It seems an age since Christmas, and no time at all since I last filled the central heating tank four months before that. It is also three weeks since I sent the Inland Revenue their annual tithe.
Having closed the business, paperwork has decreased. In any case they have automated and computerised both VAT and Tax returns thus making life easier for themselves, if not for us. I suppose any day now we shall hear of civil servants being made redundant albeit, on terms better than the millions once employed in British Manufacturing; an industry which is but a frail shadow of what it was when I joined in 1954.
In the late eighteenth century, the aristocracy and commercial classes had houses and estates that employed huge numbers of Domestic Servants, and so when the elite started to lead the Nation State they employed many of their own best employees as Public Servants.
This nascent bureaucracy grew to take on a life of its own. As The full time Civil Service became better educated in the art of governance, they began the process of writing the rules of governance in ways that perpetuated work for their own species,
Mischievously, I will suggest that they wrote the rules to better control their Masters, the Members of Parliament.
As I became more alert to the ways of the world, I realised that the larger an organisation becomes, the greater the chance that its bureaucratic processes emphasise self-preservation, to the point where internal vested interests make significant change impossible!
Broadly speaking the Western Democratic system is, that politicians prepare manifestoes to inform the public of their direction of travel prior to a vote.
If, however, as now, it is clear to the Civil Service that MPs are incapable or disinclined to become masters of their brief (Job) I can understand a drift of power from the elected person to the unelected one.
The growth of Quangos is, for me, proof of the thesis that MPs are now inadequate for the job and so have left policy detail to the Civil Service or a suitable Quango. They then busy themselves with constituency work or chasing the last fashion or fad to hit Social Media or TV screen.
To change this situation, there will need to be external pressures of some intensity.
Because my work has kept me in touch with what is happening throughout Europe, it sensed for some years that radical political, even constitutional change will occur in Germany, France, Spain and Italy before it occurs in Britain. I hope here it will be within the current electoral system.
Wider that just politics, the same processes of political/bureaucratic arteriosclerosis can be seen in the banks, insurance companies and even the church.
These follow the same processes to cut costs and the services to us, whilst retaining the systems that provide purpose and opportunity for headquarter staff, enough to keep them busy and motivated.
The Church is now also acting like the Civil Service in the sense that it is easier for the bean counters to count itemised costs, than it is to calculate the costs of the opportunity lost by not doing what the Gospel promised.
In the case of the Church, I say ‘Oh Ye of little faith. Read Mark 16ff, And to the politicians I say, “Trust the British People whom you represent and not your own man or woman – made, ‘idol’.
Should any reader now feel down at heart with the present situation in Western Christendom, I say. Take heart.
The War between Hope and Despair between Life and Death and between the Nihilism (Nothingness) of materialism and our Immortality, created as we are Imago Die, (in the image of God) has already been won.
Change is in the air.
And, as the Dentist peered into my mouth and sang, “ Change and decay in all around I see”, I continued, ‘’Oh thou who changest not, Abide in me”
View from the Pew 