David Boyle's Blog, page 71

What would Mr Gladstone make of total surveillance?

[image error] I remember reading an article some years ago by Christopher Hitchens about airport security, a subject he returned to many times, and its fatuous stupidity.

He had made some facial expression interpreted by security personnel as mildly disrespectful, and was hauled out of the queue and given the first degree.  The last people you should put in charge of security, I remember him writing (but can't actually find the article now), are the security fraternity.

There is an important point here.  It is the bizarre way that the security systems tend to work.  They begin to categorise among their biggest threats - not just terrorists - but those who criticise security systems, or reveal aspects of their work, or seem disaffected about them in some way.

It is a strange phenomenon.  It takes a particularly well-balanced security psychology to be able to distinguish reasonable criticism from dangerous challenge.  It is the besetting sin of the security world.

It explains why some of those who have been criticising the huge new surveillance system on both sides of the Atlantic are given such a hard time when they travel.

That is why the revelations in the Guardian last week matter so much that the security apparatus in the USA and UK have broken the encryption used by the main email providers, to provide themselves with blanket surveillance of the whole population.  Without permission or debate or scrutiny or safeguards.

I thought the campaigner and journalist Henry Porter hit the nail precisely on the head this morning when he asked why it was that no political party has complained, and that the public seems so uninterested that their correspondence is being read.  The Today programme failed even to report the story in their early bulletins, for goodness sake, which is both bizarre and rather pathetic.

This matters, not so much because privacy matters (though it does), or because the surveillance organised by the Stasi mattered (though it did too, see picture), but because this kind of apparatus always misunderstands threats.  Because it multiplies the besetting sin of the security world many times over.

Fine if they ignore you, but just occasionally they don't - and they then fling these individuals, guilty and innocent, into a nightmare Kafkaesque world where there seems to be no escape.

Because I am a sad type of Liberal, addicted to history, I keep asking myself what Mr Gladstone would say.

I suspect he would recognise that total surveillance must occasionally provide useful clues and leads.  But he would complain about un-English, Napoleonic, 'continental' forms of tyranny.

He would also complain about the expense - and when 850,000 people are security cleared for this kind of activity in the USA alone (more than half the number employed by the NHS), then it must cost vast sums, paid for by taxpayers.

Finally, he would complain about the threat to business.  Because when you create a 'backdoor' into the emails of every business in the world, and you give 850,000 people access to it, then it will mean that they will inevitably be read elsewhere too - it means no business can be private.

And when privacy and business security is impossible, and the foreign agencies representing foreign competitors (should I mention the Chinese here?) can read everything, then business becomes impossible.

This is the Liberal issue of our times.  It matters in the same way that illegal snooping by newspapers matter (see Chris Huhne's excellent article on that this evening).  In the great balance of things, it certainly doesn't make me any safer.

How do I know?  Because Mr Gladstone told me...

The bizarre world of Henry Kissinger

“Nothing was ever promised me that was not given; nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted."  So said the great art critic John Ruskin about his own dysfunctional upbringing.  There are people who think diplomacy must be conducted.  Among them is Henry Kissinger.
More about him in a minute.  But I find myself increasingly irritated with the true believers on both sides of the Syria debate.

I particularly find the smug pronouncements, usually on the left, that – because Winston Churchill used chemical weapons against the Soviets in 1919, or because the Americans held back from punishing Iraq for gassing the Iranians in the 1980s – then nothing should be done to prevent the people of Syria suffering in the same way.

The fact that an attack might be ineffective – that is an argument against military action in support of human values. The fact that it would kill and maim innocents or ratchet up global tensions – those are arguments against. The fact that, pathetically, nothing was done a generation ago is no argument at all.

But I must admit, the hypocrisy of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger really takes the biscuit.

There he is urging Congress to back Obama’s call to punish the Syrian government for using chemical weapons, when he himself presided over the most indiscriminate bombing of civilians in human history, including chemical weapons like napalm, and a million people in Indochina died as a result.

This is not an argument against action in Syria, if it is likely to be effective and not divide the world – but it is a staggering example of such human hypocrisy that some other action seems to me to be required: some kind of truth and reconciliation committee perhaps for those who have used chemical weapons in the past, or supplied them to others – a recognition by our side that we are not sinless.

To be fair to Kissinger, this isn't his argument.  He says that, once a president sets out a red line, and it is crossed, then action must be taken.  Consistency above all things, like Ruskin's parents.
In fact, that was the argument for bombing the very soul out of Laos and Cambodia a generation ago.
I'm not sure consistency, important as it is, is the most important argument.  People who say that America's dignity will be damaged when they do the wrong thing, or the dangerous thing, just to avoid inconsistency - I think live in a strange world of puritanical parenting.  It isn't human and it isn't right.

The real reason universal credit is in crisis

There is a titanic struggle about the way public services should be organised. It is only just beginning in a serious way, and it is below the radar of the mainstream media, but it is tremendously important.

It isn't the usual stuff - this isn't an argument between public and private.  It is between the conventional thinkers, committed to economies of scale and the manufacturing model, and the emerging critique – based on the ideas of the great quality guru W. Edwards Deming – which proposes something much more organic.

The news yesterday of the problems with the government's universal credit is some evidence for this.  In fact, it looks set to be the first great set-piece stand-off between the old and the new.

The leader of the insurgents, the system thinker John Seddon, confessed in his latest newsletter that he had temporarily abandoned the battlefield, blaming depression, and miserable that he was having so little impact on Whitehall.

But now he is back and as angry as ever, but he is quite right that Whitehall appears not to be listening to his absolutely fundamental critique of the way things are currently done.

From the very start, he has predicted disaster for the universal credit – not because the idea is wrong (it is tremendously important) - but because of the way it is being rolled out.

The fundamental mistake which the designers of the universal credit have made is the same one made by the NHS IT project – they have swallowed whole the mistaken assumptions of the IT consultants and are busily creating a system that can treat everyone online, as if they are on an assembly line.

What Seddon has shown is that this is the great flaw in the objective of digital by default.   It is a ruinously expensive fantasy because it is unable to deal with variety.

If a system can't deal with anything non-standard – and most of us are actually non-standard – then the inflexible system just bounces them around, creating costs and what Seddon calls 'failure demand'.  Failure demand can involve most of the demand on public services: it is people who are not being effectively dealt with, and keep coming back and back and back.

That is why digital by default always produces such unexpected costs. There is no reason why the universal credit should fail in itself, but this inflexibility condemns it to precisely the fate that it appears to be accelerating towards.

We are heading towards a new public service era which is characterised instead by a system which you might call human-by-default, because it is more effective and considerably cheaper.  The new era will be dominated, not by obsessive cost-cutting, but by revolutionary increases in effectiveness - which will, in turn, reduce costs.

But we are certainly not there yet.  It means recognising what human beings can do brilliantly and what IT can do brilliantly, and realising which is which. See more in my book The Human Element.

Unfortunately, the coalition appears to be stuck in the old assumptions, and Seddon's last newsletter described a depressing encounter with Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, which nearly sent him back into the blues:

"I went to the minister for health’s presentation at a think tank a couple of months ago. I told him (Jeremy Hunt) that we’d been studying the NHS over the last couple of years and what we found was high levels of failure demand caused by fragmentation, specialisation, working to arbitrary measures and so on, and I suggested the way we should go would be to design a service that meets demand. He said he agreed with everything except my conclusion for, in his view, computer systems will fix the problem of integration. So there you have it. Policy amounts to what the minister will agree with. I think I’ll go back to my favourite mood."

Still some way to go, clearly, before the new era I described.  The trouble is that against Seddon and his handful of allies lies the immense marketing budgets of the IT consultancies.

Why are so many schools so staggeringly dull?

My children went back to school this morning.  It has been a shock after a Mediterranean-style summer.  Just wearing grey flannels again after so many weeks has been seriously upsetting.

And I sympathise, I really do.  I'm a Liberal and therefore wholly committed to education, but I sometimes stumbled over effective answers to the inevitable question: "Why do I have to go to school?"

Because when the utilitarians are in charge of education - as they still are, despite the change in government - I'm not absolutely sure.  They go to a wonderful primary school, which does so much more than force them online to prepare to be IT drones in later life.  But still my nine-year-old has to swap reading The Hobbit for Tom Goes Shopping, or its equivalent, and that is another shock.

When he has to swap reading whole magical stories for the comprehension of short uncompleted, soulless passages, it is cumulatively like cutting off a child's daemon, as so graphically described by Philip Pullman in Northern Lights (see picture above).

And it is so ineffective.

When I think of the huge resources employed to stuff me full of French from the ages of nine to sixteen - seven long years, three times a week - and how basic my command of the language remains, it makes me cross that school is still so staggeringly dull, so utterly committed to Gradgrindian dullness, so miserably unable to stand up to Ofsted or any of the other utilitarian agencies.

Had I been sent to France for a month by my school somehow, they could have dispensed with the long, drab procession for seven years.  Maybe that would have been impossible, but there must be a middle way.

Children are fascinated by languages when they are in other countries - that is another thing I learned this summer, in Normandy.  It is only when they get home that they grind away at the grammar.

So, yes, I'm cross on behalf of my children that they are being prepared for exams, and for employment, rather than being educated and inspired - and prepared to make their own way in life.

So just to celebrate the continued existence of the educational utilitarians, here is Sissy Jupe - a circus girl - being cross-questioned in class in Dickens' Hard Times:

"You mustn’t tell us about the ring here … Very well then … Give me your definition of a horse.”  (Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

“Girl number twenty unable to define a horse! … Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals!” …

The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer …

“Bitzer,” said Thomas Gradgrind. “Your definition of a horse.”

“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.” …

“Now girl number twenty,” said Mr Gradgrind, “you know what a horse is.”
Now, ask yourself about other public services too.  If they could escape the Gradgrindian influence, and make things happen as I could have been taught to learn French - inspiring, human, thrilling - might we not have a more effective public services system?  And might it not cost very much less to run?

Why do we have so many cock-ups?

I had a fascinating conversation yesterday with my friend Sonia about government cock-ups.  Anthony King and Ivor Crewe's new book asks whether the coalition is the most cock-up prone in history, and certainly the failure of the government whips to stir themselves to win the vote on Syria does suggest something of the kind.

Micheal Gove's repeated announcements and retractions suggest a difficulty thinking through new ideas.

I'm not sure this government is really any worse than any other, but - if it is - I have a theory about it.  Three interlocking forces are involved.

1.  Complexity.  The sheer complexity of most systems of government, and especially in public services - a good deal more complex after three New Labour governments too - means that any change, however sensible, will mean unexpected and largely unpredictable side-effects.  For many civil servants, struggling to make administration smoother, the only sensible way forward is to avoid most change altogether.

2.  Frustration.  Knowing this, some ministers - especially those who suspect that recalcitrant civil servants are dragging their feet - are, knowingly or unknowingly, keeping their favourite initiatives semi-secret for too long, for fear they will be scuppered,

3.  Turnover.  The staff turnover in the civil service is now so high, and so much of the institutional memory has been lost along with such a heavy proportion of staff - especially in the Department for Communities and the Department for Education - that these unintended consequences are even more difficult to predict and tackle.

These things are important.  They leave ministers frustrated at the slow and unpredictable pace of change.  They leave the public frustrated at the apparent inability of government to make things happen.  And they mean looming problems unaddressed.

I remember being assured by senior civil servants under Blair how much they wanted big ideas.  It wasn't true at all - they wanted small ideas.  Now even the small ideas seem impossible.

And it may be that this is the inevitable stage that extreme centralisation reaches.  The only solution is to devolve power more radically to those who can actually make things happen - on the frontline (see my book The Human Element ).

This is the one lesson the coalition ought to have learned from the New Labour years.  I understand why they haven't learned it - it would render them doubly powerless at the centre - but they haven't.

School and town cramming all over again

Just over a century ago, the former Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery was quoted in an important new book describing London as a 'giant tumour':
"Sixty years ago a great Englishman, Cobbett, called it a wen. If it was a wen then, what is it now? A tumour, an elephantiasis sucking into its gorged system half the life and the blood and the bone of the rural districts." 

Rosebery was reflecting a growing understanding of the problem of inner cities, burgeoning from the agricultural depression and hideously overcrowded.  He was also chairman of London County Council.
The book was the prescription to do something about it.  Garden Cities of Tomorrow, by the House of Commons shorthand writer Ebenezer Howard, explained how the urban poor could be persuaded to live in new green towns, where they owned the land, living to a high environmental standard – rescuing rural areas and cities at the same time.
I thought of this when I read yesterday about the serious overcrowding in the schools in London’s East End at the start of the new term.
London now needs about 200 new schools just to keep up with the growing population.  Imagine being a four-year-old going for the first time this week to Gascoigne Primary School in Barking, to find all the play space covered with temporary classrooms and you as one of 1,200 pupils.
It is precisely this kind of hothouse factory schooling, drab portakabins, titan schools, impersonal giantism, that causes the great divisions in UK education (see my new book Broke on the subject).
Howard’s book led to Letchworth, Welwyn and the new towns, and for most of the last century London, together with most cities in the western world, has been shrinking.  Not any more.
The sudden rise in population has been expected for years.  Ken Livingstone worked for it tirelessly and disastrously.  But as so often in UK policy, nobody seems to have planned for it, least of all the current useless mayor.
So we are back to town cramming, squeezing the poor into monstrous flats, which is in many ways the dark side of he Spirit of ’45, we have been hearing so much about.  The Attlee government went for new towns but they also went for flats for the poor – precisely the opposite of what they actually wanted.
So I am glad that Nick Clegg dusted down garden cities at the end of last year.  That has to be the way forward.  A new generation of garden cities, with homes and gardens, where the land is held by the community and can use the rise in land values to their own benefit.  And, above all, where there is work.
These must not be the great soulless edge of town estates so beloved of the Glasgow Labour Party, still less the kind of 'Prescottville' sprawl we got in the Docklands.
But this time, they are not going to be as close to London, like Harlow, Stevenage and Welwyn.
We have to ask ourselves, what would it take to make an economic success of new garden cities in the great abandoned spaces of northern England – around Bradford or Newcastle or in the industrial wastelands of the East Midlands?
What would it take to repeat the success of Milton Keynes a little further to the north?  High speed rail,  possibly.  Regional government, possibly.  Major decentralisation of power, definitely,. 
Would any of that be enough?  I don't know.  But we need to talk about it, because otherwise we are going to turn London into a tumour, gorging on the blood of the poor, all over again.  And we will be expecting the poorest to plunge their youngest into factory-sized, impersonal schools.

The local government revolt against big banks (in the USA)

Are there such things as ‘public banking campaigners’ in this country, as there are in the USA? 
I’m not sure.  There is Move Your Money.  There are the redoubtable people who are actually trying to start local banks.  But not quite what they have over there.
I mention this because the campaigners at theWhy the Bank of England?  Good question and the answer is that US law now forbids public money being used to bail out a failing bank, which means that other institutions are going to have to be involved.  And that means agreements along the lines of those imposed on Cyprus, or so he campaigners say.
It is good to see that plans are being laid for that eventuality, though it is strange that the Bank of England is preparing the way to bail-out American banks – perhaps if they are major players in the UK market.
But all of this is in some ways beside the point because the revelation has led to a fascinating heart-searching among US local authorities.
If we have a looming derivatives crash – and who can say we haven't – then money kept in the Wall Street banks may become partly forfeit.  It makes sense then to remove city or or other local government deposits from the Wall Street banks and to keep them in relatively safer local ones.  More than that: it may well be their fiduciary duty to do so.
The campaigners have issued an online video to put their point across to city halls and state assemblies.
There are also signs of a local government revolt against the big banks over there,  San Francisco is launching its own bank.  Philadelphia is suing its own Wall Street banks for losses incurred because of the Libor rate fixing scandal.

But then, US consumers have a massive advantage over those in the UK,.  They have local banks they can choose if they dissatisfied.  After three years of a coalition dedicated to 'rebalancing the economy', we still don’t.  But I believe we will.

The euro, the Syria vote and the rise of the technocrats

"The government will ensure that the legislation [for cuts in education, pensions etc] is presented to Parliament in Quarter 3 and agreed by Parliament in Quarter 4... The government will present a Privatisation Plan to Parliament and ensure it is speedily passed."

No, not the instructions of a monarch to a client state, or of a foreign power to a conquered vassal, but the instructions of the Troika - the EU's economic directorate - that now governs indebted states like Greece, Portugal and Ireland, as explained in an absolutely revelatory article about the state of Europe in the London Review of Books by Susan Watkins, the editor of New Left Review.

The Troika is led by the Directorate of Economic and Financial Affairs, in turn directed by the Finnish Olli Rehn, as Susan Watkins says, a man who has been "soundly rejected by his own electorate".

The present nervous lull in the story of the euro-zone is described in the article as the result of the combined willpower of the US Treasury and the German government.  The critical voice of France has been silent; Britain seems only concerned to protect the bonuses of the American banks based in the City of London.

While this wholly undemocratic regime continues to limit itself to southern Europe, it may well continue - though the political monsters it is creating there will have to be faced sooner or later.  It is a triumph for technocratic rule - the very reverse of what the European Union was supposed to mean.

And the crosser the electorates get, the more difficult it will be to reform it.

I was thinking about this, and the UK Parliament's vote on Syria off and on this weekend.  On the one hand, we have a terrifying democratic over-ride in southern Europe, justified because somehow you can't trust the venal local politicians not to overspend (I paraphrase of course).  On the other hand, a technocratic decision like starting a war is properly debated and people throw up their hands in horror at the result.

The combination seems to me to add up to a real scepticism about democracy - perhaps more so than at any time since the 1930s.

The technocrats must now be promising themselves never to let Parliament decide such things again.  They must also have realised what would have happened at the vote had gone the other way - saddling Cameron with a wafer-thin victory which hardly justified the use of force either.

Yet the UK electorate very sensibly voted no one party into office, allowing unprecedented powers to MPs to exercise their conscience, rightly or wrongly.

Similarly, at European level, it is the peculiar withdrawal of the French that has allowed the Troika to assume control of government south of the Alps.

Let's leave Syria on one side for a moment (we can only solve one problem at a time in this blog).  Is there any way we can rescue democracy in Europe before the inevitable monsters emerge?

The basic problem seems to be the capitulation to technocrats - accepting a technocratic plan: a single European currency, which has pushed the national economies apart rather than brought them together (a predictable and predicted outcome).

There is nothing wrong with the euro itself, but it urgently needs to be supplemented by a raft of new regional, national and local currencies, capable of recognising economic differences, and capable of keeping populations alive while the vast euro loans are paid off.

Remember what Keynes said about economic downturns which are kept artificially long by a technocratic commitment to long-term austerity: "A perigrination in the catacombs, with a guttering candle."

People need a means of exchange to live, and - if they can't have euros - they will need something else.

Why the Syria vote was lost

I know politicians are supposed to have firm opinions.  No, they are supposed to have convictions.  So are political bloggers, but my convictions about an attack on the Syrian government wavered to and fro pathetically in the days before the vote on Thursday night.

I have to admit it.  I should have surrendered my blogger's licence.

I listened on the radio to as much of the debate as I could, and found myself convinced by Paddy Ashdown's position.  Had anyone elected me to Parliament, I would have followed him into the voting lobbies.

Now that Parliament has rejected military action - for the time being at least - I am back in the waverers' camp.  I see no great humiliation for either Cameron or Clegg, both of whom have acted with dignity and leadership.

My generation has Harold Wilson to thank for not sending us to Vietnam (it is about the only thing we do have to thank him for) and that was hardly a humiliation for him either.  Admittedly, he didn't get defeated in a Commons vote on it.

Almost every commentator has talked about the legacy of the fatal war in Iraq, and certainly the phrase "without doubt" now rings alarm bells because of the misuse of the phrase before.  These days, when a politician needs to say something is "without doubt", it simply emphasises the doubt.

The latest claim, from an Associated Press reporter, that the chemical weapons were supplied  to the rebels by the Saudis and let off by mistake, does indicate a reasonable doubt.

But there is another problem, beyond Iraq, which I think led to the scepticism from all parties about military action.  It is the problem of the nature of modern technological warfare, and our collective denial about collateral damage.

We wage war now from safe bunkers back home, a virtual war which can only be virtually accurate.  We bomb imperiously, aware that innocent people will suffer and die for our just cause - and a million people seem to have died as a result of the Iraq war, in the original attacks and in the chaos that followed.

It is this imperious approach to people - not completely different from the imperious arrogance of the terrorists to innocent lives - that makes us so uncomfortable.  And we are right to feel uncomfortable about it.

Back in the 1960s, there was a famous Punch cartoon showing a police plane flying above New York, dropping bombs on it.  One NYPD officer says to the other: "Don't worry, we're bound to hit someone who is breaking the law".

There is a nervous truth about that these days.

The difference in intention isn't enough.  We try to minimise the loss of life, they try to maximise it, it is true.  But when we are waging war to defend an embattled people, it seems wrong to kill as many of them accidentally as we do.  It seems wrong because it is wrong.

I don't pretend I know the answer, because we can't allow every dictator to murder and gas with impunity.  There will be times that we have to act, using whatever technology is to hand.

But in the end, we had to abolish the death penalty because juries were so reluctant to convict murderers.  In the end, we will have to find a more civilised way to take military action, or democracies may not stomach it.

The Great Auditing Scandal that is to come

Let's get down to the nitty-gritty about numbers in policy-making, and why they caused such waste, expense and ineffectiveness in public services when wielded by the last government.

Numbers have the appearance objectivity.  They look hard-nosed and unanswerable.  They look like the kind of thing that people who gargle with the idea of 'evidence-based policy' might like.

But here is the tragedy.  The numbers are chained at the other end to definitions, which involve words, and these are endlessly malleable, often illusory, sometimes delusory.

The numbers are trustworthy, but the definitions slip through your fingers, are massaged by frontline staff and managers, by civil servants and also by politicians.

That is the terrible weakness of evidence-based policy.  This is not to say that anyone should embrace evidence-free policy, just that - by defining evidence so narrowly - it began to suck the life and power out of so much of what had been effective in our services.

It rewarded those who tweaked the definitions; it downgraded those who were brilliant at actually doing the job.

It is one of the themes of this blog that the coalition failed to define the problems with New Labour's approach to services - and the target numbers at the heart of their humming, centralised public service machine.  They therefore repeated many of the same mistakes.  They still are repeating them now.

You wouldn't expect that author of The Tyranny of Numbers to say anything different.  But there is now a new twist, and it is partly thanks to the policy-known as payment-by-results.

The cage created for frontline staff, partly by McKinsey, partly by wrong-headed notions like 'deliverology', meant that they often had to massage the definitions just to do their job.

I remember going to a public meeting around 2003, and overheard the organisers say to each other: "If any couples come in, mark them both down as women.  We don't have enough of those."

Ah yes, those days of innocence.  It was necessary to do a little light  massage just to get the funders off your back long enough to do a bit of work.

Remember Richard Elliott, ten years ago a member of the Bristol drugs action team, who had to keep his eyes on forty-four different funding streams, nine different grids and eighty-two different objectives imposed on him by managers, funders and the government. Before he resigned, he reckoned that he and his colleagues spent less than 40 per cent of their time actually tackling drugs issues.

Elliott compared his management regime to a kind of addiction on behalf of the obsessive and narrow measurement of his performance:

“Monitoring has become almost religious in status, as has centralised control. The demand for quick hits and early wins is driven by a central desire analogous to the instant gratification demands made by drug users themselves.”

But now, ten years on, money is attached to the figures.  Even if it isn't payment-by-results, there are legal contracts with the providers.  What was once a bit of mild massaging is now fraud.  It is a police matter.

Hence the news yesterday that the public services giant Serco is being investigated again for "irregularities in records keeping".  The second such investigation, this time for their prisoner escorting contracts.

There is much tut-tutting in the business pages about it.  But there is a much bigger problem here, and it is this: look under any stone in public services, and any private sector contract to deliver them, and there will be something like this.  Some of it will involve fake numbers; some will involve manipulated definitions.  But this is where the system of centralised targets leads to, inevitably.

We can blame the teachers and frontline staff and anyone else who is caught in this way, but it isn't really their fault.  The system is set up to demand this kind of manipulation of definitions, because the difference between success and failure is no longer how you actually perform for the people you help - it is in these little tweaks of definitions that can make hard numbers look so very different.

I make this small prediction.  It started with A4e, but over the next year, more and more of the big outsourcing companies will find themselves involved in this, more schools, more hospitals - until the rewards for the investigating auditors become unsustainable and some other solution will have to be found.

And all because this is a system for arms-length management that works by hollowing out services.

But remember, when it happens, that you read about the Great Auditing Scandal here first.