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BUREAURCRACY HERE TO STAY
Posted by Charlotte on February 24, 2010
Tags: Conservatives, Politics, Post Bureaucratic Age, Subtext Magazine
The Conservative’s A Post Bureaucratic Age conference held in Shoreditch on Monday was an outing for the tories progressive face: an open data, crowd sourcing, power to the people fist in the air for politics—however it may have oversold itself a little bit.
The day started well with Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov talking about the empowerment of the citizen, not the corporations with an emphasis on bottom-up politics and with the “radical freedom of data act” making it possible for a truly diverse slice of people to be active in the crafting of policy and the direction of their lives.
David Cameron’s turn saw him talk about a four prong future: Transparency, Participation, Decentralization and Accountability, and the phrase ‘a post bureaucratic age’ made itself apparent numerous times as if saying it would will it into existence. The celebration on the stage was that all data would be available online for all to see and interact with but it truly missed the point, as Martha Lane Fox of LastMinute.com would mention later, that 10million people in Britain are still not online, 4 million of those are the most disadvantaged of our society –the power then would continue to shift to those who already have a palpable chance of being in the mix. Not to mention the additional barrier of being able to read and use raw data which could not really be described as a laypersons job.
Another layer of confusion was met in the Q&A after Cameron’s speech where his importance of access to the internet was undermined by the “three strikes and you’re out” rule for illegal downloads. Cameron dodged the bullet the first time miss understanding the content of the question and relied on stealing is bad rhetoric rather than what does this mean for citizen participation in government.
And entwined with this celebration of technology of connecting the people directly to the power was a the new roll of tory policy; passing control from central government to local councils; offering the right to buy on local amenities that the government chooses to close down; local meetings to define local needs and local planning without the obstacles of bureaucracy. And this just struck me as bad.
If the power is shifted away from the government do they no longer take responsibility for the country? For example if you people in this village can’t organize yourselves to keep this school/post office/leisure centre running, if you can’t figure out to divert money to community building then it’s your fault. The policy feels a bit like the split of the American states, where women’s reproductive rights have been hacked to pieces one state at a time.
Cameron’s example of a local service that could change radically with his open data act was the criminal system, namely the accountability of the police. His rallying point for this was crime maps, so we the people could see what was happening, what needed cracking down on. However, crime maps don’t make the rapes counted as non-crimes suddenly appear, crime maps don’t radically change the systemic discrimination and racism in some forces, just sharing information and ridding yourself of responsibility will not change the world.
And as an example of this post bureaucratic age: a panel of nine of ten people, a largely white male panel which failed to navigate crowd input and diverse interaction as most of the conversation took place between panelists. Martha Lane Fox, my new favourite business woman, not only pointed out that not everyone is online but that government could not simply bail out of a situation because where amazing community work was happening there was still a need for guidance and funding. The discussion, albeit on stage, about changing the parameters of success and failure so that testing, testing, testing and organic routes to the right end were acceptable was entirely on point but would no doubt come at the cost of oodles of paperwork and bureaucracy.
You can’t rid bureaucracy with a snappy new title but you can work towards a more positive form of politics with less polemics but probably a lot of paperwork.
Tags for this post:Conservatives, Politics, Post Bureaucratic Age, Subtext Magazine