The Lies of the Land

Forget Dame Shirley Porter, says Theodore Dalrymple. If it’s real scandal you are after, consider the millions wasted as a result of public service corruption

[. . . . ] Were earnestness of demeanour a guarantee of efficiency, Britain would have the finest public services in the world. Alas, such earnestness is a guarantee of nothing except lack of sense of humour. And a very high proportion of public servants know perfectly well that they are parasites, that their so-called work would be much better left undone, and that it is nothing but outdoor relief for the unimaginatively ambitious, which is why their earnestness is combined with furtiveness and an inability to look you in the eye. Of course, if asked about their work they would claim to ‘care passionately’ about its ostensible aim, because the verbal expression of passionate concern is now the sine qua non of promotion. The public services are thus rife with institutionalised lying. They have become an instrument of clientelistic politics.

The [public service] rot is everywhere, including (I regret to say) in the medical profession. The number of adults in this country without a job has remained more or less constant over the last 20 years, but as unemployment has fallen, so disability has risen; there are now two-and-a-half times as many people who are supposedly too ill to work as there are people who are simply unemployed, and this at a time when the population has been growing steadily healthier. No doubt the large-scale switch from unemployment to sickness suits government propaganda well — and the present government is not the only one guilty in this respect — and is also pleasing to people who would find only the worst-paid menial jobs if they found any jobs at all; but the switch could not have occurred without the connivance of thousands of doctors who wrote and continue to write millions of certificates knowing them to contain falsehoods. No doubt the doctors would claim to be acting from kindness where it is not from self-preservation, but if so, a system that requires mendacity on so institutional a scale in order that kindness should be done by doctors is deeply and irremediably corrupt.

We cannot even organise a public examination system for schoolchildren in this country so that the results mean what they appear to mean. As for our universities, they blatantly steal the money of foreigners by virtually selling degrees that will soon start to devalue like the mark after the first world war. No longer scholarship and learning, but bums on seats and grade inflation to guarantee yet more bums on seats next year, these are the aim of our institutions of higher education.

You have to look no further than the job advertisements [. . . .] whose titles convey no meaning, let alone entail specific duties: co-ordinators, facilitators, evaluators, strategic planners, directors of organisational development and so forth. These jobs are designed for people who are overtrained for nothing in particular, and whose main aim in life is a pension or — better still — early retirement on medical grounds.

One symptom of the corruption of the public services is the inability of public servants either to speak or to write comprehensible, straightforward English. . . . an example from the Clinical Governance Bulletin, . . . . from an article entitled ‘Supporting the development of a strategic approach to effective services: a framework for directorates’. The first paragraph reads: ‘The development of an “effective services agenda” has enabled us to co-ordinate research and development, clinical effectiveness and audit, evidence-based practice, user involvement in evaluating services and ensuring appropriate responses to national guidance papers and reports, such as guidance from the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.’[. . . .]