All we want for Christmas is some responsibility

In our early Christmas present* to ourselves we find this about Sir Christopher Bullock:

Finally in August 1936, he was summarily dismissed without pension by the Prime Minister; a unique fate for a British civil servant of his rank.

As the Wiki entry points out this might not have been wholly and entirely fair. On the other hand it did in fact happen. What we want, not just for this season but for all, is more of this.

Not just senior civil servants being sent out into the snow. More of the ruling class held accountable for their actions. That Post Office scandal, that bat tunnel.

It’s one of - one of - the reasons we’re so in favour of markets and even capitalism. People who get things wrong clearly, publicly, get things wrong and suffer the consequences of their actions. This acts as an incentive to not get things wrong.

In A Man for All Seasons we’re shown how responsibility for public servants used to work. Given that we’ve now built Marble Arch on top of the Tyburn Tree we can’t use that method any more. But as we can see as late as the 1930s we did still insist upon at least some linkage between actions and rewards. We should bring back that idea, that action.

After all, we’ve already done it for bankers, haven’t we? We do now insist that bankers’ bonuses are paid in script, in paper, which only matures some years after the year of work in question. A large portion - perhaps as much as 35% or so - of civil service (and the MPs’ and ministers’ pensions schemes are little less generous) pay is in fact in pensions. Delayed compensation that is, just as with bankers. Which does give us a useful hostage to the longer term outcome of this year’s work.

It is Christmas, the 25th of December was a Rent Day, one of the four quarterly such. This did lead to top-hatted, snarling and cigar smoking capitalists, landlords and rentiers driving families of stricken waifs out into the snows. We are thus proposing something very conservative. And how are the servants to understand the rewards of failure if we do not drive out into the wastes those who have so failed?

We’d even pay for our own cigars and we’re sure we could borrow a top hat from somewhere. After all, isn’t Christmas supposed to be enjoyable, full of family fun?

Tim Worstall

*The Price of Victory, NAM Rodger. Bit big for a stocking which is why early….