rory stewart mp

Handling my father’s cows reminded me of what political choice is
really like. We were trying to get an enraged and terrified young
Highland bull into a cattle crush. Its predecessor had gone in the
first time. But this one kept breaking free.  When he was almost
trapped he retreated and bucked, roared and rolled, turned and
charged, (while my ninety year old father staggered aside from the
broad slashing horns), and then, finally, leaped, hooked its front
legs above the five foot rail and dragged itself over the side of the
crush. Testing and injecting cattle is time consuming, can be
dangerous for the humans, (we have had fatalities in Cumbria
recently), and terrifying and risky for the animals. The day was a
reminder for me of why almost no farmer would support compulsory
annual testing for bovine TB. And yet, I may have to press for such
testing.

Almost nothing matters more for Cumbria than preventing endemic bovine
TB. Gloucestershire and Cornwall, where a third of farms are infected
and hundreds of herds are killed, show us life with the disease.  The
compensation is never enough, businesses are wiped out and the effect
is emotionally terrible because herds, carefully bred and built up
over years, are murdered. Cattle prices in infected areas can be a
third lower than in a clean area, auction marts cease to trade, and
everyone else who depends on farmers, from feed merchants to milk
processors, from fencers to agricultural contractors, suffer. But
Gloucestershire is on the edge of the London commuter belt, with many
other income streams. Cumbria is the dairy field of England, the
genetic livestock treasure of Britain; it is three hundred miles from
London and farming is one of the two largest parts of our economy.
Endemic bovine TB could destroy Cumbrian rural communities, families,
our economy – and thousands of livelihoods.

And unless we act soon, it will. Every year more TB infected cattle
come into our county, partly because the tests are not accurate,
partly because you can ‘link’ a holding in an infected area hundreds
of miles away to one in a clean area of Cumbria. Under current rules
it can be four years before you test a cow.  Four years is a long
time: long enough for a TB cow not just to infect the rest of the
herd, or spread across fences into neighbouring herds, but most
importantly, long enough to infect wildlife – badgers and deer. And it
if gets into our wildlife it would spread rapidly, many miles across
the county: it would become endemic.

What is the solution? We don’t know. But one solution could be to
implement universal annual TB testing across Britain. This is what we
did after the War and it eliminated TB. But even if annual testing
could save us, politicians would be very reluctant to push for it,
because farmers would hate it. It would anger farmers who are already
fed up with testing, restrictions and paperwork, and who have been
promised less not more bureaucracy. And, as I was reminded when
handling my father’s bull, testing is tricky, time-consuming, and
sometimes violent.

So instead politicians have fallen back, and may continue to
fall-back, on half-measures: things which may be helpful, but which
are insufficient. We might call for a live data-base to give more
information on a cow’s real-time movements and health; or for
education; or for an end to linked holdings; or for eradication of
badgers. But Cumbrian badgers don’t yet have TB. And a live-movement
database would take years to construct and would only record the
location and health of the cow. This - and an end to linked holdings -
would help farmers to know exactly what they were buying, but the
tests could still be inaccurate or out of date, and under the current
system it could still be a long time before you detected infection.
Nor are there the resources for a huge educational programme on TB,
including bringing farmers from infected areas to share their
experience. And many farmers will never be convinced that the threat
in Cumbria is real, or that annual testing is essential: yesterday
someone told me it was all a plot by vets – ‘jobs for the boys’. What
reason is there to think we are finally going to go beyond these
half-measures, and do what it takes - however unpopular - to prevent
Cumbria from being crippled by endemic bovine TB?

The banking regulators saw the risk of what the banks were doing in
2007, and realised that we were flirting with catastrophe. But they
did nothing, because imposing more checks, tests and regulation would
have enraged all banks, and some businesses; would have been costly;
and might have slowed short-term economic growth. If a politician had
taken the plunge, risked the anger of the banks, and succeeded in
preventing the crisis, no-one would have been grateful – because
no-one would have ever seen what might have happened, or been able to
prove it would have occurred.  I’m not sure that I would have done the
right thing on banks, but with the benefit of hindsight, we should
have done. I hope we can now do the right thing – however unpopular -
on bovine TB.

Things are becoming slicker and more professional, but also, at times, more second-rate. Businesses and governments boast of their new professional management. But poor documentaries are coming from good TV companies, dangerous drilling decisions from major oil companies, idiotic investments from leading development agencies. There are bad planning decisions in market towns, bad environmental policies for farms, counter-productive decisions in public health. And it is difficult not to feel that these positives and negatives are related.

In the BBC, the NHS, the police and the Foreign Office, the number of managers has ballooned over the last fifteen years. This happened because, often with good reason, we lost confidence in the old way of running things. The old system included elitism, waste, inflexibility, and terrible policies. Many old directors were poor colleagues, bad administrators, and intimidating for clients or staff. Accountancy and personnel processes have now become tighter. And we have (to express it in the new jargon) more consistency in policies, more diversity in staffing, more transparency, clearer benchmarks, more staff satisfaction, more accessible public-facing programs. 

Yet, all of us still witness the shoddiest policies and projects. And this is, I suspect, because the new idea of management, despite all its merit, has displaced a respect for a certain kind of knowledge. The things for which people are now selected, the qualities for which they are praised, the criteria on which they are promoted, are not related to deep or long experience. They are instead almost exclusively about "core competencies" in management. Boards in the civil service, for example, are now prohibited from taking anything except "core competencies" into account when making a promotion decision.

All the institutions continue - often sincerely - to believe that none of this is at the expense of knowledge. They point out that there is no logical reason why one shouldn't be a good manager and deeply knowledgeable. And indeed in theory that is true. But in practice the new emphasis is changing an entire culture, very quickly. Younger entrants take the hint from the promotion boards, steer away from jobs on the ground, and push to get into management as soon as possible. They have less time, opportunity, and incentive to develop deep knowledge. And when they are promoted they have less understanding of its importance, or respect for those that do. 

Within living memory, you could find many curators in the Tate gallery, who knew everything about Stubbs; people who knew each storm-drain and river bank in their part of Cumbria; diplomats who spoke fluent classical Arabic; BBC sound crews, who had worked in fifty countries; BP engineers, who understood the dangers of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico; and foreign correspondents, who had spent years reporting abroad. These people had learnt through concrete examples. They had discovered through direct experience, that that the world is difficult to describe, and easily misunderstood. They had become wary of abstract theories, and of reality reduced to numbers. But all these people now sense that their skills were no longer rewarded. As they lose power and status, so they lose the chance to defend, or justify the importance of their knowledge. Under our new management culture, there are fewer old Tate curators, traditional Cumbrian road-crews, Arabists, soundmen, engineers, or foreign correspondents. Those that survive are often treated as ‘dead wood’. And the institutions of knowledge connected with them, have also withered: libraries, and archives sold off, training and research establishments closed, older staff replaced with consultants and contractors. 

Today, instead of deferring to long practical experience, and deep knowledge of a particular place, managers prefer to implement ‘best practice’ from somewhere else; they impose theoretical models with less and less understanding of what does not work on the ground; and they justify decisions with abstract metrics, and obscure concepts. And as more and more positions are filled with people with this mentality, there are fewer people, with the confidence, or seniority, to expose the shallowness of this approach. Our culture is beginning to forget what deep knowledge and contact with the ground looked like, or why it mattered. 

The solution must be to give power back to people with deep knowledge. But it won’t happen through running training courses. You need to force institutions to change their promotion criteria, and put those with knowledge, judgement and experience back at the very top. Some of them might not be ideal managers: they might be less popular with staff, unappealing to stake-holders, more difficult to work with. But they can offer things we have forgotten how to measure: not just long experience, but rigour, a sense of vocation, and unexpected frames of reference. They might have prevented some of our recent mistakes. They could certainly bring more flexible and inventive ways of engaging with the world. And we cannot afford to continue to ignore them.

A secret: politicians don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t mean that we are all stupid, or lazy (I can sense my father’s arched eye-brows, as I make that claim). But I mean that it is impossible for politicians to know enough. The most successful ones, of course, are brilliant at concealing this: they assimilate quantities of data, remember impressive statistics, and sound convincing on debt and drought, on customs and crime, on Inner Asia and inner ear disease. But watch them at the despatch box, or on question time, replying confidently to a hundred unexpected queries, never saying they don’t know, and you must realise they are performing the impossible.

This is a problem. Because our best hope of making good decisions, or at least avoiding catastrophe, is to have people whose knowledge gives them the ability and confidence to challenge bad policies. Our track record is not good. The US banks continued to invest in credit-default swaps for years; the European Finance Ministers let Greece drift for decades. We invaded Iraq, and sent more and more troops into Afghanistan. Again and again, politicians failed to realise that despite the confident advice, optimistic predictions, and encouraging figures, everything was going very wrong.

Take Tony Blair on Iraq. He was bright, his speeches showed that he was well-briefed: full of obscure and precise statistics, confident about international law, clear about the global order.  But everything he had learnt, everything he believed, everything he expected, was wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction, there were not their terrorist links, he imagined. He underestimated the strength and nature of the Iraqi opposition, he missed the signs of civil war. International credibility was not – as he predicted – helped by invading Iraq: it was destroyed.

Now, of course, people said so at the time. And some were right for the right reasons, because they had an instinct for the temptations of power and the errors of politicians, and a few because they had a detailed first-hand knowledge of the complexity of Iraq.  But it was easy for Blair to find apparently equally well-informed, thoughtful people who backed his view: to find any number of sophisticated arguments, and statistics, which suggested he was right. None of his senior serving Ambassadors or Generals formally challenged his decision in writing. Not one resigned. Instead, they set about justifying and implementing his policy.

The same errors, the same lack of challenge, exist everywhere. Look at Germany’s disastrous 100 Billion investment in solar energy (98 cents in every Euro was wasted, and the effect according to the standard model, would delay global warming by 23 minutes). Look at why steps were not taken earlier to protect Cumbria from Bovine TB; or the 38 Billion debt run up in the Ministry of Defence; or some of the more catastrophic investment decisions of the North-West development agency. Ultimately all this was the politicians’ fault; but in almost every case, they were taking expert advice, and they never had the knowledge, experience, or confidence to take a different path.

The solution to these problems is not to plug a bigger external hard-drive into a minister’s head. The solution lies with the civil service. In every area - agriculture, small business support, military procurement - we need to continue to promote officials who are well-informed, experienced, and imaginative. Some need to be sector experts, others need the originality to ask questions, which no normal person would ever ask, nor perhaps could ever answer. An agriculture official needs to ask what would be the thirty year impact on farming of improving ‘sites of special scientific interest,’ and what would happen if subsidies ceased to be paid. They need a grasp of Spanish animal movement data-bases, and an even clearer instinct of why we failed to predict the change in New Zealand’s powdered milk exports. They must understand the long-term significance of an edible hamburger that has just been grown in a laboratory, from a stem-cell. They need to have seen first-hand the dangerous unstoppable momentum of fashionable theories.  They need to understand economics, and what economists don’t understand. And they need the courage to challenge treasury officials, and wealthy businessmen.

Perhaps the best contribution we can make to the future of British government is to support the right kind of civil service. It is not a project that fits an election cycle: you need to recruit people today, who may still be in the civil service in forty years’ time, you need to give young people the incentive to get out on the ground, the time to think, and the nimbleness, and courage to challenge conventional wisdom. You need the promotion criteria to ensure that those with the best policy judgement reach the top. You need to recognise when knowledgeable people have become rigid, or lost their desire or energy to fight. And you need to ensure that there is a culture of self-questioning. Politicians are not encyclopaedias, super-power memories, or saints. But they don’t need to be, if they learn how to listen to the right kind of civil servants – and just occasionally when it is clear the whole establishment is digging itself into a hole, to make that lonely decision, and change course.

 

The Financial Times yesterday suggested that the recent success of Asian economies could be the result of a young population, and as average age rose, growth would fall. Behind this, and a hundred similar theories, is the belief that a nation’s future is determined by statistics. We peer at the world through a cage of bar-charts – on productivity, literacy, trade, and per capita GDP. And when we measure ourselves against the Norwegian oil fund, Finnish numeracy, the Chinese urban population, or Indian engineering, Britain seems always to be in the lower-middle, and falling steadily. The bars of the bar-chart seem unbreakable. And although we are exhorted in endless articles – like sleepless hamsters – to run faster to catch up with China, our numbers seem to define our destiny. Of course, this is not the way that anyone’s history works, still less Britain’s.  A nation’s fortune can be altered, in defiance of all the numbers, within a generation.  Who would have bought English bonds in 1560? The Exchequer was bankrupt on a more than Greek scale. We had the sectarian divisions of modern Iraq, and had less prospect of a strong, legitimate ruler than Afghanistan. England’s last continental territory – Calais - had just been lost. Compared with the rising splendour of France, the civilisation of Italy, and the power of Spain, we were a pitiful, obscure Northern island managing decline.

And yet within the next twenty-five years we had taken the cultural lead in Europe, broken the Spanish super-power, and opened English-speaking America. Or take Scotland, which in the eighteenth century was the second poorest country in Europe, and by the nineteenth century had become the second richest. How did this happen? Marxists imply that national wealth is driven by impersonal factors of raw materials, class structures, and markets. But in fact it was politics and culture which created our success. Politics, which today can seem inert and disappointing, was then vibrantly, destructively inventive. English statesmen had just torn apart the Catholic church, plundered the monasteries, and broken the Bishops and nobles (and in a
different way, the Monarchy itself). The House of Commons was beginning to accumulate power in a constitutional battle which would last a century. Economists may see Elizabethans simply as “opening new markets”, but Sir Walter Raleigh was only in a very partial sense a tobacco merchant. He, and the others who navigated the Atlantic, challenged the great Empires, and secured concessions in Bengal were not MBAs but worshippers of medieval chivalry, Greek learning, and the Bible. They had the grandest possible conception of themselves, strove to be more than merely human, and often behaved as though many things – their God, their honour, their pride - were more important than their lives. (Raleigh’s best sonnet is a reflection, on theatre, written in the tower on the eve of his execution). Even the Victorian era, which we like to view through statistics on the cotton trade, or railway miles, was driven as much by dreamers, fantasists, and unruly adventurers taking irrational risks: the deserted rock of Hong Kong island was acquired more as a whim than a policy.

These past worlds are not our world: such people - their politics, their culture - are alien, and in their attitudes to Empire or Ireland bigoted, narrow and cruel. But they remind us that national power is not an unrolling mathematical formula. Today, our growth is crippled above all by lack of confidence. Banks will only lend, companies will borrow, hire and invest, when they have confidence. And although reforming tax, and regulations, negotiating deals on bank-lending, and digging broadband may help, it will not be sufficient. For confidence includes character, energy, focus, imagination, and an attitude to risk - things which are not simply the product of economic levers, but of faith, creative art, political engagement and our personal, human and national identity. It is easy to feel that we are an exhausted country that gave its best and last in the Second World War, and having stretched ourselves beyond our limits, has no energy to continue. We can describe ourselves as an ageing, diminishing, indigenous population, which can hardly support itself. We fantasise about reducing our concerns to a tiny circle around our home, and forgetting about the costs or opportunities of a wider world, wondering whether we mightn’t model ourselves on some country with an economy, a population, and a history a tenth of our size – Norway, perhaps, or Denmark.

But Britain’s history is in the vanguard, and so should its future be. Let me finish with something which makes me hopeful about Britain. The British men and women who volunteered for our charity in Afghanistan took great responsibilities, studied languages hard, travelled adventurously, were courteous to staff, attentive to local culture, and bold in completing projects. Take Will, 26, from the Welsh borders, who created a national TB centre for Afghanistan in two years. They showed characteristics, and potential, which our politics, and culture, today too often neglects – and which should make us careful of what we try to forge with our industrial or education policy. And in Cairo, last month, I talked to someone of great judgement, discretion and common-sense who could quote eighteenth-century poetry, had won a scholarship to Vienna, and has just completed a report on Somali piracy, and discovered she had studied in a state school in Penrith and comes from near Gamblesby.

Last Summer, the Corinthia hotel in Tripoli was filled with reporters and photographers. They had propped their laptops on tiny marble tables in the lobby. Waiters brought Turkish coffees but the reporters’ eyes flicked only from their screens to their phones, checking for messages about Gaddafi’s whereabouts, a recently discovered palace, prison, or press conference. Only one person seemed to look around the room: Marie Colvin.

A tall, elderly Libyan man had driven me to the hotel in a battered Japanese car, so small that he seemed barely to fit under the steering wheel. In the hotel, he studied the chaos politely. The new Minister of the Interior had just entered, flanked by recently promoted policeman, and the Minister of Finance had apparently just left, grinning, in a phalanx of eager, American-educated advisors.  Some of the reporters thought they should interview the Ministers but no-one was interested in my friend, the elderly water engineer. But Marie immediately asked us to join her. Since she was the journalist who knew Libya best – the only one who had known Gaddafi - she might have felt she didn’t need to bother with my friend. Instead, she took a patient, courteous interest – just as I had seen her do in other countries, when everyone else was too busy.  In our hotel in Iraq, in 2003, she had been the only person to talk to the hotel pianist. She discovered he had been in the national orchestra. “I used to play with the greatest musicians in the world,” he would tell her, "now I am in a hotel bar, and all I get to play is 'Feelings….Feelings….'" Eight years later no-one could remember his name, except Marie. On this occasion, my friend in Tripoli said nothing remarkable: he repeated that his country was a peaceful place, and that now Gaddafi had gone, everything would be fine. Piqued by Marie’s interest, other younger journalists shuffled over. A couple asked questions, but they could get little from him, and they moved on. Only Marie sat patiently, took notes, thanked him warmly, took his number and promised to be in touch.

The other correspondents seemed worn down by weeks of reporting. Most didn’t speak Arabic, so they needed a translator; colleagues were being kidnapped, so they needed a sensible driver; and the only place where they could get internet (to file their stories), or indeed basic security, or a few hours of running water was this five-star hotel – which might have reduced its sewerage, but not its prices. Everyone was short of money. And everyone was being chased by editors to beat each other to the same stories.  People were not going out of their way to help each other.

Marie, however, had an adopted family: a Libyan woman, who was staying in her room, a Libyan man who was borrowing her laptop, and two young English stringers – from the Telegraph and the Independent – who she had offered to take along with her to share her interview with a Minister. She wondered whether I needed a shower, and lent me her satellite phone to me to call home. Satellite calls are very expensive, so I made a quick call and handed it back. She told me not to be ridiculous and to take my time. She wondered whether we should all try to find supper in the old city – it was Ramadan and since the city had only fallen two days earlier, most places were shut  - but there was a chance. She met me there a few hours later with some young Libyan activists. She persuaded a café to put a plastic table in the street, right next to the arch of Marcus Aurelius, bluffed her way past a Zintani militia group who had appropriated a courtyard house and, by taking great interest in the boss of an American television company, acquired us some extra food and Coca-Cola. It was almost one in the morning when she wandered into Green Square. We followed. Her blonde hair was tied back in a pony-tail, her sleeves were rolled up, revealing golden hairs on her brown arms. On her feet, under a pair of skinny jeans, were some soft slippers, and over her shoulder a backpack which contained her notebooks, water, camera, and satellite phone.

People were firing heavy machine-guns into the air. A pick-up truck raced towards us. The radiator grill was missing, and there were bullet holes in the olive paint. Everything, including the windscreen, had been stripped off to give an unrestricted field of fire to the anti-aircraft gun pointing straight at us. The passenger in combat fatigues had a long black beard. They braked hard in front of us, leapt out, grinned, and greeted Marie. “It’s some of the Misrata boys",  she said, “I think they’ve confused me with Portia." Portia is 27 and does not have an eye-patch.

When I heard she had been killed in Syria, what I first remembered most was her generosity, the lack of pomposity or competitiveness, the kindness she showed to younger journalists, to Libyan activists – even to travelling politicians. But what was great in both her character and her journalism was her ability to listen. When I returned to Tripoli this week I found that the quiet, tall elderly engineer, in his battered car, who the others ignored, was now the Prime Minister. I’m sure she knew. But, still, I would have liked to have called and praised her.