All bureaucracies are bad, but the EC is a federalising behemoth

Antony Jay

Over the years I have identified 10 principle rules of bureaucratic survival:

Spread responsibility. Ensure that any potentially wrong decision is taken by more than one person - preferably by a large committee so that it cannot be pinned on you.
Consult Widely. Most opposition comes from colleagues, departments or outside bodies who resent exclusion, so include them all. It takes a lot of time but it does not have to be authorised by the treasury.
Keep it a secret. If people don't know what you are doing, they don't know what you are doing wrong. Nothing damages a bureaucratic career more than a public outcry, so secrecy is vital. This extends to public documents. Avoid anything specific and stick to impenetrable abstract generalities.
Cover all activities for which you are responsible with rigid rules and procedures. So long as you can show you followed the rules and kept to established practice, you are in the clear. Once you make exceptions or use your common sense, you are in uncharted territory.
In any situation where there is a possibility of blame, put everything on paper to show that the blame is not yours.
Avoid Risk. The rewards for success are immeasurably smaller than the penalties for failure.
Avoid changes, innovation and hurry. Not just because of the extra work, but because of the opportunities for error once you loose the protection of a precedent. Milton Friedman's first rule of bureaucracy is: "The only feasible way of doing anything is the way it is being done." And avoid hurry, because, if things are done quickly, they are much more likely to be done wrong.
Avoid measurable standards. If there are objective criteria for your success, people may be able to prove you have failed. By all means impose them on others, but demonstrate how none of them are applicable to you.
Keep expanding. Put up proposals that require more staff, larger premises and bigger budgets. At the best this will make you more important and powerful in the system. At the worst, it should at least insure the avoidance of cuts. Whatever happens, never underspend your budget, or it will be reduced next year.
Put all duties and responsibilities on others - your colleagues, other departments, outside bodies and the general public. Wherever else the buck stops, never let it be here.
As I have come to understand the bureaucratic culture more clearly, so my horror of it has grown. Not a horror of bureaucrats - I have liked most of the ones I have got to know, and most of them are doing their best within the system. It is the system itself that is the evil.
When I was growing up in the 1940's and 1950's, there was a general feeling that, if you left things to the government, they might be done slowly, sometimes inefficiently, but always in the public interest. The truth, I now see, is very different: the public interest is not an objective, but a constraint. Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Minister are driven by their institutionalised hopes and fears, and the public interest is very low on the agenda of either. If Humphrey is perceived to be acting against it, he will be in trouble; if Jim can be perceived as acting against for it, he will prosper; that is why so much of a ministers time is devoted to creating the desired public perception. But the idea that the first and only desire of both of them is to server the public good is a joke that we exploited for 38 episodes.

Time and again during the writing of the series, we found that the prime motivation for Jim's conflict with Humphrey was the fear of the tabloid headlines, followed by questions in the house, parliamentary outrage and possibly demands for resignation. Equally, one of Humphrey's most powerful levers on Jim was the suggestion of how damagingly his proposed action might be portrayed in the press. Bureaucracy is the cancer in the body politic; voters, Parliament and the press are the immune system.

So neither Jim Hacker nor Sir Humphrey was the villain of Yes, Minister; indeed, Jonathan Lynn and I both felt that, in their position, we would probably have behaved exactly as they did. The villain was the system - the great tyrant Bureaucracy, which shaped their attitudes and drove their actions. That is why I was so deeply suspicious of Brussels even from the earliest days, when, like most of my fellow "Yes" voters, I though it was there to promote free trade in Europe, which I favoured. But as it has become clear that its purpose is a political union in a federal Europe, my suspicion has turned to horror.

I have thought - I still think - that Britains bureaucracy is a menace, but the Brussels bureaucracy is a nightmare. If a group of brilliant bureaucrats had tried to devise the perfect system to maximise their power and perks, and minimise their accountability, I do not think they could have achieved anything even to approach the European Commission. It has benefits to make any national bureaucracy gasp with admiration:

Political "control" is spread over 15 different countries, speaking 11 different languages.
There is no government party, and no Europe-wide political parties elected on published manifestos.
Constituencies are so vast (approximately 250,000 voters) that few people know who their MEPs are and even fewer know what they do. Under PR, they do not even know who their MEP is after they have voted.
Reaching agreement with 15 countries is so difficult that policy is always a compromise drafted by the bureaucracy.
Allmost all initiatives are conceived, or at least hatched, within the bureaucracy.
National politicians all have their own departments to run at home and have time only for the minimum number of items. Moreover, each represents only one 15th of the political group.
Divergencies in the cultural and linguistic base create confusion and misunderstanding between member states politicians that bureaucrats can exploit wonderfully.
The departments of government are run not by elected ministers hoping for re-election, but by appointed commissioners who never need votes.
The vast wealth of the EC enables it to buy the co-operation of bureaucrats in member states, by the funds it adds to their budgets and the perks of travel and entertainment. If can buy the acquiescence of the politicians by allocating EC funds to their countries and by "jobs for the boys". This is quite apart from bribery and corruption.
the language difference means that there is no Europe-wide press to publicise scandals, and focus and unify electoral sentiment across the EU.
The combination of massive taxation revenues and almost non-existent democratic control has of course fuelled an enormous gravy train. But this is almost beside the point. What we discovered while writing Yes, Minister was that bureaucracies are not passive instruments. They actively create their own agenda. The contrast between party manifesto commitments and the Bills that finally come before the Commons represent the triumph of ministry policy over ministers' policy. In party terms, the ministers more or less balance out, with Left-wing Health, Education and Employment to set against the Right-wing Defence, Trade and Home Office. But there is no such balance in Brussels. All 19 directorates, all 15,000 bureaucrats, are driving relentlessly towards a federal Europe. And if they can achieve a unified currency, nothing will stop them. It will of course fall apart eventually, but the damage will be incalculable.
There is no point in trying to replace the present incumbents with "better" people; the Commission may be a salon des refuses, and the parliament a wilderness of manques, but, even if they were political and administrative geniuses, they could not defeat the system. We have harnessed a political Frankenstein to a fiscal Gargantua, and set them to work in the Tower of Babel under the ultimate control of Macavity. The result is a bureaucratic empire with no Emperor, which could all to easily come under the gradual and progressive control of a single nation. Whether it does or not, it is not an empire of which I want to see Britain become a province.

Antony Jay, writing in the Daily Telegraph, June 17 1999