy)

I’ll come in a minute to why this way of thinking is based on a fundamental misconception about the nature of the State and its relationship to the human subject. But first I think it is important to point out that even on their face, these four purported use-cases of technology in public services will not in fact make things ‘better’ in the terms proposed. Even if there is an answer to the question of what will improve the quality of public services and make the State function more effectively, in other words, technology isn’t it.

The reason I say this, of course, is simply that human beings are not machines (much as the experts at the Tony Blair Institute might wish it to be otherwise), and they do not therefore respond mechanically when inputs change. Human beings are political animals, so they respond to change - including technological change - politically and animalistically. In this regard, there is a sentence in a recent Telegraph article covering the Tony Blair Institute’s The Economy Case for Reimagining the State report that tells you almost everything you need to know about the likelihood of technology being some sort of silver bullet for the many manifest weaknesses of the British State:

The report said public sector workers’ productivity had been flat for more than 25 years but that the workforce had grown by 500,000 to six million over that time.

The fact that, despite there having been lots of technological advancements since 1999, public sector workers’ productivity is ‘flat’ is in itself highly illustrative, obviously, and should be enough to flag to any reader of The Economic Case for Reimagining the State that its contents are pie-in-the-sky. Technology is always getting better, but that does not seem to be correlated with improvements in public services even slightly, so nobody should reasonably expect it to be any different this time around.

However, the more important point is made at the end of the short passage: bureaucracies metastasise. They don’t shrink. Even if the use of AI brings about vast efficiencies in terms of workforce time in the public sector, in other words, those efficiencies will not, as the report suggests, lead to government ‘choos[ing] to bank those time savings and reduc[ing] the size of the workforce’. Because that simply isn’t what happens. What happens is that the modern State’s incentives are always and ineluctably to get bigger, and so in the medium-long term it does so - momentary Thatcherite or Cameronian roadbumps notwithstanding. So what we will get as technology advances is not a smaller, leaner, more capable State. What we will get is a bigger, more bloated, less capable one that has more scope to do foolish things because it is equipped with AI. This should surely be obvious to anyone who lives and breathes.

(I also cannot resist at this juncture pointing out, as an aside, that the total savings associated with the great AI-related efficiencies to be found in public sector employment are predicted in the The Economic Case for Reimagining the State report to amount to £34 billion a year. This, the authors tell us, is bigger than the total annual defence budget. What they don’t say is that it is less than half what the UK pays in debt interest each year - i.e. £89 billion. Maybe ChatGPT has some ideas about how we solve that problem, because our political class doesn’t seem to have any.)

But leaving all of that to one side, as I mentioned earlier on, the real sin of the Tony Blair Institute’s report, and of the new Labour government, is simply that they are buttressing the central discursive practice of government in modernity, in that they are serving to present government itself as the necessary means to ‘fix’ problems, and the population itself as essentially incapable of actually making improvements for itself, and by its own lights.

It always bears emphasising, in other words, that the State needs a weak, incapable and vulnerable population (or at least a population that conceives of itself as such), because if the population were capable of largely governing itself there would be no requirement for the State to do very much and no reason for most of the organs of the State to exist at all.

Regular readers will by now be expecting me to say something about Machiavelli’s thoughts about Moses, but to use another of his historical illustrations of the discursive practice of modern government in this regard:

Hiero of Syracuse [went from being] a private citizen [to being] ruler of Syracuse. He received nothing from Fortune but the opportunity, for as the citizens of Syracuse were oppressed, they elected him as their captain, and from that rank he proved himself worthy of becoming their prince.

The point here will not have been missed: if one wishes to become a ruler while lacking any prior source of legitimacy (for example, without having inheriting the crown, having been chosen by God, etc.), then one must receive from Fortune an opportunity, and such an opportunity will arise when the citizens are ‘oppressed’ - because then you can ride to the rescue and save them from their oppression.

This, obviously, requires two things: a plausible sense that the ruler is indeed ‘worthy’, and that the citizens are indeed ‘oppressed’. And this in a nutshell is the central dynamic of modern government - a relentless search, on the part of government (at the individual level of politicians, civil servants, and so on, as well as collectively), for opportunities to portray the citizenry as ‘oppressed’, and to portray government as the ‘worthy’ rescuer, so that the existence of government in its particular current form is legitimated and justified.

What this means in practice, of course, is that government is not really about ‘fixing’ things so much as it is about plausibly describing itself as necessary to exist so that things can be ‘fixed’. Those two activities are quite different, and imply a very different approach to problem solving. A person who wants to fix things fixes them. A person who wants to portray himself as necessary in perpetuity does not fix but manages problems, without ever letting them get so out of hand that his own position is called into question. And, ideally, he looks for more problems that he can plausibly lay claim to being able to solve, so that he can manage those in perpetuity, too.

The other side of that coin obviously is that the people must be endlessly cast as having vast numbers of otherwise irresolvable problems that only government can possibly hope to ‘fix’, and must therefore be made to rely on government more and more. And the end result of that is clear: the more the State purports to be necessary in order to solve problems X, Y and Z, the less the population needs to do for itself, and the weaker and more enervated it becomes - so that, naturally, arguments for the necessity of the State apparatus grow yet stronger still.

The Economic Case for Reimagining the State itself contains a paradigm example of this mode of thinking in its treatment of the UK’s health services, which it tells us could be improved by:

[A] digital health record for every citizen; improved access to health checks online, at home and on the high street; and a wider rollout of preventative treatments across the population.

‘This programme’, the report goes on:

could lead to the triple benefit of a healthier population, a healthier economy (with more people in work) and healthier public finances (since more workers mean more tax revenues).

You will recall, reading this, that government is not so much about fixing things as it is about managing problems in perpetuity so they do not get out of hand, so as to create a sense that its own existence is necessary. And here we have that central dynamic writ large: heaven forfend that the public might by and large be expected to lead healthy lifestyles, eat well, and look after themselves, because that would not necessitate the existence of a complex system of digital health records, online health checks, and ‘preventative treatment’ rollouts. It is better indeed that the population’s health should fundamentally be thought of as the responsibility of government to manage, rather than something which sensible adult human beings are perfectly capable of dealing with for the most part by themselves (assuming the existence of doctors, nurses, clinics and hospitals), because then there is a justification for an entire edifice of State-owned preventative health care programmes to emerge and operate forever and ever amen. The last thing the State actually wants is a healthy population, because then the health service could be a lot smaller. To repeat: what it wants is problems it can manage.

The idea, then, that the State can make things better is therefore - except in a few areas where the population definitionally cannot self-govern, such as national defence, border control, policing, and the criminal justice system - simply false. That is not the dynamic which is at work in the relationship between State and population. The dynamic which is at work is almost precisely the opposite: the more the State does, the less capable the population becomes - and the more the State is called upon therefore to do. And this is not an accident; it is, as the kids say nowadays, a feature rather than a bug. It is the discursive practice of modern government in action - whereby the population is constructed as ‘oppressed’, and the ruler constructed as that which is necessary to rescue the population from its predicament, in a self-reinforcing cycle.

There are, it goes without saying, no sunlit uplands at the bottom of that cycle - merely an abyss of more and more State power and worse and worse conditions for the population, until something eventually snaps and the cycle itself breaks. That is the world which are now living in, as will be evident to everyone: one in which the means by which the population self-governs - family, faith, community, social ties - have become so frayed and tattered through over-reliance on the State (and through the State’s own relentless emphasis on ‘fixing’ everything) that the very fabric of society itself is threatening to tear and the State’s capacities are themselves being stretched to breaking point. There is no ‘fix’ for that, and certainly not within the realms of AI, except for the most radical ‘reimagining’ of all: a genuinely small State with genuinely fixed limits on its purview, which creates the conditions in which the virtues of the population can reassert themselves and the perceived necessity of government shrinks.