Nelson was in the BRITISH navy.

It’s the casual and consistent failure to recognise that there is, or ever was, a difference between that and English that is more of a “dagger to the heart” of the Union than any home rule movement within the UK.

reply: It was the UK navy, as Ireland had joined the Union. However, Nelson posted his famous signal “England expects…”, revealing how he saw it as the time, which is why I used the language I did. I always refer to the modern navy as the British navy, although to be correct we should call it the UK navy.

This is certainly true in some workplaces, in both the public and private sectors, but not in others. Continuing with the military analogy I guess that you could equate employees that show hostility to the official line as ‘rash generals’.

Top-down targets afflict both the public and private sectors to some extent. However in the public sector a surprising number of targets are set lower down the food chain in ’service plans’.

Because of the way public finance works public sector organisations spend a lot of money promoting their agenda and providing ‘pots’ of funding to other public sector organisations that help to promote their agenda (for example central government departments and quangos award funding to local authorities). This is how a lot of the targets get into the service plans.

Because so many central government departments and quangos are removed from the action they have to get local authority officers to do their work on the ground. The local authorities lap up the cash like anyone would and serve the agenda of the whitehall/the quangos.

A good example is the unauthorised unlocking of mobile phones. You see market stalls and shops openly offering to do this, even though it is a criminal offence under the Communciations Act to do so. OFCOM do not employ ‘footsoldiers’ and have better things to do regarding competion issues anyway. Local Authorities are not authorised to enforce the Communications Act hence no one is ever punished for carrying out this black market activity openly and in public.

The way a lot of public services operate would be akin to Nelson’s ship not leaving port. Because the decision makers are removed from the nitty gritty reality, and no one on the ground wants to come across as being the proverbial ‘rash general’ that can’t be trusted to follow orders, masses of money is spent on a long and bureaucratic process of getting the orders and the funding from the Admiral to the gunners so to speak.

The electorate are left standed on civvy street blissfully unaware of what is happening out at sea. If the French Navy appears on the horizon, no one dares deviate from the service plan because missed targets equal less funding next year. The French Navy would have been allowed to dock at Plymouth and march ashore if the Royal Navy functioned the same way as ‘public services’ do. They would have been too busy meeting their annual targets for nautical miles to have stood around in the English channel wasting cannonballs.

I don’t think the problem stems from skills and purpose not being there. I believe you’ve already stated the real problem indirectly - a lack of the trust and empowerment which Barham gave to Nelson and Nelson to his Captains.

In my opinion, where there are those leaders who actually have knowledge, wisdom, experience or ability, at any level in all government organisations including public services, they’re not permitted to use any of them. This is because every action, every decision, every budget, every statement is driven from the top down by a government obsessed with total state control. They provide steadily proliferating and ever-more restrictive regulations, and endless numbers of targets, which must be met and proved to have been met. Everything is micromanaged from the centre, with no room for deviation or reaction/adaptation to circumstances.

This all contributes to preventing independent thought, promoting a culture of absolute conformity (or at least one where the figures are fiddled to make it appear so), and ensuring exact adherence to central government provisos. Which means that everything is run according to the government’s incompetence and ignorance, with no relevance whatsoever to anything that happens in the real world.

Of course, one could cynically argue that those who have knowledge, wisdom, experience and ability tend not to get promoted to leadership positions, because they’re more likely to take decisions that actually make sense, rather than those which slavishly agree with the government’s prescriptive and proscriptive desires.

Reply: I agree that the absence of responsibility and the lack of motivation go together