BY STEWART SLATER

“When all is said, we are ruled by the amateurs and the second rate. The methods of our departments would bring any private firm to bankruptcy. The methods of Parliament – pardon me – would disgrace any board of directors.” A sentiment with which, I am sure, we can all agree. For the feeling stalks the land that we are poorly governed and the lack of any noticeable enthusiasm for Labour suggests that this is blamed by the man in the street on the governing class, not merely the government.

It is not, however, just that we are badly governed, but that we are worse governed than we were before. Our current malaise is, we think, a symptom of decline. Things were better in the past. Government was better in the past. We were better in the past.

But such thinking is not new. The Greek poet Hesiod, who vies with Homer for the earliest work in the Western canon, saw his own times as the Iron Age, markedly inferior to the Gold, Silver, Bronze and Heroic Ages which had preceded it. Providing, in his Theogony, the first account of Tartarus, both the region of the underworld in which the wicked are punished, and the god in charge of it, we can say that, pretty much as soon as Man invented Hell, he decided that society was headed there in a handcart.

Such a long-lasting history should make us skeptical of narratives of decline. Every age appears to believe it is poorly governed, and harks back to some mythical Golden Age in the past (paradoxically, every generation also believes itself cleverer than its forebears). The quote at the start of this article may seem plausible today, but it also seemed plausible to John Buchan, when he gave it to one of his characters in 1916 (just before he was appointed the government’s Director of Information, and a year after his adoption as the Unionist candidate for Peebles and Selkirk).

In every generation, a smattering of the flawed and foolish reach positions of eminence. The system may have worked when it prevented Paula Vennells from becoming Bishop of London, but it manifestly failed  in 1724 when Lancelot Blackburne became Archbishop of York despite being widely believed to have been a pirate and to have dug a tunnel between the Deanery and a canon’s house so he could “sport” with the canon’s wife while Dean of Exeter.

Mention of the country’s current bête noir brings us, of course, to the Post Office scandal which is today’s emblem of the decline in standards in public life. Another will, no doubt, be along shortly. That it is easy to say that such things would not have happened in the past has not prevented many from doing so, the seductive myth of a past peopled by upstanding public servants of Olympian competence once more raising its head. There is something, we assume, uniquely modern about the scandal which means that it could never have happened in an earlier, Golden Age of British governance. Only contemporary Brits could pull off the necessary mix of incompetence and lack of feeling which resulted in over 900 postmasters being wrongfully prosecuted.

This is, however, to do ourselves a disservice. If organs of the British state have been incapable and uncaring recently, the same is true throughout history. The Victorians may seem to mark a high point in British abilities, but the period also saw such disasters as the First Afghan War, the potato famine in Ireland and the Tay Bridge disaster. Every Flashman novel reveals some storied Imperial panjandrum to have been mad or bad and, certainly for the hero, dangerous to know.

AJP Taylor may have been striving more for rhetorical effect than strict accuracy when he wrote, “Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman.” but it is useful to ask whether a scandal such as Horizon could have occurred in that halcyon period. The answer is, of course, no.

For the issue is uniquely modern not in that modern Britons are uniquely fallen but in that it is, at heart, a software problem. Each of AJP Taylor’s post masters would have compiled their accounts by hand and sent them to a regional office. Horizon took data from every post office. Designed to reduce benefit fraud and improve efficiency, it was well intentioned, but it also created a pinch point where previously none had existed. If a postmaster in 1914 had made a mistake in his accounts, his post office would be the only one affected. If Horizon made a mistake, as we have seen, hundreds of branches were affected. The search for efficiency meant that what would have been an isolated problem became a systemic scandal.

There is a similar issue at the heart of last week’s other big story, the bombing of the Houthis. Yemen is not, and I say this with the greatest of respect, an important country. No-one, save its residents and neighbours, particularly cares what happens there. But everyone cares about the Suez Canal, through which 12% of global trade passes because it substantially reduces sailing times between Asia and Europe. Like Horizon, it is a pinch point – when it works life is better, when it goes wrong, bad things happen. The only difference between the two is that there is an alternative to the Suez Canal (going the long way around Africa) which mitigates the impact slightly (although still adding about 0.5% to inflation) and there was not to Horizon.

Pirates have always been with us – one of Rome’s first overseas interventions was against the Illyrian Queen Teuta who was harassing shipping in the Adriatic – but they have generally been a regional problem, troublesome only to those at the ends of the shipping routes they attack. Globalisation and the efficiency gains offered by the Suez Canal make the Houthis a global problem. As with Horizon, forcing everything through one channel in the search for efficiency has created a pinch point which has magnified the impact of malign actors.

It is neither practical nor desirable to return to a past of hand-written ledgers and clippers racing round the Cape of Good Hope. Globalisation and the ongoing search for efficiencies have brought untold boons to society. But they have also brought vulnerabilities, and it is on those we must focus. The more central we make something to our activities, the more harm it can create when it goes wrong. Action against the Houthis was taken, if not at the first opportunity, then certainly reasonably early. In this it should be a model for other projects which create pinch points. To misquote Thomas Jefferson, “the Price of Efficiency is Eternal Vigilance” and we should reward those who display it.

Nor should we see efficiency as such an end in itself that we allow injustice to be done in its name. Those who allow others to be wrongfully convicted despite having evidence which would acquit them should be subject to the maximum penalty that would be imposed on the accused.

For, with great efficiency comes great risk. Absent some form of intervention, another Post Office scandal will roll around soon enough. Not because we are worse than we were, but because, just as flawed as we always were, we have created a system which allows us to do more damage.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.