The blame game

A chap who put in ten years or so as the President of the European Commission, no doubt recipient of a fat pension therefrom, takes what one supposes to be a well paid job with a US bank. A chap who was Prime Minister of the UK for ten years or so, also the recipient of a perfectly respectable pension, goes on to make a great deal of money out of property, out of advising the leaders of more or less unsavory regimes and a drop of pin money from the celebrity lecture circuit. The senior civil servants around at the time that said Prime Minister went to war with his buddy Bush, all seem (according to the latest issue of the NYRB) to have wound up in comfortable berths in the private sector. The senior police officer, the one in the chair at the time an innocent Brazilian electrician was shot dead in a tube train, the one who gave the green light, goes onto to greater things. Doctors are alleged to cover up for each others' mistakes. Social workers are alleged to get away with outrageous errors of judgement regarding vulnerable children.

All of which tends to irritate. Why do we indulge the greed of retired public servants? Why do we reward their failures?

But this morning, I had the contrary thought. In the olden days, the public services were run on more relaxed lines. No-one ever got the sack, or at least very rarely, in the sense of being dismissed the service. Public servants were not paid fancy salaries and the sinecures that might have come to senior servants on retirement were comfortable rather than gold-plated. But one might get abruptly transferred, shunted off to premises, to personnel or to statistics. One's card might get marked and one might never be promoted. The up-side of all this was that public servants were able to do what they believed to be the public good without having to look over their shoulder the whole time. They could do their work, which might, quite properly, involve taking a chance, without being hampered by fear for livelihood, of being pilloried in the media or even of being dragged through the criminal courts. On the whole, we just trusted the public service and the public servants in it, to get on with their job, while we got on with ours. Or our allotments, as the case may be.

Maybe in said olden days we struck a better balance between looking after our own and not rewarding failure than we do now.