The extraordinary failure of the public sector in Britain, despite massive funding by the Labour government, needs some explanation.

The poster child for this disaster is Baby P, who died at the hands of monsters who were meant to protect him. The Social Services department charged with preventing it, failed so completely that no confidence can be placed in any similar organization anywhere in the country.

The people in charge barefacedly claimed they “followed procedure”, as if procedure were their only duty, not actual child protection. Failure of the procedure was the fault of politicians, not their own. Unhappily, that is mostly true.

The appalling rash of incompetence across most of Britain’s public sector, involving the police, child protection agencies, exam boards … and many other examples, highlights the need for a total reform of how Britain is governed.

Superdemocracy is an idea I had a long while ago while musing on the optimum hierarchy for any organization. It’s really a variation on meritocracy, so will be dismissed by followers of the postmodern tendency.

Imagine if you will the billions of decisions taken daily in businesses, agencies, governments, and other organizations up and down the country. Most of them will be made at nodal points where power has settled and accumulated over time, and where empires are ruthlessly defended. In other words, they will be taken well above the level of optimum efficiency — the Point of Maximum Competence.

A little thought reveals that almost all decisions are made at points where the decision-takers are not fully aware of the complexities of the task. In today’s technical society, that disjunction is growing all the time.

If each decision is depicted as a small arrow, it’s not hard to visualize most of them pointing downward, albeit by a tiny amount. Day after day, these billions of small decrements add up to a massive efficiency deficit, which can only be supported by vast quantities of public money propping up the whole edifice. They will also need statistical fallacies to claim success where failure is the norm.

Small businesses, by contrast, develop the expertise to avoid this tendency or they die, which is why they are usually the most dynamic elements in any economy.

Big businesses become more like governments as they mature, even creating social security and foreign affairs departments — look at Google and Microsoft.

But government is the principal problem. In the UK, central government operates the highly technical National Health Service, with predictably dismal, and costly, results.

Government also runs the State schools, transport and other big areas of public concern. It now appropriates getting on for 50pc of national income and employs 25pc of the workforce. Let’s call that, Decremental Drainage. The losses are huge and ongoing.

Governmental decisions are taken at the Level of Minimum Competence. In the UK, we also have the even more remote European level in Brussels — the Level of Maximum Incompetence. Why would any decisions, beyond essential cross-border issues, ever be sent to Brussels?

Conjure up a vision of decisions being taken much further down the food chain at the point where all the complexities and variations of the particular case are fully appreciated. Imagine all those billions of arrows pointing upwards by a small increment.

Jump forward a year or so and listen to that faint, distant rumbling of a tidal wave just visible on the horizon. It’s a tidal wave of MONEY. In the public sector that would translate as COMPETENCE, and hence lower public debt.

Look at any successful operation and you’ll see decision-making at the Point of Maximum Competence, or quite near to it. Examine any failing organization and you’ll discover decisions being made well above those levels by people miserably ensconced in positions of conceit and self-delusion. There is no exception to this rule. Decisions, like cream in a milk bottle, will always rise to the top.

All decisions therefore should be taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. The CEO role should comprise little more than shaking the milk bottles all day long.

Superdemocracy and representative democracy
Representative democracy, our standard political institution in the West, is vital for two reasons:

1. It spreads decision-making thinly, ensuring that power doesn’t concentrate in too few hands, and
2. It allows ordinary people to feel they are represented in the highest taxing and lawmaking councils of the land.

Point 1, of course, is easily bypassed by determined politicians with a decent majority in Parliament. Elective dictatorship is a curse of the British parliamentary system, caused mainly by “the Sovereignty of Parliament” — but that’s another story.

As Churchill may well have implied, you wouldn’t appoint a CEO of a major organization by a kind of X Factor televised beauty parade. “Democracy,” he said, “is a bad form of Government, but it’s better than any of the others.”

We have to recognize that most politicians are rank amateurs at what they do — and it shows. Seizing on a dangerously-small stock of information and experience, while being ignorant of the complexities of the case, they often make huge, irreversible blunders paid for by the rest of us.

Clearly, representative democracy is necessary. But it needs to be modified still further to limit the amount of decision-making available to the often hick-town amateur actors who rise to the top in the election process.

Using Superdemocracy as the principle of governance across a whole society would naturally rob the dilettantes of power and add a huge efficiency increment to a country’s earning power.

Simply passing power downwards — or sideways, in the case of “devolution” — is not enough. A root and branch examination of decisions, and who takes them, is vital to rebalance the system.

David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, and the next Conservative Government should put constitutional change on its agenda as a matter of urgency.

John Evans

I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about Energy Analysis, which is a central part of the Superdemocracy project I’m working on.

Energy Analysis is a different way of viewing how organizations work. Instead of seeing people in particular “jobs” — which are ragbags of roles inherited from earlier empire building and power grabs — we examine the energy flows through the whole unit. We also look at the type of energy involved. This method always points up people placement as the main source of rigidities in any large organized group.

It’s a simple enough procedure, but breaks away from our normal worldview in which people are the natural drivers and shakers of all corporate activity. At first sight, it can leave you a bit disorientated, but think of Google. From the outside, the Googleplex looks like a giant energy plasma instead of a normal corporation, like Microsoft or IBM. And yet even Google has still fully to evolve into a true superdemocratic organism.

Then, out of the blue, a perfect example of an energy-driven corpo landed with a thud in my lap : the European Commission.

Basic background
The EU Commission is a board of quasi civil servants, drawn from the political classes of EU member states, and based in Brussels. Unlike normal secretariats it exercises considerable executive powers by proposing new Europe-wide legislation which eventually becomes legal throughout the community.

It has steadily amassed a lot of influence and control, backed by a tame supreme court which almost always supports the central orthodoxy. Its methodology has been “salami-slicing”, taking power in small increments that they think will not be noticed by busy people, but will accumulate over time into a vast control console for the whole of Europe.

The Commission is widely regarded as a political graveyard for national politicians who see it as western Europe’s equivalent to the Siberian salt mines of the old Soviet Union, where out-of-favour opponents were conveniently deposited. Britain’s commissioner, Peter Mandleson, a friend of Tony Blair, was twice forced out of the British Cabinet for alleged dishonesty. He now controls trade negotiations for all 27 countries in the EU.
/Basic Background

Now just imagine what all that negative energy will do if concentrated in one supranational body given the power to use it.

Naturally, that resentment and loss of status back home will fixate on stripping power from national governments and lodging it in Brussels. This will compensate Commissioners psychologically for the assumed shabby treatment these people had received from national politicians.

In short, the Commission will inevitably become a kind of politburo, hoovering power to the centre and spewing out hundreds of thousands of prescriptive “directives” for the folks back home. It will be job justification and revenge politics writ large by a powerful bunch of losers.

And that’s just what has happened over the past 35 years, ever since the UK joined an inoffensive “Common Market” with “no political or sovereignty implications”. The energy map of the institution predicts perfectly how it has evolved over the decades. It’s also a fact that the Commission’s accounts have not been cleared for 13 years by their own court of auditors on the grounds of massive fraud.

This week a constitution was signed by national politicians which paves the way for yet more power grabs and the downgrading of democratic procedures and accountability.

You would rightly guess that most ordinary people are totally against all this. Indeed, two years ago both France and the Netherlands voted it down in referendums, and Britain would have done the same if allowed to have a say by the slippery Blair and Brown. The constitution has now been repackaged and renamed — an amending treaty. This time they’ve walked away with the whole salami.

So the transition from common market to legal jurisdiction is almost complete, with not a referendum of the people in sight. And it’s all been driven by the energies funnelled into the Commission by short-sighted, short-termist national politicians. Stitch-up is too mild a comment for what has taken place.

This week also sees the 350th anniversary of the Flushing Remonstrance which was issued by English settlers in New Holland, now New York, in protest against religious persecutions by the then Dutch rulers. In retrospect it was the model for all the other Declarations and freedom documents that followed.

So do we need our own Flushing Remonstrance here in western Europe? It would be a good start, but we should also look at the energy makeup of the Brussels Commission and so-called Court of Justice. Then we could get back to free trade and dispense with the futilities of failed politicians.

As Shakespeare put it, we must renounce “the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth”.

Energy Analysis is a useful tool for that in any organization, especially when aimed at finding the points of maximum competence for the taking of critical decisions. One thing’s for sure, pushing up decisions to Brussels is the worst of all possible worlds — the point of maximum incompetence.

But then we hardly live in a sane universe.

In developing my forthcoming book, Superdemocracy — The New Art of Corporate Governance, I’ve been looking closely at the dream of synergy and the reality of particularity. #

All mergers and acquisitions are based on the idea that economies of scale will drive down costs across the board and produce synergies between organizations. This assumption is so ingrained in our thinking that few people stop to ask why most takeovers fail.

In any group activity there’s a hierarchy of decisionmaking. Each person in the structure gets a bagload of responsibilities based on various assumptions, and the empire-building of their predecessors. Like cream in a milk bottle, decisions have a strong tendency to rise up the hierarchy, stopping only when the number of assumptions needed to take them exceeds common sense.

Notice the word “exceeds”. This isn’t a rational process, it’s pushed purely by ego and vanity.

The result is that most decisions in any organization (business or governmental) produce a one-size-fits-all outcome which gives a false sense of synergy, while destroying efficiency and particularity.

“Particularity” may sound odd here but, in reality, it’s the crux of the well-being of any complex infrastructure. It means decisions are made with few assumptions and with a “size”, or scale, that fits the need of every case.

Modern Western countries are one-size-fits-all societies. It’s our weakest link and the point where our enemies concentrate their attacks. They know most decisions, whether laws, regulations, red tape, whatever, are unpopular and largely unworkable, because they lack particularity.

Thus we need armies of lawyers to sort things out, over long periods of time. We also have to throw huge amounts of national and business capital at problems just to keep them afloat.

Politburo orders are always wrong. EU “directives” are never right for most people. Decisions taken on 10 Downing Street’s sofa have been proved disastrous time and again. White House decisions are hardly spangled with success. Microsoft, and even lucky Google, make crass moves all the time which go totally pear-shaped.

If every decision were taken at the point of maximum competence, or very near to it, there would be few assumptions to make, and the outcome would be as close to perfect as it’s possible to reach.

So here’s The Superdemocracy Principle : Particularity means never having to make assumptions. If you’re making assumptions, the decision shouldn’t be taken at your pay grade.

Abraham Lincoln’s famous maxim, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time”, is so obviously true you wouldn’t expect anyone to fall foul of its remorseless logic. Yet that is precisely what Britain and some other Western countries have done over the past decade.

It began with Bill Clinton and his obsessive pursuit of minority interests to bolster his poll results and show how caring he is to the wider electorate. In Britain, Tony Blair followed suit under the banner of The Third Way, a neo-Marxist equality agenda of endless social tinkering and mindless bossiness. It was how they would make the entire population love them to bits — they thought.

The Third Way signalled the death of Bentham’s Utilitarianism in British politics and the beginnings of an eerie hero worship of carefully selected in-groups and minorities.

Jeremy Bentham’s Embalmed Body

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), philosopher and social reformer, paved the way for modern fully-franchised democracy with his great maxim, “The object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. It has been the basis of modern society ever since and has clearly worked well. He even provided a mathematical formula for calculating the best possible outcome in every situation.

Then came the Clinton/Blair obsession with “dog whistling” — the pursuit of prescriptive minority rights which are often rolled out at the expense of other minorities and almost always the majority itself.

Let’s look at an analogy of Bentham’s dictum in action. Somewhere in Holland a hole appears in a dyke. A small boy senses the danger and stops the flow by putting his finger in the hole.

His cries alert farm workers nearby who rush to his aid only to find other holes appearing. They stop the trickle with their own fingers. Soon, at the urging of the Mayor, others are rushing onto the scene until the whole village is there with their fingers in hundreds of holes.

“What do we do now?” somebody shouts.

A distant voice cries, “There’s another hole.”

So now the dyke will give way taking the entire population of the village with it. The Benthamite view would be to send a small repair party to the dyke to assess the likelihood of saving it, while evacuating the rest of the village to safety. In other words, it may mean sacrificing the few in order to save the majority.

Stable Families
We know that children are happiest and more stable if brought up in married two-parent families. All the statistics prove this self-evident fact. Why then would a couple with children be financially better off in Blair’s Britain if they were not married? And why are the same “rights” given to same-sex couples in loose relationships as to married families?

Bentham’s relentless logic means that public policy should never be confused with private kindness, which is exactly what we’ve got in Brokeback Britain.

The greater public good has been destroyed in favour of a patchwork quilt of minor prescriptive measures, all jangling against each, causing huge resentment in the so-far silent majority, and destroying all social cohesion in the cities and in the country.

Children run wild at night, tormenting adults who can’t take action because of the Children’s Rights Act. This situation is an example of extensive child neglect in a society that increasingly looks to the state for everything. And that’s not to mention the destructive Human Rights Act which grants British civil rights universally to the whole world in an act of unparalleled betrayal of a nation’s right to protect itself from harm.

If New Labour had foresworn the advice of its militant Marxists, oddball, second-rate academics, and heeded the wise words of Jeremy Bentham, little of this would have happened.

That politics today is broken is clear. Only the resurrection of Bentham’s Utility agenda can save it. It’s not as if he’s that far away. His perfectly embalmed body, still in his familiar clothes and sitting in his favourite chair, can be seen in a glass cabinet in a London University college.

It would mean the end of prescriptive legislation, social engineering of the many by the few, the massive centralization of power, and the loss of the balm of Superdemocracy.

As General George Patton once said : “Don’t tell people how to do things, [suggest] what to do and let them surprise you with the result.”

Thanks to Aaron Brazell at Technosailor for the Patton quotation.

We’re getting more than a few inquiries about our forthcoming Moneyizor network magazine. Principally, they concern the shape of the content and the policies behind it. These are mainly coming from people who are considering offering their own sites to the magazine, or applying to write an in-house webtitle.

The top question is, what sites are currently scheduled for Moneyizor, and what are the main categories? So here’s a list of the sites that will be in at the launch :

1. LSE Latest – Supporting an Independent London Stock Exchange.

2. Money Finesse – Personal Finance in the USA.

3. Small Business Booster – Tips and Advice for Success. [NEW]

4. The Money Log – Enrichment Daily.

5. Superdemocracy — A New Art of Corporate Governance.

6. Entrepreneur Latest — [Under Development].

7. Innovation Latest — [Under Development].

And the list is still growing in advance of our mid-April launch.

As for the terms we offer to externally-owned sites, we’re currently looking at a 70/30 split in favour of the client. Other aspects of the deal are still under consideration.

Contact : Moneyizor(at)SyntagmaMedia(dot)com.