| Just by writing a letter... |
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It was announced last week that inflation had gone up to 3.1% and so had overshot its target range by 0.1%. This was the first time that this had happened since Gordon Brown had given the responsibility for meeting this target to the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee. It was not therefore an occasion for Gordon to answer questions or face censure in Parliament. Instead, we have a curiously British requirement - that the Governor write to the Chancellor explaining why it had happened. And so he did. It rather reminds me of when I was a child and you took a day off school. You had to take a note from your mother, explaining that you had had bad ear-ache or some other minor ailment. Not to produce the note meant lines or detention. To produce it was to be completely excused. Too many letters like that though and the Truancy Officer may call. The requirement to send such an apparently innocuous thing as a letter can be actually an extremely potent thing. In the case of the Governor, his letter cannot contain feeble excuses. It has to show why, despite their best endeavours, something unpredictable happened to push them off course. And if he, or his mother, has to write too many such letters, then it is inevitable that he will eventually have to write his own letter of resignation. Now I approved of the idea of giving the MPC responsibility for setting interest rates in order to control inflation. After all, politicians had done a remarkably bad job of it up until then, being always far to ready to go for a quick fix and immediate popularity, especially at election times, rather than doing what the Country really needed. And so from a practical point of view, it was indeed a good thing, but putting those decisions into the MPC's hands was also a cop-out for the politicians. After all, inflation is something which is measurable to within a tenth of a percentage point. So the one thing that really can be measured - where we really could see if the government was capable of governing properly - is apparently no longer the responsibility of the government but, instead, of functionaries. Government policies for a host of other things - crime, health, education - can all have measurable outcomes, but in practice are portrayed as very complex, so that failure to meet one set of figures can be ‘excused' by pointing to others which have been met, or simply by changing the basis year for comparison. Perhaps though, one day, the politicians will tire of all of this. Perhaps they will step back from thinking that they actually have to pretend to run services themselves. Instead they could just provide those actually at the sharp end, like those looking after our education or health, with the necessary budget and set simple performance targets that have meaning for us in everyday life - just like Gordon did with inflation. And so we may finally see local GP's having to write to tell us why we can't get appointments at their surgeries and what they are going to do about it, consultants having to explain above-average fatality rates at their hospitals, chief constables telling us why it is that crime is not being kept under control in our locality and headmasters being required to send notes to the parents to explain why their school has underperformed as compared to similar schools elsewhere. They may feel so apprehensive at the thought of having to say ‘mea culpa' that services would actually improve as a consequence. And if the failure continued, well they would be expected to do the honourable thing and fall on their swords. And not being politicians, they may just do that. Such is the power of letter writing. Well, I can dream... |