Centralisation

On this morning's Today programme a piece of news announced that Government Minister's were interested by Denmark's Social Workers' approach to looking after children. Government Ministers, mind.

Five years ago I was at a conference in Birmingham at which a few hundred people (medics, managers, policy makers) were discussing European Health Management issues. I think it may have been a man from Denmark who said with emphasis (that seemed to stun even him) that the British System was so very much more centralised than in all the rest of Europe.

Twenty five years ago, as a freshly minted business studies graduate, I was engaged on a project on the question of Centralisation at British Telecom. This was in the year of its privatisation. It was the first of the nationalised industries to come onto this new scene, and was Mrs Thatcher's innovative entry into creative accounting. At that time the rhetoric was all about decentralisation as the most effective business strategy, and it was used very much as a rationale for flogging the national asset and for dismantling the organisation. Everything was put into question as 'centralisation' was linked to the 'old ways of doing things' (and thus put into the moral bad box) and decentralisation was linked with the cut and thrust of commerce (hence morally good).

I am not interested here in the rights and wrongs of nationalisation and privatisation, but I am (and was) very interested that a centralist decision was being rolled out under the rhetoric of decentralisation and that there was a twist in the idea that seemed impossible to resist. A few years later I fetched up at Thames Water to do an ethnographic study of computer systems design. Here I was amazed to discover that privatisation was in preparation under the signifier centralisation! Thames Water, in virtue of the nature of its business, was very much tied to the ground. It's operations (water works, sewage treatment works) were very much linked to particular localities and had a strong association with people and their bodies. In spite of the obvious reasons for this, 'decentralisation' soon became associated with nationalisation, and hence part of the moral bad ground, and Centralisation became the name of the new strategy, associated with all that was good.

This new strategy at Thames Water was brought in at huge expense from Anderson Consulting. This was one of the Big Five consultancies who enjoyed great success around the world, and who employed the elite of the graduate crop each year. This organisation now goes under the name of Accenture - the name change came shortly after the Enron debacle, I'm sure you will recall. The bulk of the work that I witnessed at Thames Water was to do with the creation of a call centre in Swindon (one of the first of this new idea) which was to be supported by the creation of an immense set of computerised information systems. A significant, yet implicit, part of this new ideology was the belief that it was better to remove knowledge from local human beings, and place it in machines.

I think it would be easy to read this as an attempt to lay blame and seek retribution. I'm sure I am susceptible to that, at least as much as anyone else. But actually I think that this is precisely the problem. It is only just dawning on me, after all these years of study, analysis and consideration, that we as a country (at least) are well on the way to Popper's Nightmare in so far as a certain process of centralisation has been steadily ongoing in so many different areas of our life for at least 25 years - and is accompanied by the rise of a rather ridiculous morality .

The creation of the HPC is very much part of this process, and even with the best will in the world and the greatest minds in the Kingdom, it would be difficult for anyone to overcome the pressure that has been building up over decades which aims to produce intelligent centralised systems based on a pernicious idea, and at the expense of decentralised, real, local, loyal (at least they used to be) human subjects.

Small wonder it is Government Minister's who are so interested in Denmark's Social Workers, or that this counts at mainstream morning national news.