A wise, long serving public servant once told me:
Everything goes in a circle. First we de-centralised to give control to each of the government departments.
Some years later, we centralised to save money and streamline management.
I was reminded of this today when I received an email about the latest company initiative.
Or as Sir Humphrey put it in The Whiskey Priest:
Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel, and of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I’d have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I would have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac, but above all, I would have been a stark staring raving schizophrenic!
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