Meritocracy and the Start Up Party
Northcote-Trevelyan, Cyclical History and the Commissioning State
This article explores the differences between the stated ambitions of ‘The Start Up Party’ and the Meritocratic platform, largely for the benefit of Meritocrats, it is not intended to be a critique, let alone a refutation, of the Start Up Party about which there is a lot of good to be said. We conclude that, on every issue except the vast lockdown dubloons stolen by the old people, Dominic Cummings knows more about how governments work and politics happens than we do. This is merely a gentle exercise of spiritual delineation.
A new trend in Cummings’s thought, since 2023, has been the idea that the Northcote-Trevelyan Report signalled the beginning of ‘the Blob’ and the end of the British Empire. For those who don’t know, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report established the rudiments of a professional civil service, recruited by examination, in the United Kingdom. It was modelled partially on Macaulay’s scheme for reforming the Indian colonial government and backed by a number of intellectuals including Thomas Carlyle (an interesting one for Moldbuggians who oppose ‘Chinese’ innovations). Cummings identifies Northcote-Trevelyan with the failures he has exhaustively documented in the modern British civil service; more significantly, he has broadened this into a critique of ‘self-selecting ruling classes’. This echoes, perhaps unintentionally, much of the language of Kemi Badenoch’s ghastly ‘Future of Conservatism’ paper which locates “bureaucrats” as agents of wokeness. A more fair comparison to what we hope are the man’s intentions is to the planned D.O.G.E of the Trump admin, and nascent credos of ‘start up government’. Cummings recommends a mixture of shutting down, restructuring and establishing new government agencies. In the past, he has relied upon outsourcing crucial government work to people he knows in the private sector, such as Marc Warner’s A.I talent firm, Faculty, receiving a number of COVID-19 contracts in 2020.
I, personally, like the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. I admire the ambition to create a master-class recruited entirely on talent, even if it did not work in practice for reasons we shall read about here. All societies, ever, are governed by ‘self-selecting elites’, the question is whether or not those elites are recruited by birth or by aptitude. I suspect much of Cummings’s argument comes from a book, published a few years ago, which blasted Northcote-Trevelyan for not including enough chippy northerners and vaguely insinuated the modern-day civil service’s paucity of Black and Brown Bodies traced back to wily old Trev’s famine-raising tricks. It is, as has been mentioned, congenial to appropriation by the lowest sort of Torybrain such as Badenoch’s crusade against ‘bureaucracy’. We like elites, because we are elite. This does not change the fact that the current civil service as it presently exists must be abolished. What ought to be corrected is A) the idea that ‘permanent elites’ are the cause of British decline B) selection by exam is the reason the civil service is dysfunctional.
How much of 19th century British decline was the result of the N-T Civil Service? Cummings cites a letter from Lord Palmerstone bemoaning that a permanent civil service would never work in England. Palmerston did not oppose the permanent civil service in India. The Indian service, with a tiny, ultra-elite cadre of men selected by examination, successfully governed a subcontinent for almost a century; Cummings, presumably, does not think that the Indian civil service was spectacularly incompetent at things like building railways and preventing criminal uprisings. Palmerstone, it should also be noted, does not say that a permanent civil service would fail in Europe: where, indeed, Napoleon had used them to great effect. What we see, then, is Palmerstone identifying an incompatibility between civil service establishment and British mores of cabinet governance and Parliamentary sovereignty. The British civil service does not, and did not, work because civil servants have no direct link to the legislature and must contend with a judiciary founded upon precedent. If the mandarins empowered by Northcote Trevelyan had, as they were in India, been able to enact and impose regulations without the pesky business of common law courts, the outcome would’ve been different. It is Democracy which is the cause of Western decline, Democracy is the difference between Britain in 1790 and Britain in 1850. Provided that millions of unqualified people can influence politics, you will never achieve Renaissance.
How was England administered before Northcote-Trevelyan? Much of administration in Pitt’s England was done via ‘Placemen’, a Placeman was a pejorative term for an M.P who held a civil service position as a reward for their loyalty; and vis-versa, important officials were often elected as M.Ps to influence legislation. The placeman system worked because Parliament was controlled by a small group of landowners who could personally advance the careers of Talented Young Men. The substantial difference between the Britain of 1860 and the Britain of 1790 is the existence of representative government (i.e: “Democracy”). The Reform Act of 1830 made the earlier Pittite system impossible to recreate, as M.Ps were no longer territorial magnates chosen by patronage but by cheesemongers motivated, as all Democracies are, by confused moral ideas. Party politics, as we understand them, did not exist in Pitt’s England; what existed under that term were the followings of certain individuals like Charles James Fox, Lord North or Pitt himself. With the beginnings of democracy, ideology arrives on the scene, any direct appointment of officials by a Democracy will reflect ideological bias as much as competence, if competence is considered at all.
Consider, for example, the prosecution of Warren Hastings in 1788, this occurred before the Reform Act but was the result of unusually ideological politics for the time, with nominal ‘Whigs’ like Burke joining in with Foxites on crude moralistic grounds. Hastings was the embodiment of Start-Up Government in the 18th century. He single-handedly brought order to the anarchy of EIC Bengal, restored the Treasury, ended famine and fought a successful war against the French. We do not even have to go back that far in History. Look at President Trump’s problems appointing reform-minded individuals to cabinet posts in the face of an intransigent party. Granted, the British system, if you scrapped the civil service, would allow a P.M to make appointments with zero Parliamentary consultation; how long this situation would last two decades into a politicised civil service leads us onto speculation about The Start-Up Party’s durability.
The Start-Up Party aims to seize power, rule for fifteen years and then, in Cummings’s own words ‘abolish itself’. This means that whatever it does to the political system will be inherited by someone else. The historical norm, in Britain and elsewhere, is for these jobs to be given to friends and political allies of the administration. Inevitably, these networks solidify into entrenched, unmeritocratic, elites which make for a poor track record when it comes to responding effectively to challenges. There is a lot of similarity between what TSP proposes and the 2010 IFG report on ‘the commissioning state’, which called for the civil service to be reduced, in effect, purely to procurement and accounts; with all other government work contracted out to start-ups. This then begs the question, why not simply have the start-ups run the country? Why have a Prime Minister and a Parliament? Indeed, why not allow the start-ups to compete with each other to design, and implement, policies; with the start-up fulfilling the most contracts becoming the new commissioner? Why persist in the delusion, in that case, that these are limited companies? Instead, give all individuals who have passed certain qualifications status as a kind of modern nobility, free to bid for these contracts, and limit participation in government to this class. This is, after all, what Faculty A.I did with A.I researchers.