Jane Field retweetledi
Excellent thread, this. Something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about…
The British state is run by people who have never been fired, never missed a number, never had a client scream at them, never stayed up until 3am working on a deal, or repricing a book because Tokyo opened badly.
They have never experienced CONSEQUENCE. Ever.
THAT is the single most important fact in British public life.
The pipeline is so uniform and mediocre it scarcely needs describing:
- School
- PPE or adjacent
- Civil Service fast stream or a Think Tank research role
- Spell as local councillor to appear “grounded,”
- Then a safe seat and a red box before 40
At no point has the market ever called them a moron.
At no point has a P&L told them their idea was shit.
The feedback loop that every private sector professional takes for granted simply does not exist in their world.
This matters because policy is NOT an essay. It IS a trade. Every regulation has a cost, every tax has a behavioural response, every intervention has second and third order consequences.
In markets, if you misread convexity you get carried out. In government, you get reshuffled to a different department.
The incentive structure could not be more perfectly designed to retain the incompetent and repel the capable.
Anyone with genuine commercial talent is earning multiples of a ministerial salary by their early thirties. So the applicant pool self selects for people for whom the title is the reward because they could never command that status where performance is measured.
The think tank ecosystem makes it worse.
IPPR, the Resolution Foundation, JRF and the rest function as ideological finishing schools and revolving doors. They produce people fluent in the language of policy who have never implemented anything. They can model a distributional impact assessment in their sleep but could not run a corner shop at profit.
This is NOT intelligence. It is pattern matching within a closed system that never tests its own assumptions because everyone in it shares the same priors.
The civil service compounds it further. The fast stream rewards generalism, rotating you through departments every 18 to 24 months to develop “breadth,” which in practice means you never develop depth.
A Treasury official who helped design a tax policy in 2019 is working on transport by the time it starts distorting behaviour in 2022. Nobody owns the outcome.
The private sector has one thing the state fundamentally lacks: a kill switch.
Bad companies go bust.
Bad traders get sacked.
The state just absorbs failure, reclassifies it as “lessons learned,” and promotes the people responsible.
The compound effect of thirty years of this is a permanent class institutionally incapable of delivering growth or even understanding why the private sector they depend on for revenue keeps shrinking under their stewardship. This is what we have, right now.
You cannot fix this with better people inside the same system. The system selects against competence, insulates against feedback, and rewards survival over performance.
Every parliament is just a fresh rotation of the same profile through the same machine expressing the same surprise when nothing improves.
We need parallel institutions to be built by the guy or gal staying up til 3am repricing the book. The risk taker. The entrepreneur.
Then we gradually phase the existing sclerotic failed structures out.
That’s how we win.
Make Britain Great Again 🇬🇧 💪
Gareth Davies@GarethDavies007
There’s been a lot of talk about how Labour ministers aren’t qualified and have little experience relevant to the position in cabinet they hold So let’s look at one such example Bridget Phillipson She was born on 19 December 1983 in Gateshead 1/5 dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…
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