Joined up government is something apparently the current administration aspires to, but is it such a good thing?
Government certainly wasn’t joined up (either from a parliamentary of administrative perspective) when I first started dealing with it back in the late 1970s. I wasn’t active in the union then. My vehicles for ‘engaging the state’ were the Celtic League (CL), Mec Vannin and the Anti Militarist Alliance.
I was always fortunate in knowing what government was thinking because, despite attempts to retain confidentiality, people always had a motivation or grudge to release information. So around about the 1980s an item of correspondence from the Government Secretary’s office (copied by hand) came to my attention.
I can’t remember the exact text now but, if you have a month of two to spend, you will find all this stuff filed with the Celtic League papers at MNH.
Basically, it said: ‘We keep getting queries from a JB Moffatt in various guises [I like that word] i.e. Celtic League, Mec Vannin or the AMA – we could do with finding out more about them. The CL publishes a magazine CARN which is stocked by Frank Quayle’s in Peel. I suggest copies are procured. Note: purchase using petty cash to avoid attention.’
This is where I come to the ‘joined up government’ bit because at the time as secretary of the local branch of the League I was corresponding with the Tynwald Library asking it to subscribe to CARN. If they had taken a sub and been ‘joined up’ they could have strolled along the corridor to the library. Alternatively, they could have visited the museum library, which acquired copies as they were printed from about 1973.
Government got a bit more ‘joined up’ after the ministerial system came in.
However records in the mid-1980s and for the next decade were still for the most part paper and they generated loads! By this time I was the union official (‘that man’s worse than Scargill’).
I was enjoying, together with my colleagues, great success.
It was down to good old ‘paper intelligence’
The ministerial system and the Whitley Council employers and other bodies just spewed out paper – a rainforest of it. The Whitley (employers) had their own minutes; they sent briefing notes to the employers and received responses. They assessed our position and set out theirs.
Chief officers met separately. They had sub groups – cue another paper mountain. Finally, of course, the Council of Ministers, in the days before it published its minutes, was ‘a whirling dervish’ of paper flying between Chief Minister, Chief Secretary and executives.
There was just one problem with all that paperwork flying around: some (in fact loads) was bound to be leaked.
So we were not industrial relations geniuses. We were just well informed, indeed we knew some things before the employers knew it themselves. We also saw some things we were never supposed to see. This ‘happy time’ went on for over a decade.
I have to confess, going into pay talks with an employer when you not only know their bottom line but also their top line was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.
Government were so perplexed about our insight that, ruling out clairvoyance, they seriously contemplated the possibility we were bugging them. It wasn’t that implausible because at that time they found a bug in a meeting room at the Department of Highways Ports, and Properties. But it was definitely, hand on heart, not us.
We eschewed such subterfuge to the extent that a union member, who procured a recording briefcase was told in no uncertain fashion not to use it!
Then disaster! Sometime around the mid/late 90s a decision was taken to cut down on paperwork, save money, store and transmit government files electronically.
The game was well and truly up for us!
But we had a good run! Anyway, with Freedom of Information, subterfuge within government should have become a thing of the past.