Trust the locals

摘要

Whenever Britain is diagnosed as illgoverned the same remedy is proposed: split up the mammoth bureaucracies in Whitehall, the wide street that runs from Parliament to Trafalgar Square and is still haunted by the ghosts of the men in bowler hats who built the welfare state from their offices there. Functions move from one department to another, in the hope of conjuring up better co-ordination across government. Then something new goes wrong, and the process starts again. John Reid, the home secretary, has been at this recently, arguing that his clumsy department would make a better job of keeping track of the miscreants who keep escaping from its databases and on to the front pages of newspapers if it were split into two.