"The British civil service was designed to run an empire, not to serve working people. Its purpose was to rule over people as subjects, not serve them as citizens. It was built to command and control. Clever people with the right sort of education who knew the decisions they made were better. Brains at the centre, obedience at the edge. Endless statistical knowledge, precious little experience on the ground."
"We expect much more of the state than we did in its imperial past. In particular, it has three problems. First, it's not good at dealing with complexity. Take knife crime, for instance. It's a complex social problem. We can't know the answers from a desk in Whitehall. Second, the state is too centralised. The state collects 95% of all UK tax revenue, compared with 50% in Germany. Third, it is too slow."
"The answer is to create a dynamic state. In our paper, A Progressive Case for State Reform, we argue for Labour owning this space radical state reform and reclaiming it from the right. Because we believe in the state's power to improve the lives of working people, we must be its most strident reformers, especially when it fails to deliver. This is the big call for Keir Starmer this autumn."
The British civil service was built to command and control an empire, concentrating expertise at the centre while prioritising obedience at the edges. It lacks practical, on-the-ground experience and struggles with complex social problems that cannot be solved from centralised desks. The state is overly centralised, collecting a far higher share of tax revenue than comparable countries, and it is slowed by vetocratic decision-making. The proposed remedy is a dynamic state featuring decentralisation, agility, and mission teams able to deliver urgent national priorities such as major housebuilding, clean energy transition, violence reduction, and asylum system reform.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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