Its The Law And Order Stupid - Road to the Middle Class

Unfortunately bureaucratic organizations are designed for precisely the opposite purpose, for imposing top-down strategy. It is like an army. The general at the top issues the order and the underlings all execute his plan.

That means if you want to do something more flexible than fight battles and march from A to B, the bureaucratic model is not the best fit.

If you want a flexible, responsive system then you must choose the market as your organizational model. A market, need we add, in which people spend their own money buying goods and services. Other Peoples’ Money need not apply.

The ruin of New Labour was inevitable. You can’t make government bureaucracies into flexible, responsive, “joined-up” organisms. And the more you try, the more the bureaucracy just slows down to a stop, and ceases doing anything.

So now, nine years after being swept into office on a platform to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” and after egregious failures to keep the peace, Blair is reduced, according to the London Spectator, to asserting that

the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’.

Well, do tell. The criminal justice system is just about the only thing that government should be doing.

But modern progressive government doesn’t care about that. Its bureaucracies are too busy handing out loot to the government’s supporters in the name of compassion and sensitivity to care about law and order. Anyway, you can’t do anything about crime until you have corrected the root causes of crime in poverty and alienation.

So Britain is sitting about where the US was back in 1990 when 30 years of liberal policing had reduced the inner cities to a violent hell.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.