The problem is to know how we can remain accountable without being overwhelmed by paperwork. The simple answer is: 'Trust us. Most of us are decent people and we will not misspend the money entrusted to us.' The problem is that most of us are decent people, but some of us are not.
When the Labour Government came to power in 1997, it decided that the best way of making public organisations efficient and helpful to people was to set 'targets'. (A target used to be a large round board with a spot in the middle, at which soldiers could practice firing their guns. Now it is used to describe the level of achievements which a person or an organisation must reach.) For example, a hospital might be told, 'This year you have performed 200 operations on heart patients, but patients are still queuing up to have such operations. Please organise your hospital so that next year you can do 250 operations.' And schools were told, 'Your pupils received on average 56% in the national examinations. The school in the next street had an average mark of 60% So your school could do better, and next year your target should be an average mark of 61%.for your pupils.'
Patients who waited for heart operations were pleased. Parents who wanted their children to be well-prepared for examinations were pleased. 'Targets' was a good way of running the country. So the doctors and the teachers, the hospital managers and the school head teachers, in their struggle to achieve these targets, had to rearrange their work, change their priorities and often work longer hours. Sometimes these changes brought the patients or the pupils to the centre of discussion. Sometimes they simply moved the problem from one place to another. Today the hospital performs 250 heart operations, but there are longer queues for lung and kidney operations; now there are more hospital beds available, but that is because sick patients have been sent home too early. Now the school educates children who are brilliantly successful at passing exams, but they have studied no music, no art, no drama, because they have had no time for these creative activities. Targets' can measure exam results, but they cannot measure the value of learning to play music.
And, inevitably, in order to show that these targets have been achieved, hospitals, schools and other organisations require many bureaucratic hours of labour by hardworking secretaries and clerks to calculate exactly what has been achieved.
Like all the other policies for running the country more effectively, targets have good consequences (incentives for better health and education) and bad consequences (distorted or irrelevant objectives, and time-wasting form-filling). The debate continues as one side says, 'Less regulation, more freedom' and the other side says, 'More regulation, higher standards'.
All these policies, 'initiatives', reforms and targets require people who are trained to put them into practice. The invention of 'Schools of Management', 'Management Qualifications' and 'a Management Career Structure' are quite recent innovations which supposedly train people to run the country. The problem with these management schools is that they have isolated 'managers' from practical work and learning-on-the-job. It takes a long time for these highly-trained people to learn what actually works, what might work, and what doesn't work because people will not accept it. It also takes a long time for them to learn to trust the professionals who actually do the job.
In 2009 the demand for more 'managers' and 'management training' is beginning to decline; in Britain many of the population are furiously angry at those people in 'management' who take huge salaries and profits but fail to be efficient or to show intelligent initiative. We need good managers, but if they are trained to think about managerial structures more than the interests of those they are supposed to serve, then they lose the trust of the people. Institutions which lose the trust of the people cannot function in a democracy. That is a problem that we always struggle with, and are struggling with now.
Chapter 3. British Law: Why We Obey It, and What Happens When We Don't
As a British citizen, I walk around daily in a society which carries out its business 'according to the rule of law'. One noticeable difference between Russia and Britain that confronts the British person who spends time in your country is that our society is founded on the rule of law in way which is not quite true in Russia. I do not mean that Russians are more criminal in their nature. Most Russian people are just as eager as most British people to behave decently and to keep the laws which we all understand - like those which tell us not to steal the handbag of the person sitting next to us, or not to hit old ladies over the head, or not to cheat in paying for an article in a shop.
What is more, both the British and the Russians live in modern secular societies where men and women have (more-or-less) equal rights under the law. A father cannot force his daughter to marry a man against her wishes; a woman has the right to work and to organise her own life; contraception is widely available. Children are entitled to a full education. Nobody is forced to go to a church or a temple or a mosque. Expectations of what men, women and children can and should do are broadly similar in both countries.
Nonetheless, the differences in law make themselves quickly felt because they are embedded in daily life. They concern expectations of and attitudes to authority. They are about our rights and responsibilities under the law. At the end of this chapter, I return to this difference. I begin by discussing the basis of English law, and of Welsh law which is almost identical. The situation in Scotland which is founded on Roman Law (common in Western Europe) is rather different.
The core of English law is what we call 'Common Law'. It consists of rules of law based on common custom and usage (what we normally do) and on decisions which have already been made in courts (precedent). Common law developed after the Norman Conquest (1066) as the law common to the whole of England, as distinct from local law. As the court system became established under Henry II in the 12th century, and judges' decisions became recorded in law reports, the doctrine of precedent developed. This means that, in deciding a particular case, the court must take notice of decisions made in earlier reported cases, and of the reasons why judges made those decisions on the same, or similar points. Since cases frequently differ slightly from previous cases, the law may be extended or varied if the facts of the particular case are sufficiently different. Hence, common law (sometimes called 'case law' or 'judge-made law') keeps the law in harmony with the needs of the community. This is quite a different approach from that based on Legal Codes and hierarchies of coded law.
As society became more complex, it was obvious that we needed more formal legislation to cope with major social and economic problems. So Parliament began to enact laws dealing with every aspect of our life: our finances, our homes, our working practices, our personal relationships, our education and so on. But because we had no 'Code', no systematic framework, we depended - and depend - on careful lawyers to ensure that old bits of law were removed as new laws were introduced. Each year, common law accumulates more and more bits and pieces, while each year the Parliamentary legislative programme grows longer.