COVID UK and NO DEAL BREXIT – two problems, one common cause

Covid UK

We face a coronavirus pandemic with a Government focused on political targets rather than the outcome we need.  It’s clear that

• -      The Government wanted at all costs to avoid damaging headlines of an overwhelmed NHS, but were not focused on minimising deaths (they weren’t even measuring overall deaths)
• -      The testing targets have always been about the headline number of tests “done” (or sent out), rather than on what tests were needed
• -      Since the tracing app has so far failed, the Government aimed for an arbitrary target around quantity (number of tracers) rather than quality (people trained and supervised. to do the job that was needed

This is explored further in these links

https://viewdelta.blogspot.com/2020/05/what-can-project-management-tell-us.html

https://viewdelta.blogspot.com/2020/05/why-does-uk-government-require-rigour.html

If you aim for political targets that are not in themselves beneficial then you will take the wrong decisions.

Brexit

That sentence above applies to Covid and to Brexit. The original Leave campaign dangled illusory and contradictory and in some cases insubstantial targets such as “Take Back Control” and more recently “Get Brexit done”

Now anyone who has tackled lesson 1 in Commercial Programme Management understands that a business change is “done” when the projects are completed and the business is successfully operating to the new arrangements.

Is Brexit “Done”? If you wanted to move house and by 31^st January you had signed a contract to sell your existing home but had no idea where you were moving to, would you say you had “Got House Move Done”? Oh, you signed a contract, sure, and set in motion a ticking clock taking you ruthlessly towards the point that your short-sightedness would become much more apparent, assuming that you still want somewhere to live in 2021. But there is nothing to celebrate in the fact that you decisively burned your boats; any fool can do that.

So there is the common factor – a lack of business experience and commercial rigour at the heart of government, coupled with an unwillingness to learn– that is why we have meaningless political targets, not targets that benefit the population.

Without fixing that, we will not achieve any Brexit that is anything other than disastrous, not in 7 months, not in 77 months

What is needed?

Now you may imagine that this problem is not new – that politicians always set political targets.

In its current form the problem is new, for two reasons.

I have seen the impact of politicians and Civil Servants working together. Part of the Civil Service role is to apply some rigour . to whatever beneficial outcome the Government wants. What are the two problems with this now:

1.    There are not any beneficial outcomes with Brexit, particularly not with No Deal, and so morale in the Civil Service degrades to “we’ll do what you ask, even though…” I heard a Civil Servant at a “Christians in Politics” meeting make an impassioned plea (there was a Government junior Minister present) for a return to the day when evidence mattered.

2.    Dominic Cummings role is partly to neutralise the Civil Service, to quieten the voice of reason, in the name of “getting things done”. It’s interesting that even Cummings doesn’t see his role as extending into 2021 and achieving any of the benefits of Brexit that one might expect Brexiteers to look forward to; once he had brought about a NoDeal and done the damage and the disaster capitalists can bank their profits and enjoy the fire sale of UK businesses and the NHS, Dom’s job is done. At that point, we can assume that Brexit will be “done”, and the fact of that belief demonstrates that there are no benefits to Brexit – if there were, Brexit would not be “done” until those benefits were  achieved.

One crumb of hope

CummingsGate has exposed Cummings’ deceitful and elitist character, to enormous disapproval of the public and of MPs of all Parties, and Cummings should be sacked in June.

This has also exposed the hypocrisy of the senior Cabinet Ministers, and crucially has exposed it to all the Tory backbench MPs.

Dennis Skinner was once reprimanded for saying “Half the members opposite are crooks” and was told to take it back. He agreed, and declared “Half the members opposite are not crooks”.
We need Tory MPs to see clearly through the emperor’s clothes. If we can work with them – half of them would do - , we could at least have a new Government. And then, at least, fewer of us would die.