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January 4, 2009
Colin Leys in The Cynical State in Socialist Register (Jan 2007) says:
Governments have always lied. They naturally deny it, even long after it is abundantly clear that they have lied, trailing multiple red herrings, dismissing inconvenient evidence, implying that there is counter-evidence they are not free to produce. When a lie can no longer be credibly denied it is justified, usually by an appeal to the national interest. Governments of modern representative democracies are no different, even if they are more liable than dictators to be exposed. Half-truths and outright lies are routinely told. Facts are routinely concealed. Files are unaccountably lost. Tapes are mysteriously erased. Democratic checks and balances are rarely effective and the public’s collective memory is short.
After mentioning various British examples, which he says, could be replicated for almost any field of public policy in contemporary Britain, he adds that these examples illustrate:
the emergence of a new, neoliberal policy regime that is more brazenly willing to dissemble, more indifferent to evidence, more aggressive towards critics and distinctly less accountable – to the point of being virtually unaccountable – than ever before..... When this new policy regime is properly understood the lies about Iraq no longer appear as a special case, but only as a special dimension of a general one. Cynicism, we realize, is a necessary condition of neoliberal democracy.
Leys argues that a neo-liberal regime means that major economic policies are made in conformity with an overall agenda set by transnational corporations and the international and regional agencies they dominate. These global market policies involve adapting the national economy and socio-economic institutions (fiscal policy, aid to industry, education, training, the health and safety and labour market regulation, etc.) to compete successfully in the global marketplace. Once neoliberal globalization had been accomplished, the scope for radical policy-making was drastically narrowed.
In this regime the public service has been reorganized so that it no longer speaks truth to power through dispassionate advice and careful argument. What is looked for is a capacity for vigorous implementation of the government's policy ideas. A can do entrepreneurial type. So where does policy advice come from?
It is less from think tanks and more from the prime minister’s ‘senior’ policy advisers and the employment in key civil service posts of senior staff on secondment from the private sector with the circulation of personnel between the civil service and the private sector has become commonplace
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