I said in the last
mailing that I wanted to deal with the question of bureaucracy. On second thoughts, I really don’t. There is nothing much that hasn’t already
been said about it, even if only in passing.
To go into it again in specific detail would be simply a matter of
tautology.
Yet there are one or
two points that need to be made, as way of background.
Bureaucracy is a
necessary thing. It is, for example, the
general staff of an army, whose job it is to translate the commands of its
leader into effective action, without which otherwise those commands would
remain no more than wishful thinking.
Most organisations require a bureaucracy to some degree or other,
otherwise they couldn’t work.
The problem is that
bureaucracy, left to its own devices, tends to become self-serving to the
extent that it often squeezes the life out of the purpose it was meant to
serve. Rather like a parasite taking
over its host.
When I speak here about
bureaucracy, I have in mind a sort of mutation that, especially in modern
times, can occur in organisations and is self-propelling and expansionary. Whatever its ostensible purpose of existence,
its true purpose in the end is self-aggrandisement and keeping itself alive.
The classic example of
this, to my mind, is the whole Health and Safety phenomenon.
Now, like a bush taking
root way up on the front of a building, bureaucratic off-shoots can seed
themselves and flourish in the most unlikely of places. It is less a matter of planning than of
chance. Individuals of a bureaucratic
mindset are constantly scanning for the accidental thing that may promise a shortcut
to promotions and the building of their own little empires, provided they are
quick enough to identify it and get in first.
There are certain
requirements for this to be successful.
Firstly, one must find a seemingly unarguable justification for what one
is proposing. After all, how easy is it
going to be in the current environment to resist proposals based on grounds of
health and safety, or child protection, or any of the myriad aspects of the
equality agenda, no matter how off-the wall such proposals may seem to be? The degree of public hysteria or concern one
can tap into always provides an inestimable source of leverage.
Now I mentioned the
matter of Health and Safety as a classic example of this sort of bureaucracy. One reason I can say this is because I saw
the process in its infancy and watched individuals’ eyes light up at the
possibility of advantage in it. After
all, as I’ve already said, who’s going to argue against health and safety . . .
? It was like being handed a blank
cheque!
Now don’t get me
wrong. Safety in the workplace is
important—and in some workplaces more than others. And I have no doubt too that the process was,
and continues to be, in many circumstances valuable—for I am sure that there
were and still are many places with poor safety standards. But primarily what I felt I was seeing at the
time were people anxious to build a nest for themselves and puzzling over how
to justify it. For the fact is that once
one has got beyond the commonplace problems, the circumstances requiring a
dedicated safety input tend to get rather thin.
In that situation, if you are an ambitious health and safety bureaucrat, you are left
with emphasising and reemphasising what Basil Fawlty once famously described as
‘the bleeding obvious’.
I can remember quite a
few years later, back in the early 2000s, being shown the schedule for a health
and safety conference that was being held in a well-known regional hotel. This involved people from various employments
from all over Ireland. It also involved
a large fee being levied on the bodies sending attendees. But what was really startling was the nature
of the seminars being presented. Not the
‘bleeding obvious’ but rather the ‘bleeding, bleeding obvious’. It was sufficient to make one cringe.
Of course, there was a
certain collusion of interests involved.
The people attending were enjoying an all-expenses-paid freebie; while
the organisers were getting extremely well rewarded. No reason for anyone to rock the boat.
Another aspect, of
course, is that where even the ‘bleeding obvious’ threatens to peter out, one
can still spin the idea of ever new dangers that need protecting against, no
matter how far fetched. The managers of
bureaucracies being what they are, the first instinct is always to cover one’s
arse, so that the likely reaction is to roll over and go along with it, in case
by some chance an asteroid might really hit the earth. If one is clever enough with words, there is
nothing than cannot be spun into a potential danger.
The truth is that the
original Health and Safety impetus has morphed into a great and many-tentacled
bureaucracy. It has also carried out the
trick of transferring the burden of implementing its regulations on to the
shoulders of those compelled to use the system.
And the fact also is that it is has begun to gum up the normal workings
of the economy, especially at the lower level, where smaller firms are finding
it too expensive and onerous to deal with the paperwork involved in even the
smallest of tenders.
I will come back to
this again at some stage.
