The new Labour government’s mantra is for ‘Growth, Growth, Growth’ in the UK economy but, according to the ONS, such positive growth has yet to appear.
Over the same period, however, significant negative growth has already occurred in both Civil Service numbers and taxes on businesses and farmers whilst even winter benefits for many pensioners have been cut.
Such action does not seem to us to encourage widespread economic growth and optimism.
But what do others think?
Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the British author and historian of ‘Parkinson’s Law’ fame, once explained that Civil Service officials want to multiply subordinates and ‘make work’ for each other.
Consider his explanation for Civil Service ‘job proliferation’:
- Civil servant A believes himself to be overworked
- He could resign, but won’t
- He could ask to split his workload with one other, B, but B would then be on his own level and become a rival for promotion when his boss M retires
- So A demands the assistance of subordinates C and D, each kept in order by fear of the other’s promotion
- Thus set in competition, C and D create work with great intensity until C complains to A of overwork
- Happily A permits C to appoint two assistants, E and F
- He also does the same for D, who appoints G and H
- Thus A now finds himself sitting at the top of a department of seven
- What does he do?
- Well, he has to manage the other six:
- Should G go on leave, even if he’s not strictly entitled to it
- What about E’s application for a transfer to the Ministry of Pensions
- And the ticklish situation that has arisen on account of D falling in love with a married typist
- In addition, he has to read through the letters written by F
- And delete the fussy paragraphs added by C and H
- He corrects their English and finally produces the same letter that would have been sent out some time previously had C and H never been born
- And so it goes on
- Eventually A’s toils end for the day
- It’s late in the evening, he turns off the lights and finally quits the office to begin the long commute home to Ealing
- He’s one of the last to leave
- Late hours, like grey hairs, are the penalties of success!
Parkinson concluded: “In the Civil Service, far more people now take far longer to produce the same result – no one has been idle – all have done their best”
One wonders whether things have changed much since he wrote the above many years ago?