C Northcote would approve

CN Parkinson that is:

Peter Bridgewater has a clear message for the International Whaling Commission (IWC) that he once led. The organisation – which played a critical role in ending whale hunting in the 1980s – has become a zombie institution that should vote to disband itself at its meeting next month.

“The commission did great work, but that was last century,” Bridgewater told the Observer last week. “Today it has – like so many other international conventions or organisations – outlived its useful life and should be quietly disbanded.”

Some take Parkinson’s Law to be that work will expand to fill the time available for its completion. We tend to take another lesson from the book which is that bureaucracy will, inexorably, expand (as in the essay in The Economist, the last useful article published in that source). The job and duty is therefore to be continually, inexorably, pruning that bureaucracy in a countervailing manner.

Another of C Nothcote’s derived points was that a bureaucracy strives simply to continue to exist - as with any other lifeform. The only way to properly curtail the attempts at continued expansion is to kill, not merely prune.

So, yes, kill off an international bureaucracy and the Montreal lot about the ozone hole - now solved - also seem to be being discussed. Excellent.

But we think we should go further - as we always do think we should go further of course. The essential job of any management - private, state, anything - is to continually prune, kill off, those bureaucratic barnacles upon the ship of state or enterprise. To continually strive to close down things to avoid them becalming the whole effort.

Markets contain their own incentive, those that don’t do this go bust. But governance? Some way back we actually suggested a Viscountcy for any Minister who successfully closed down their own department. We should revive that perhaps. Would have to be proper close down of course. Raze the buildings, sell the workforce back to the private sector, plough the ground with salt, the full Carthaginian. But why not? After all, a Viscountcy is pretty cheap to create and there’s no right to sitting in the Lords that goes with it - it’s an award, not a thing.

Possibly we should extend the idea. Manage to close down a smaller bureaucracy and gain a lower level award - GCMGs, CBEs and possibly the MBE for sending only a handful out of comfy offices into the howling gales of the marketplace? After all, we do want an incentive for public sector managers to curb the growth of bureaucracy and we’ve not got any other one at present, do we?

Tim Worstall