Post-Bureaucratic, Neo-Medieval

Phillip Blond explains:

Being a fan of the middle ages, I was delighted to hear some its virtues being extolled on the conservative fringe. The stage for such an unlikely endorsement was a policy exchange panel on the question "What is the post bureaucratic age?". As well as me, it included, Oliver Letwin urbane Tory policy chief, Charles Leadbeater, general advisor on modernity and the technological proclivities of 14-year-olds and a frighteningly humorous and sardonic Steve Bundred, CEO of the audit commission.
Letwin led the way by giving a historical account of how bureaucracy first arose through the creation of the state by the monarch, who, in wishing to assert and codify his control over the realm, inaugurated a vast centralised system of state control to regulate and direct his subjects. He then concluded that this has led to its modern correlate: a managerial and bureaucratic state wholly unresponsive to its citizens and indifferent to their needs.

On a historical point Letwin is right, the late middle ages especially were marked by a vast plurality of horizontal relationships, often overlapping, and a myriad of reciprocal and mutual duties and responsibilities. Likewise it is right that a medieval network of a predominantly horizontal communal and social order, exemplified by the church but also including guilds and agrarian communities organised around differential property relationships, was destroyed by the new vertical "secular monarchs". From the 14th century on, they asserted their power and corrupted a pre-existing highly plural and reciprocal community with demands for top-down allegiance, authority and control.

Updating and recovering this earlier medieval model for the modern age is of course the task. But it remains an urgent one as Leadbeater (previously advisor to Tony Blair's policy unit) reminded us that all the evidence shows that self-organised groups with delegated budgets making their own informed choices invariably delivered a better service for themselves at lower cost and to everyone's greater satisfaction. It's worth making this point, as many on the left fear that the new localism is just covert Thatcherism, ideological cover for worsening services at lower cost, and that it really constitutes nothing more than state abandonment of the poor. This could be the outcome, but professional and non-partisan opinion counters this critique by stating two truths: there is something wrong about how the state currently works for its citizens. Firstly, vast sums of money have been poured into the public sector often with little return (look at how GPs and hospital consultants managed to inflate their salaries while actually doing less work).

Secondly, the evidence seems to suggest, and I repeat, that self-organised empowered groups that both commission and receive services can deliver better care for themselves at lower costs to everybody else, thereby, of course, freeing up public money for other social ends. All this was punctuated by Brundred's persistent reminder as to the manifest and ingenious ways that government can and will mis-spend huge amounts of public wealth.

What is interesting is that the possibility of a genuinely post-bureaucratic age is what hyper-modernity offers. With the internet democratising knowledge and access, people can group around informed debate and make judgments in a way never possible before. However, the real escape from bureaucracy occurs when communities are formed that reconstitute traditions across time and place such that all relationships within that community become practised and no formal account of their nature and fulfilment is required.

Instead actions and behaviour are the subject of unconscious agreement and completion. So conceived, an ancient conservative communitarianism can be married to a hyper-modern network of trade and exchange to the mutual benefit of all.