The State of the British State

It never fails to amaze me how ignorant people are about the state. George Osborne and his Tory Party continually argue that the state is far too big and must be reduced, and continually portray the state as a bad thing. Karl Popper famously defined the state as 'a necessary evil that must not be allowed to grow greater than is absolutely necessary.' This is the lamentable level of political discourse in this sorry country today. How these people get into government, or even manage to find employment of any kind is a complete mystery.

The state is an administrative concept. It is the professional body of people who operate the day-to-day administration of the country and who are charged with implementing government policy at both national and local level. The state is not a thing with an existence independent of the people who make it up. If the state is evil as Popper says, then its evil is a reflection of the people who compose it and define its structures and strategies. The state cannot be evil, only people can be evil. The people who administer the state may be evil and may do evil things, but the state is simply a reflection of the personnel who design and administer it. Therefore, state agencies and state personnel can do evil things and utilise the state apparatus for their own agenda. However, as a result, if we wish it to, the state can be equally altruistic and beneficial, it can do good things if the people who determine its policies desire it to do so, it can have a new and different agenda.

If the present state is too big, then it is Osborne and his Tory cronies who have made it so, because the size, structure and functions of the state is determined by the government of the day. So, its no use simply blaming the state for all of our ills, we must blame the people who determine the policies that the state is implementing and administering. The real problem with the British state is that the personnel who compose it and administer it are all committed to the neoliberal nonsense that emanates from Westminster. They are bureaucrats with little intelligence and no imagination. Erich Schumacher made the wise observation that people who work in large bureaucratic organisations lose the ability for independent thought, and he was spot on. The British state is peopled with automatons who obey their masters voices with no thought other than their own careers.

What is striking about Popper's observations on the state is that, although he concludes that the state is evil, he still considers it necessary. That is a peculiar conclusion, I personally could not endorse as a necessity anything I considered as evil. The state, any state in any nation, is a necessary reflection of the human social nature. Human social living requires regulation and administration. However, the structure and functions of such administration can take whatever form the inhabitants of the country wish it to be. I personally believe that the nature and form of the state in modern Britain is indeed doing evil things, but that is as a result of being directed and administered by evil people, operating from a deeply evil set of ideological beliefs. That can change, but not under the present Westminster system of government, or through any of the Westminster parties. That is why it is a moral imperative that Scotland votes for independence this September, you have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat