The Government is rubbish. More please!

Why do people complain about the government, then demand more of it?

Well that was interesting. To summarise: universally respected historian Gary Lineker gets on Twitter and likens the current government’s only popular policy to something the Third Reich might have come up with in 1937, and appropriately enough, it all kicks off.

Keir Starmer, who increasingly resembles a baked potato wearing an invisible neck brace, surprises everyone, including from the look on his face, himself, by coming out in favour of Free Speech, and all the BBC Sports presenters do a Mick Lynch and down tools in solidarity. Meanwhile Rishi Sunak runs for cover, sticks his fingers in his ears and tries to give the impression that he’s never even heard of this ‘Barry Limmacar’ or these so called ‘Nastys’.

Opinions were divided. But what everyone could agree on, was that the real villain was the BBC. It had either not backed Gary sufficiently, or let him get away with too much. It had not been inadequately strict applying its own rules, or maybe too strict. It had been too slavish in its commitment to impartiality, or not nearly impartial enough. Definitely one of those anyway.

And literally everyone did have an opinion. The entire journalistic class, who happily sat dumbstruck on the fence when it came to grooming gangs, the army’s 77th Brigade spying on British citizens during COVID, or the lockdown files revealing that many COVID policies were more about saving the government’s reputation than saving lives, British teenagers receiving death threats for accidentally damaging a religious book, all seemed to have no end of clever things to say about an ex footballer’s right to call the the Tories a bunch of Nazis.

The whole thing was needlessly complex, star studded, boring and preposterous. A bit like that second Knives Out movie.

And forget Lineker, what was almost universally agreed was that the BBC’s worst sin, was its temerity to employ as its chairman, a man who once arranged for Boris Johnson to be lent some money so he could waste it on gold plated wallpaper. Not lent him the money mind. Just arranged its lending.

A blatant conflict of interest of course. I mean yes it was, and potentially a pretty dodgy appointment.

Unlike the appointment of Sue Gray, the top civil servant tasked with impartially investigating the same Boris Johnson’s unforgivable lockdown partying. She has just announced she is jumping ship to become Labour leader Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff. That move of course is completely above board and beyond reproach. No conflict of interest there. Not a bit of it.

Moaning about the BBC is a bit like sex. Every one does it, and each new generation thinks they were the first ones to try it. But rest assured, long before Twitter even existed, people had no problem coming up with reasons to complain about our national broadcaster.

These days the BBC comes under a lot of criticism for its liberal and progressive bent. Obvious, but kind of understandable when you consider who works for it, how we pay for it, and how it sees itself. If it was even a tiny bit, slightly right leaning, or small ‘c’ conservative, it would be a massive outlier, the only government controlled institution that was not achingly keen to be perceived as being ‘on the right side of history’.

Back in the old days the moaning was less about politics, and more about the general quality of the TV shows, and especially the number of ‘repeats’ on offer. For some reason people objected to the BBC spending money on quality shows that bore repeat viewing, rather than waste it all on nonsense that wasn’t even worth a second look.  Something no one cares about now, since the internet has made TV schedules, along with the idea that we should be faintly reticent about openly broadcasting our basest sexual proclivities to strangers on social media, seem outdated and quaint.

I remember once, back in the day, reading in a newspaper, one irate letter about the BBC. The letter writer was moaning about having to pay the TV licence, (plus ça change-(get me French!)) for a schedule filled with sub standard programming and those endless ‘repeats’. The dissatisfied licence fee payer ended with a killer sign off and argument ender. I paraphrase, it was years ago, but essentially he said.

‘I have no objection to the BBC continuing to be funded by the licence fee, if from now on, The BBC makes a formal commitment to only make good television programmes.’

I remember finding this both hilarious and depressing. Did this letter writer think that the BBC went out of its way to make bad TV shows? That it had highly paid executives just sitting around working out how to waste the most amount of money on the lowest quality garbage? The writer could simply not fathom the more simple explanation; that a large part of the BBC’s output was simply not for him.

But the bigger point is that our friend also seemed to be labouring under the mistaken assumption that there was some kind of empirical measure for what constituted a ‘good’ tv show, and that somehow he himself was the arbiter of that goodness.

I’m reminded of that letter sometimes when I hear people complaining about the government.

People moan about the government all the time. They always have of course. But whether on the left or right, the nature of those complaints seems to increasingly focus on demands the government solves all their problems, reflects their values, punishes those they don’t like, and rewards only those who they favour.

They demand fewer taxes on themselves, but crippling taxes on those they deem greedy or unworthy. And they stipulate the government only spends those taxes on the projects and priorities that they themselves approve of.

In short, they only want ‘good’ government.

It seems fair enough on the surface. No one actually votes for a ‘bad’ government. Unless of course you vote SNP.

But the fact is there are no good governments. And if anyone is thinking ‘Jacinda Ardern’,  please close the door on your way out.

And the reason there are no good governments is simple. Because, as slavery battling racist (Yup-you read that correctly) Abraham Lincoln reminded us

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time”.

Somehow modern electorates have been led to believe this is nonsense. And that nowadays it really is the government’s role to satisfy all the people’s needs, all the time.

People are always demanding the state solves this. Or intervenes in that. We’ve been sold the lie that there’s not a problem too gigantic and universal, or too tiny and personal that cannot be solved with a bit more government intervention. And so we end up with a giant bloated inefficient state that is too busy meddling in every little aspect of our lives, to get the big stuff right.

We need to remember the government isn’t an all powerful all knowing brain trust of the brightest and the best, striding toward a brighter future.

It is literally Matt Hancock groping a woman in a cupboard, it is ‘top scientists’ guessing how bad COVID is going to be and getting it wrong by a factor of ten every. single. time. It is our most senior civil servant finding the needless quarantining of British citizens at their own expense ‘hilarious’. It’s a smug man telling you that you are ‘far right’ for wanting to drive down the shops. This is our actual, real life government at work.

Look at the lockdown files, and ask yourself if you want these people to have more control over your life. Or less. And don’t be fooled into thinking Hancock is an outlier. He’s not. He’s just a fool who has been exposed to the sunlight.

Of course that’s mainly the midwit Tories. But if you genuinely think that Sir Keir, Angela, Diane and the rest of Labour’s front bench geniuses are going to actually form this nation’s first ever ‘good’ government, when they sweep to power in next year’s landslide victory, then I have a shipping container full of out of date PPE to sell you.

I’m always amazed when people on the one hand decry the government for being terrible, self serving out of touch and wasteful, and then in the same breath propose that the solution to this sorry state of affairs is the involvement of the state, in even more of our affairs.

I’m not suggesting that governments are uniformly useless. We need them. As Seattle’s CHAZ zone reminded us. Anarchy doesn’t work.

But maybe we should stop expecting on our government to be a one stop shop for solving all of our problems. It’s unrealistic, and when it inevitably fails, it leaves us voters angry and disappointed.

We need to rely on the state for the basics like healthcare, energy supply, infrastructure, security, crime prevention.

Get those right, and only then maybe move on to telling me what I’m allowed to eat for dinner, how big the windows on my house should be, or maybe what I’m allowed to say on Twitter.

In a nation state made up of over 46 million voters, each with (and I know this is hard for some people to take) an equal say in shaping the direction of policy, there will always be competing needs and trade offs.

So some people want to spend all our money on the health service, some people think we should spend a bit less on healthcare and a bit more on defence. Some people want to prioritise climate change, and tackle it with windmills, some would prefer huge investment in nuclear power. Some people want to spend that same money on HS2. (That’s a joke. No one wants HS2).  But each gets huffy when the government doesn’t do the thing they think a ‘good’ government should  do.

But it seems that what we’re never allowed to suggest, even just occasionally, is that it might work better if we leave people to make their own choices rather than impose so many decisions on them from above. For the government to step back, and let us solve our own problems, maybe even just the little ones. Not just for ideological reasons, but because it can be more efficient to spend the nation’s money like that. And also because, and no one ever ever ever seems to acknowledge this, we’re all grown ups, with you know, personal agency.

I’m not asking for a free market libertarian paradise. It’s clear British voters do not want that.

But what they do want is a government which provides decent core public services, especially a healthcare system which works, shopping they can afford, a police service that investigates crimes that are committed on their street-not just on Twitter, a tax system which is perceived to be fair and transparent, defence, and a school system that doesn’t teach their children that their parents are racist transphobes, or that this amazing country was built on the bones of hatred.

It’s a pretty long list, and it’s probably quite enough for any government to be getting on with, before it turns its attentions elsewhere and decides its actual role is to try and fix, you know, everything.

Maybe after all the disappointments, betrayals, lies and destruction of the last few years there’s a world where people could decide that ‘good’ government might just look a tiny bit like ‘less’ government.

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