Bird flu and the perils of centralisation

Town & Country Planning, March 2007

“Do you know what you’re saying?” said Georgi Malenkov, sometime deputy to the fearsome KGB boss Beria, as the Nazi armoured columns hurtled towards Moscow in 1941.  He was speaking to a senior general responsible for the city’s defence, and his reaction was extreme.  On the other hand, it is still instructive about the way highly centralised governments react to bad news.

What Malenkov meant was that Stalin had decided that the advancing German forces would be stopped some way further from the capital than that.  This information was not just worrying evidence of their military predicament, it was a direct contradiction of the government’s position.  It therefore put the bearer of the news in peril of his life.

It is a peculiar feature of highly centralised governments that these two begin to knit together in such a way that the official mind has difficulty telling which is worrying evidence of the real world, and which is simply a threat to their dignity.  Sunstance or spin: highly centralised regimes tend to blur the two.

Of course the Blair government is not quite in the same league as Stalin’s Russia, but the fatal muddle still applies.  Britain is a highly centralised state, and these same confusions tend to affect them too.

I was reminded of this as I listened to David Miliband struggling to explain why ministers were busy reassuring the public that the outbreak of bird flu at a Bernard Matthews factory farm was no threat to our health, and why we should not carrying on eating turkey.

The reason was that the scientists had told him so, he claimed, adding that we didn’t want to go back to the bad old days of ignorning scientists, as we had – apparently – during the Mad Cow Disease fiasco.

What he was forgetting here was that scientists can only give their opinion on the evidence revealed to them, and the fatal link between Bernard Matthews and the Hungarian outbreak had not been – and when it was, the cause was obvious.

He was also forgetting, or perhaps had never been told – he is young for a cabinet minister – that the same applied to the Mad Cow epidemic.  Factory farming had in fact created a serious threat to humans, but research into the link was being suppressed, and scientists who had understood it were being publicly reviled, and – as it turned out later – having their letters opened.

And so it was that, once again, Defra preferred to give the appearance of safety than to take the action required to make it safe.

Perhaps what was most staggering was that ministers seem to feel the public would believe these assurances every time, despite the fact that months, weeks and – in this case – hours later, they are revealed as completely empty.  As we all know they will be.  After a few decades, it gets to be obvious.

The result is likely to be a catastrophic collapse of confidence in the turkey industry, while Defra spends its remaining credibility to maintain confidence in the big factory farmers, and the dubious trade routes by which turkey feet zip across the continent in articulated lorry.

All that is, unfortunately, a recipe for the destruction of small-scale turkey farming.  But then, another characteristic of highly centralised governments is they don’t worry much about small business, and especially not about small farmers.

You wonder when they will learn that confidence has to go beyond these empty ministerial reassurances, which seem more insulting the more we are subjected to them.  Why should anyone who believed them about Mad Cow disease or Gulf War Syndrome or Bird Flu, believe them about the next one?

One thing I don’t quite understand is why this fatal link between centralisation and vacuity should be.  The answer, I suppose, is that these kind of blandishments don’t work at local level, because there are enough people around who know the truth.

This is the philosopher Karl Popper’s explanation too.  He meant it as a critique of totalitarian regimes, but it seems to apply to centralised ones as well.

If the system of government allows the elite to be challenged by new ideas, serious questions or indeed the truth, then it is more efficient and effective.  When those questions do not rise up to hierarchy, because they are too centralised, then government starts to make serious mistakes.

And if you doubt it, read Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad to see the horrific waste of human life caused by a clash between two totalitarian and centralised, and therefore hideously inefficient, regimes.

Centralised government is about imposing a simple, preferred truth on a complex situation.  That is why it doesn’t work.