The Guardian reports that not only is Tony Blair hiring David Bennett, a former management consultant from McKinsey's, to run his policy unit, but is taking this man's advice on the role of the Cabinet Secretary, heaven help us, before appointing the next incumbent to the post. When the history of Tony Blair's administration is finally written, maybe someone will finally put together the fact that virtually every public service it touched descended into chaos, incompetence and maladministration with the fact that the role of the civil service in running the country was increasingly out-sourced to management consultants -- and that just possibly this is the reason why the adminstration of Britain ran into the ground during this time. As the Guardian records:

'Mr Bennett, who has a 20-year association with McKinsey - dubbed the "Jesuits of capitalism" - is expected to press civil servants to become more entrepreneurial and push through an electronic revolution in the delivery of all services. He backs the McKinsey slogan that "everything can be measured, and what gets measured gets managed".'

That should surely read 'what gets measured gets mismanaged'. For this idiotic slogan sums up what has gone wrong with the delivery of our public services. It is their reduction to 'measurement' and 'management' that has all but done for them. Reducing them to this kind of managerial formula has meant that either the wrong thing get measured, or the right thing gets measured in the wrong way, or most important of all the really crucial things cannot be measured at all and are thus either ignored or destroyed. How do you measure the care that needs to be given to an elderly sufferer from Parkinson's dying on a hospital ward? How do you measure the disintegration of education standards when the 'measurements' of examination grades have been so corrupted? How do you measure the value of independence to professionalism in any discipline?

The fact is that the essence of public service, which is all about disinterestedness, trust, service, the public interest and so forth cannot be measured. To try to do so is the equivalent of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. It is simply a form of quackery, a scam dressed up in jargon to give the appearance of some kind of quasi-scientific approach and keep a lot of people in extremely lucrative employment while the country's services are brought to their knees. Managerialism is the curse of our age, and management consultants are our modern shamans. The idea that the role of the Cabinet Secretary is to be reshaped by such a person sounds the final death knell of the British civil service, once an institution that was the envy of the world.