"You only learn when things to wrong," my first legal boss used to remind me, and he wasn't wrong. Four years at the bar, sifting through the debris of old deals, taught me a lot about negotiating new ones. Observing the slow decline of Reuters in the mid-90s was another tutorial, as was enduring the tech boom and bust, working through a bunch of old loans that GE had bought a decade later and then launching Zopa into the teeth of the credit boom and ensuing financial crisis. Advising on the odd regulatory hiccup since then has reinforced the concept, which also helps with morale, of course. And with so much 'going wrong' on such a grand scale right now, maintaining morale is more important than ever. So what do we stand to learn? Well, I reckon the top 3 lessons of 2020 will be: the importance of facts, that the worst is yet to come and we need to figure out how to preserve government know how for when it can be used again...
You Can't Fight The Facts: The Truth Will Out...
The current crop of populist leaders have all seized power by targeting nationalistic lies at the gullible.
The marriage of patriotism and intelligence has ended in divorce. Whether it's #ScottyFromMarketing downunder, Trump, Modi, Maduro, Bolsinaro, Erdogan, Orban or our very own #BrexitBoris, they've all avoided letting the truth get in the way of an emotive story.
It's not unusual for politicians to lie, misinform and gaslight their voters. What is unusual is the sheer scale of the latest political mendacity.
Yet, the bigger the lie, the harder it is to control or suppress the truth, and one by one these fascistic fantasists are finding themselves facing hot blasts of unadulterated fact. Eventually their lies will be exposed for all to see, and any majority support will melt away.
But don't hold your breath...
Nationalist Economies Will Get Much Worse Before They Get Better...
The 'quid pro quo' (to borrow a well-worn phrase from 2019) for this love affair with lies is that nationalist governments are not focused on their societies' genuine problems, let alone solving the root causes of those problems. Nationalism involves denying the real problems and blaming others for imaginary ones. This creates new problems while the country's infrastructure and governing processes decay. This has been a constant feature of the Trump regime, in particular (
as Michael Lewis has observed), but is perhaps best encapsulated by Brexit.
Reversing the decay will require an electorate to fall out of love with the lies and support reform. That would give politicians permission to identify and define the actual problems, prioritise the most pressing ones, burrow into the data to identify the root causes and the improvements that would provide the most bang for the buck, and put in place the warning systems to alert us to future failings. The changes would need to be communicated carefully, in the face of inevitable resistance by the rump of nationalist disciples. But that process would take a looooong time, since anyone who understands the issues today will have lost interest, retired or found a new role by the time things get bad enough for anyone to want to fix them, let alone muster widespread support for doing so.
Compare that process with Dum Cummings
latest blog post (ironically entitled 'Two hands are a lot' since he couldn't find his arse with both of them). His undoubted success as a right wing, nationalist, populist political strategist will be dwarfed by his failure as a government strategist. But the Johnson government will have to be seen to fail before anyone else will get a mandate to undertake the huge job of reversing the decline.
This raises the problem of how to avoid losing government know how in the meantime...
Preserving Government Knowledge
How to manage the transition from one manager to another (succession-planning) is a major issue for everyone, especially large organisations and government departments.
Michael Lewis has revealed that it was not something that ever concerned Donald Trump, and there is plenty of evidence from British civil servants that it was not a high priority for Cameron or May, and it is certainly lost on Boris Johnson. Many senior civil servants have left government, often simply to retire. Their knowledge and experience will have been lost without adequate transition arrangements. Meanwhile, the ministerial leadership, policies and/or performance of departments like the Home Office, Health, Work and Pensions, Prisons and Transport seem on the slide from bad to worse.
Similarly, areas of policy and funding that the UK agreed to centralise within the EU, and the framework on which Britain trades with the EU and other countries under EU free trade deals will be lost. Britain doesn't have any civil servants duplicating tasks that were performed at EU level (like funding the EU's least economically developed regions,
6 of which are in the UK); and the EU trade deals cannot be replicated outside the EU (and certainly not within the 11 months May and Johnson negotiated).
Conclusion
If we only learn when things go wrong, we're going to learn an awful lot!
