BY STEWART SLATER

What links at least 14 parents in Cheshire, 12 people in Clapham, over 900 sub-postmasters, Andrew Malkinson and Brianna Ghey?

They have all been revealed, since the middle of last year, to have suffered significant harm at the hands of the British state.

The management of the Countess of Chester Hospital ignored suspicions about Lucy Letby, and even forced the consultants who raised them to send her a letter of apology. The suspect in the Clapham alkali attack, some of whose victims face “life-changing” injuries, is an asylum seeker granted leave to remain following two failed applications and a conviction for sexual assault. The failings of the Horizon system and the Post Office are well documented. Andrew Malkinson’s conviction for rape was quashed after 16 years following a prosecution brought by the police who knew at the time that he had none of the characteristics mentioned by the victim and who learned in 2009 that another man’s DNA had been found on her body. The pre-sentencing hearing for Brianna Ghey’s murderers revealed that one of them had been moved to a new school after spiking another child with cannabis and was at liberty despite having already attempted to poison her eventual victim.

That is the best part of 1000 people who, we have learned in just the past six months, have suffered because the agents of state failed to do their jobs. They are, of course, only the high profile ones. Those whose cases, like the postmasters, have attracted media attention. There are, no doubt others, victims of negligence or disinterest, whose lives have been altered or shortened by the failings of those in authority.  For, scratch hard enough at any scandal, and it becomes clear that it would not have become a scandal if only someone had done what the tax-payer pays them to do.

Those who read my pieces with a regularity they do not deserve will have twigged my fondness for the John Buchan quote, “The methods of Parliament – pardon me – would disgrace any board of directors.” But the problem is, for once, not the politicians. It was not the Secretary of State who ordered the consultants to apologise, it was a functionary in the hospital. It was not James Cleverly who granted the Clapham suspect asylum, it was a functionary in the system. It was not Gillian Keegan who failed to safeguard Brianna Ghey, it was the functionaries in the school and the local council. In each case, the nameless bureaucrats were not asked to go above and beyond, not to work any more than their 9-5, they were merely asked to do their jobs and act in the interests of those who pay them. And every time they failed.

In each case, there will be inquiries. In each case, lessons will be learned. And in each case, nothing will change. Because the system will roll on, staffed by the incompetent and the unaccountable, whose only mission is to get to the end of the day and ensure the survival of the system which pays them.

Last weekend, the Shadow Housing Minister announced a plan that directors of estate agents should be forced to have at least an undergraduate degree. In what, he did not specify but presumably the University of South-West East Anglia is currently firing up its Department of Estate Agent Studies in readiness. Why a degree is necessary to let flats to students but not, say, run BP is not immediately obvious, but there we are.

The proposer of the bill, Matthew Pennycook has the normal CV of the political class. Elite education (having attended one of the same institutions, my reaction after thinking, “some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual can believe them”, was a soul-gripping sense of shame which, like Lady Macbeth, despite all my efforts, I have been unable to expunge) following a succession of roles in the voluntary and charitable sectors and stints working for MPs. At no point does he appear to have done anything which exposed the predictions of his thinking to any sort of real world check, nor has he ever, it seems, been forced to live with the consequences of his ideas. He has bounced from position to position and decided from his Olympian heights that he knows how the world should be organised.

In this he is, of course, not alone. Very few current politicians are able to show any track record of real world achievement. But, having run nothing, they have conceived the belief that they should run everything. There is no-one on the opposition front bench who has any track record in investment, but until recently, they were planning a £28bn green investment plan (they may still be – the messaging is, let us say, confused). Having never run any part of industry, they believe themselves ideally placed to discern the optimal “industrial strategy”. If, with no medical training, a friend offered to take care of our by-pass operation, saying “How hard can it be?” we would, almost certainly, pass on his kind offer. Yet it is just that proposal our politicians offer us.

Freedom dictates that anyone who chooses would be allowed to run for Parliament, but those who do so the most, are increasingly those who should do so the least. Those whose egos are writing cheques the tax-payer will, ultimately be unable to pay. Those who, backed by nothing more than self-confidence bordering on self-delusion, believe they can discover by pure thought the optimal way of organising a society of almost 70mn souls, each with their own beliefs, needs and desires, all of which interact with each other in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways.

Other societies have taken care of things rather differently. Rome had its cursus honorum. Aspirants to high office would serve in the military which would give them the right to stand for quaestor – an administrative post often involving financial administration. They could then run to be an aedile, those who had responsibility for maintaining public buildings and the city’s water and food supply. And so on and so on until the consulship. At each stage, the public were able to pass judgement on the competence of those who would rule them, and, if many fell by the way-side, the electorate could at least be reasonably certain that those at the top were up to the job, that they could both enact their policies and that they would bear the fruit promised. Having had a good tutor, attended one of the “finishing schools” which functioned as the equivalents of university and really wanting the job was not, in itself, enough.

Instead, we have the worst of all possible worlds, a country run by a political class which has never run anything, relying on an administrative class which daily shows itself incapable of administration to implement policies which have never been tested outside a seminar. Is it any wonder the country is ….ed? Or, to those less jaundiced and more “Labour-curious” than I, if you like Labour’s policies (or at least today’s version of them) why do you think the British state will be able to enact them?

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