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The Curajus State Problem

Not that he’s going to make the connection:

In my latest video, I argue that the biggest problem Labour will face after 5 July – as a result of which all of us might suffer – is that almost no one in the Shadow Cabinet has any experience of being in government, or of ever having actually run anything of consequence. This might not turn out well.

This will always be true in politics. It takes a career to climb the greasy pole. Therefore those who have demonstrated competence in a career other than politics aren’t going to be in government.

Thus the Curajus State is going to be shit at running things.

31 thoughts on “The Curajus State Problem”

  1. This will always be true in politics.

    It does seem to be more true today than ever before. Reams of PPE monkeys, trade union agitators, SpAds. researchers and think-tankers. Any time one does pop up with a proper job, it seems to be a fucking lawyer.

  2. Since it’s Labour, I’d argue that their idiotic philosophy is even more of a hinderance. Still at least they’re not the Greens.

  3. Yet a man who has no economics degree and no experience of running anything other than his mouth is fully qualified to be a professor and to take charge of running the tax and spend of every aspect of the country from his desk in Ely

  4. The Meissen Bison

    It’s not a “curajus state” problem as a problem of pluralism even when all the UK parties, as now, look much alike. None of this nonsense of being in “opposition” for fourteen years in the “curajus state” as there is no opposition, at all, parliamentary or otherwise.

  5. President Hoover had been a successful businessman/mining engineer, had he not? Ike had been a successful diplomat/Field Marshal (though not a successful soldier: he had never seen action.) Jimmy Carter had run a peanut farm. Trump had run a real estate business.

    And the apotheosis of the US system: Biden is a marginally animated cadaver and can still hold office.

  6. And I still do: that should be “I have.” I have also long argued that Tim should take whatever is necessary out of Money Barn No. 9, and buy an edit function.

  7. Since any minister is going to be rely heavily on the standing bureaucracy, what does it matter about their previous organisational experience? So you’ve run a profitable company – and how does that equip you for the Foreign Office?
    Similarly, I don’t believe that being a nurse would help you manage the long term strategy for the entire NHS.

    These things are too big for the top person to be anything other than a figurehead over the layers of committees and management hierarchies that actually run them. Which is, of course, why government should do so much less

  8. @dearieme: “Jimmy Carter had run a peanut farm.”

    He was also a submarine XO and part of a team that climbed into a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while it was running to repair it enough to shut the thing down.

  9. Chris, BiS, I would suggest that the one person most in need of an edit function on this blog is our venerable host……….

  10. After reading Tim’s Substack i tried to find the apocryphal vox pop he alluded to of his prof Richard Layward, but to no avail. I did find Tony Benn describing a conversation he had in a 1st class carriage for two hours with Sir Keith Joseph. Naturally Tony Benn concluded he could debate Joseph into a cocked hat, that moneterism would lead to big problems and of course with hindsight he (Benn) was right all along!

    But i post this to this thread because incidentally i also heard him relay a 1970s meeting with William Rees Mogg whom he had a meal with in the HofC . He was at pains to point out that Mogg was a sergeant in the war, a sergeant. Yes they were of the generation where it was legitimate to ask a pro politicians and journos what you did during the war. And its difficult to know especially with aristocratic socialists but it sounded to me this was a slight sneer at his earlier career rather than the congratulatory sense of how far he’d came to be editor of the Times.

  11. BiS, yes I know that if I get it right before posting, it’s right. Once it’s been posted wrong, that’s not a lot of help.

  12. almost no one in the Shadow Cabinet has any experience of being in government, This might not turn out well.
    Since you currently have a cabinet can draw on 14 years of being in government, has that turned out well?
    The Curajus State is indeed shit at running things.

  13. Geoffers,

    “Since any minister is going to be rely heavily on the standing bureaucracy, what does it matter about their previous organisational experience? So you’ve run a profitable company – and how does that equip you for the Foreign Office?”

    It’s about knowing which bureaucrats are tossers that you leave in a quiet corner somewhere and which can get things done. It’s about knowing which ideas from bureaucrats are idiotic, and which are intelligent. I’m not even saying that someone running a company is a great match for a government department, but running something that fails or succeeds teaches you some fundamental stuff. Things like “fail fast”, things like constantly tracking the state of things, like keeping things simple.

    The standing bureaucrats are picked by politicians. Maybe it’s a recommendation and they tick a box, but they still tick the box rather than saying “no, the guy’s a moron”. If the politicians don’t have a clue, how good is the senior bureaucrat going to be? And then, how good are all of their subordinates going to be?

  14. Experience in government might be likened to being on stage in a room where everybody is shouting at you to pull the levers which are the symbols of your control over events. Of course the levers are not connected to anything except they ring bells in another calm relaxed room where civil servants drink lapsang souchong and ignore the ringing.

  15. BIS,

    It also goes beyond experience and into incentives.

    I do work for both the private and public sector and the private sector is a lot more careful about hiring me. I worked for a guy who runs his own business. It’s his pension, his kids inheritance that’s paying for me. The project I was working on suddenly had Phase 2 cancelled and he gave me a call the same day “sorry mate, got to give you notice, thanks for all your hard work” etc and I was out in a week.

    I’ve worked on public sector projects where I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for months. I had nothing to do. The guy in charge of me had the budget to keep me on, and he wasn’t going to give it back and have to put in the work to get it again if he needed someone. It personally cost him nothing to keep paying me, and I understood that apart from just checking in if he needed anything doing, to keep my mouth shut.

    That first guy is just a lot more careful about how he spends, because it’s his money. Look at how cavalier government is with railway projects. Government of all parties. Because it ain’t their money being thrown on the bonfire.

  16. Dennis: Oppressor, Warmonger, Capitalist and Consumer of Petroleum Products

    Given that Murphy has no experience in government and has never run anything of consequence, you could almost predict that nobody of consequence in the UK would give a flying handshake about what he thinks about anything.

    Then again, he could be presenting his own qualifications as part of an audition for a slot in the Shadow Cabinet.

  17. A young pal of mine joined a management consulting firm after university.

    She said her new chums welcomed getting a public sector project because it would be so much less demanding that they could catch up with their sleep and their social lives.

    There are two parts to this. (i) By tradition you’d stick around in the customer’s offices until the last of their employees was walking out the door. This happened much earlier in the day in the public sector.

    (ii) Your work intensity ought to be at least as high as the customer’s employee’s. This was absurdly easy to achieve in the public sector.

    This must be a long-standing pattern because I heard a similar account from my mother when I was a boy. She reckoned that in the Council offices she could knock off a day’s work in, at most, an hour and a half, leaving ample time to do some shopping for her mother, and to read for pleasure.

  18. @WB
    Of course. The solution to Labour’s problem is the incoming government doesn’t need experience. The Civil Service will be running things, the same way they’ve been running things the past 14 years. Government is like driving a self driving car.

  19. -Mogg in the war – no, too young. National Service.

    Correct Tim you pendant! And my error not Benn’s (he guessed 1948 he first met him) , although Benn’s says the army, and wiki says the he served in the Air Force National service. Strange because Benn was airforce too, eventually pilot officer.

  20. I think we’re being harsh on Murphy.

    This is a man with a list of accomplishments that would turn any of us into the Green eyed monster

    – Invented Country by Country reporting

    – Responsible for ‘The Green New Deal’

    – invented the Concept of ‘Tax Justice’

    – Has discovered over a £100 billion that can be utilised annually in his latest report

    – Holds three professorships

    – Most read economics blogger in the UK

    – Managed to pass himself off as an accountant for decades despite having someone else take the exams for him

    – Barred from every pub in Downham Market

    He’s a legend in his own lunchtime.

  21. “Any time one does pop up with a proper job, it seems to be a fucking lawyer.”

    And not a very good lawyer or they’d be on 7 (or at least high 6) figures. Re the sergeant, the Deputy GM of a life office once told me his proudest achievement was ending his National Service as Acting Sergeant (Paid).

    O/T I see the polls (yeah, right) are predicting Nige to romp home in Clacton – first domino to fall?

  22. Dearieme,

    “There are two parts to this. (i) By tradition you’d stick around in the customer’s offices until the last of their employees was walking out the door. This happened much earlier in the day in the public sector.”

    100%. I did some requirements gathering with the NHS and they were moving at bang on 5. I’m sure they were watching the clock on the wall. They wouldn’t even stay for another few minutes just to get a thing closed off so we could start a new subject the next day.

    The clinical staff were a different bunch, though. The district nurses were often putting in extra time to try and see all their patients if they overran.

  23. BiND in boring, flat, Denmark

    As Fraser Nelson likes to point out, politics was something you went in to once you’d had a career in elsewhere, now it’s something you do as a stepping stone to a career elsewhere. Maybe that’s why the civil service rides roughshod over politicians?

  24. iDave’s lot, Ken Clarke aside, had no experience in 2010. Tonty’s mob had none in 1997. Safe to say that this isn’t a new problem.

  25. Boganboy said:
    “Since it’s Labour, I’d argue that their idiotic philosophy is even more of a hinderance”

    Their objectives are so bad that their incompetence might actually be a blessing.

  26. “ the biggest problem Labour will face after 5 July – as a result of which all of us might suffer – is that almost no one in the Shadow Cabinet has any experience ”

    Good grief, is that Murphy saying that? So he’s now after Vermine and a Cabinet post? Do his delusions have no end?

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