Incompetence & the crisis of the Left

The Boss Party's incompetence at managing things is the result of a deeper intellectual crisis. This thought struck me whilst reading this:

Ed Miliband, who clearly disliked all talk of an early election, has admitted that ministers are “probably undertrained” for their jobs...
Nick Raynsford, a decent minister sacked without good cause by Blair, echoes him: “The only difference I would take with him is his use of the three letters ‘der’ in undertrained. There is no organisation in the world with similar responsibilities which is as utterly cavalier as British government about the capability of people it puts into ministerial positions.” Another former minister told the Guardian: “It’s hopeless. I was appointed before the weekend and was making big spending decisions on the Monday.”
France deploys professionals from institutes of administration. Here few ministers have even run the proverbial whelk stall.

But why are members of the Boss Party so badly equipped to be managers? This should be impossible for any proper, thinking, leftist party. I say so for two reasons.
1. For years, one big political question has been: what should the state do and what should the market do? You can't answer this without a knowledge of transaction cost economics, as developed by Coase (pdf) and Williamson, which asks: what are the relative merits of arranging a transaction through the market versus within an organization? And this in turn raises the question: what can an organization do to maximize the benefits of having the transaction done in house?
Any leftist with a genuine interest in the proper boundaries of the state would therefore have developed an interest in how to manage things.
2. Another question any truly egalitarian party should ask is: why do workers have so little power? Why must they be vulnerable to managers' whims? This leads to questions of the relative merits of hierarchy versus more egalitarian management structures.
So, there are two paths which lead the Left to an interest in management. And yet almost no-one in the Boss Party took either path. They seem to take it for granted that the state and hierarchy are good ways of organizing things, without showing the foggiest interest in why this should be, or how they can make it true.
Nick Cohen is fond of pointing out how the far left has lost its intellectual moorings and drifted into mindless sectarian babble. But the same can be said for the government too.

Comments

[annieb]

It is certainly possible to identify some potential politicians quite young, when they do voluntary work for the parties. We need a good scholarship scheme for them, to broaden their knowledge of the world.

[ajay]

Few politicians on either side have noticeable amounts of managerial expertise - so what's the Right's excuse?

[Paulie]

"Any leftist with a genuine interest in the proper boundaries of the state would therefore have developed an interest in how to manage things."

Indeed. Why are the left prepared to put up with a large permanent senior civil service, and why are they prepared allow ministers to be marooned with only a handful of 'politicial advisers' to look after them?

Surely, in a democracy, political parties should be expected to develop their own shadow administrations - largish policy-making bodies that will follow them into government when they win elections?

And isn't finding the patrons of such groups the best way of selecting ministers?

Instead, they have to rely upon underhand methods - the creative use of sympathetic 'think tanks' and management consultancies. And - as a result - we have entirely dispensable ministers who can be reshuffled at will by a jealous PM.

This is - I believe - how they have always done things both in France and the US.