On incompetence

Much of our political culture is fundamentally incompetent.

There are different types of error, and our political culture is making the worst type.

I say so because of accounts of Starmer’s government. Ailbhe Rea cites ministers saying that not only is Starmer “a terrible communicator” who “doesn’t have a vision” but also:

Cabinet ministers complain Starmer doesn’t want to be involved in conflict, or adjudicate disagreements between officials. Even when No 10 tried (and failed) to reshuffle Ed Miliband out of his energy brief, aides were reluctant to bother their leader when Miliband refused to move.

And Duncan Robinson adds:

There is no grand plan for this government, which, given Downing Street started a civil war a fortnight before a budget, is incapable of thinking even weeks ahead, never mind years.

What this reveals is that Starmer doesn’t know the basics of what it means to be PM. The job is mostly to develop and communicate the government’ s overall strategy and to resolve conflicts between departments and officials. Being unable to do either is to fail at the fundamentals of being PM.

His failure isn’t isolated. Rachel Reeves is also failing at the fundamentals of her job. Underneath all the guff, the government’s economic objective is a reasonable one: to shift real resources - labour, capital and management - from private consumption to public services and investment in housebuilding and greening the economy. The purpose of taxation is to achieve this shift.

But Reeves isn’t making this case, instead wibbling about the need to “ fund our public services”. Framing the issue as one of money rather than real resources isn’t just lousy economics but lousy politics too. It invites Greens and LibDems to say that we can raise money by taxing banks or the rich. Insofar as such taxes would reduce savings rather than consumption, however, they would not achieve the shift in real resources we need. In misframing the issue, though, Reeves is unable to show why their solutions won’t work.

Again, this is a failure of basic competence. And it’s not her only one. In making her fiscal policy conditional on ever-changing and unreliable forecasts, she’s creating instability, and in rowing back from her implicit promise to raise income tax she has triggered a rise in bond yields. None of which would be so bad, had she not made a virtue of trying to placate markets with the promise of stability.

There is, however, a reason why she felt the need to promise not to raise taxes in the election campaign. It’s that the Tories were promising to cut taxes, so she felt obliged to go close to matching them. But how could the Tories make such an offer? Simple; they were predicting public spending cuts which were, according to both the OBR and IFS, simply fictional.

Here, though, we come to yet more basic, fundamental incompetence. The media failed to expose those Tory plans for the lie they were. They just didn’t properly scrutinize the government.

Of course, we’d expect this from the newspapers, most of whom are mere propagandists. But it was also a failure of the BBC. And not the only one. We can add to it: fetishizing “impartiality” so that Brexiters’ lies weren’t properly exposed; the selection bias that fuels mindless vox pops; the choice to cover migration as a priority issue; Laura Kuenssberg’s mindless drivel about the nation’s credit card being maxxed out; or its ignorance of statistics or of emergence. From this perspective the wrongful editing of a Trump speech to give the impression that he incited the January 6 insurrection was the continuation of a tradition of rank bad journalism - an inability to do the very basics*.

What we have here, then, is that both politicians and our dominant news organization are fundamentally incompetent. By this I mean a particular kind of error, one hinted at by Mikel Arteta when discussing a VAR error:

That wasn’t a human error. That was a big, big, big not conceiving and understanding your job. That’s not acceptable.

So, for example, Starmer doesn’t understand that the very role of PM is to set out government strategy and to resolve conflicts between officials and departments. Reeves doesn’t understand that Chancellors should have a clear communicable policy. And the BBC doesn’t understand that the job of journalists is to tell the truth about those in power.

Which poses the question: why is our political culture characterised by such basic incompetence?

Part of the story is that politics has become dominated by fanatics. Partisans are so keen to attack the BBC for having a leftist or rightist bias that they don’t notice that basic standards are slipping. And the BBC is so keen to pacify the loudest noises that it thinks impartiality is sufficient, to the detriment of honesty.

Equally, Telegraph readers don’t mind being misled about climate change because what they want is not truth but the corrobration of their prejudices.

Labour party members in 2020 were so keen to see Corbynism without Corbyn that they overlooked questions about Starmer’s suitability: is a man who became an MP only in 2015 sufficiently experienced in Westminster politics? Does being head of a large hierarchical organization equip a man to lead a more egalitarian one facing fierce competition? Does he have any good record in developing and selling policy?

And of course, Tory party members were so obsessed with the search for ideological conformity that they elected Truss and Badenoch, two more examples of basic, fundamental, inadequacy.

On top of this fanaticism there’s also a failure to appreciate that some mistakes are more forgiveable than others. Some are inevitable because human affairs are too complex and unpredictable for any individual to understand and because large organizations will always get some things wrong. If you call on ministers to resign for these ordinary shortcomings (for example, with David Lammy having the misfortune to be Justice Secretary when journalists finally began to notice that prisoners were being wrongly released) then your call for them to go when they are genuinely incompetent will be indistinguishable from noise.

I fear, though, that there’s something else. Our ruling class has forgotten what good politics even is. It is, at root, the solving (or at least amelioration) of collective action problems - the fact that our individual plans and actions don’t naturally yield a well-functioning society. So, for example, we need a collective agreement to provide public services. Which of course entails a trade-off: better public services mean less private consumption. The job of politicians in a well-functioning polity is to recognise these trade-offs and to argue for their preferred choice.

Yes, argue. Good politics recognises that public opinion is not a fixed entity but is malleable, not necessarily by rational debate alone. Labour likes to present itself as businesslike. But decent businesses advertise their products, respect their customers, and don’t shout about the merits of their rivals. Yet more basic incompetence from Labour.

Good politics also requires something else - a healthy public sphere, in which at least the most egregiously bad ideas and bad actors are subject to sufficient scrutiny that they are weeded out. Which is what we don’t have. Instead, we have a system which often selects for rather than against charlatans and incompetents. And, worse still, neither politicans not the media are interested in why this might be or how we might change it.

And herein is my concern. Parts of our ruling class - Labour leadership and the BBC - are functionally incompetent in the sense of not knowing their job because they doesn’t even know what politics should be. This, perhaps, is the legacy of decades of a neoliberal ideology which denigrates collective action because it is the enemy of privately-owned capital. Incompetence persists because, for some powerful interests, it works quite nicely.

* Yes, that Panorama was made by an outside company. But this doesn’t get the BBC off the hook at all; basic diligence required that it check for that error - and that if it couldn’t do so, it shouldn’t have outsourced in the first place: it is criminal incompetence for managers of one of the country’s most prominent institutions not to know the basics of transactions cost economics.