rationalskepticism.org

mcgruff wrote:I hate all this outsourcing shit which allows ministers to distance themselves from any wrongdoing.

When ministers cite such outsourcing to distance themselves from the responsibility for outcomes I call it the Michael Howard defence. He is the former UK conservative Home Office Minister who suggested that certain failures were not his fault because he was only responsible for 'policy' whereas the head of the prison service was responsible for its implementation, or 'procedure.' There was nothing wrong with his ideas, he said, but there was with the way somebody else had carried them through. This was shown as a lie when it was discovered that he had directly interfered in operational matters.



If one accepts this 'Michael Howard' of course then a Minister could, and would, always claim to never be responsible for any incompetences on their watch as someone else can always be said to have not implemented the ideas properly - it's hardly as if ministers are actually locking prison doors at night and ordering whiteboards for schools themselves after all. It has been this way with regards to the NHS for the last 30 years or so. Ministers speak as if the NHS were some out-of-control problem engine, the drivers of which need constant and necessary reform and are worthy of the strongest political rebuke. In fact the operators of the government-defined NHS system are only doing, and can only do, what they are allowed and obliged to do by the law as created an implemented and interpreted by a succession of Health Ministers.

We've seen the outsourcing of service and responsibility in this way increase under the last three governments in many areas, from defence procurement to assessing the benefit status of the long-term sick and disabled, and more recently the outsourcing of community policing to the private sector in some areas. But of course the biggest move to outsourcing responsibility is in the recent NHS reforms which actually enshrines in law a seemingly 'legal' abrogation of the Health Minister's responsibility and makes several unaccountable bodies and private commercial interests responsible directly responsible for the nature, scope and outcomes of the nations healthcare in his place. For the avaricious, self-serving political oporator this is a wet-dream of a Michael Howard defence. All the good can be claimed by the politician and all the bad can be laid as someone else's door, in this case probably an off-shore holding company in the Cayman Islands.

If we move more functions of the institutions of government, and more responsibilities of elected Ministers along with them, to the private sector we will end up with a political system which is organised around generating tax to pay the private sector to do what the citizen wants the government to do; a government which acts as a mere broker between the citizen and private sector. Business interests will seek those lucrative public service contracts though the institutional system of bribery called 'lobbying' and the democratic process will be organised around the relationship between business and politicians and not around the relationship between the citizen and the State.

In fact, some might say we have that already, and this recent report into the standards of immigration officials could be just the excuse political-business needs to create and open up a market in immigration services.