Of course, the maverick who can't be told what to do is practically a stock character in journalism

It appears that Harry Fletcher of the probation officers' union, Nick's usual source for matters loranorderical, isn't picking up the phone this week. And so he must move on to other sources; in this case, the pile of "A Touch of Frost" DVDs next to the telly. I am not even sure that the "do it by the book" politician-boss is actually a particularly uniquely British figure, but that's by the by; the fact is that Nick really, genuinely does appear to have got his information about modern management practices in the police force from a work of fiction.

And a Civitas pamphlet about managerialism, and Chris Dillow's book, but both of these sources suffer from a problem which Aaronovitch has regularly identified in his journalism and on which point he is substantially correct - they do rather ignore the fact that things have been getting much better in British public services over the last ten years, not worse. If you measure success in the NHS, the education system and the police force by outcomes (rather than by the complaints of their employee lobbies), then this is pretty undeniable.

It's true, possibly (although a purist would actually probably like some evidence before concluding even this much) that the modern regime of targets, measurement and management has made the public sector a less enjoyable place to work, and that the resulting reduction in employee goodwill has had a financial cost which has needed to be compensated for by higher expenditure.

But frankly, speaking in my current mood as one of those liberals Nick endorses lower down, I am not necessarily sure that this is a bad thing. Although the public service ethos, like the charitable instinct, is intrinsically a very good thing, is it really a reliable way to run a railway? I've always been uneasy about the fact that important services for the poorest people in society have been so totally dependent on the goodwill of moral saints rather than the firmer foundation of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay; also note that, outside the police force and army, the burden of being guilted into working for less than you're worth "for the sake of the community" falls disproportionately on women. If we pay public sector workers something closer to market price and demand more results from them, this can't be counted as definitely a bad idea unless it doesn't work.

And in general, as measured by the crime, exam results, mortality, etc, etc figures, the record of the last ten years ain't bad. So when Nick says that " Despite the increases in taxation and national debt, Britain has not benefited from their selflessness." (and a quick glance at the net debt figures show that this is not really an accurate picture in and of itself), he's wrong.

The thing about fuckers like Dirty Harry, Morse, Frost, House, the Robin Williams character in Dead Poet's Society, etc, is that they are all about proclaiming their unique Whitmanesque spirit and dedication, as against the mindless, petty dead hand of management. But in fact, does anyone ever bother checking up that their claim to "break rules, but get results" is actually true? I'm pretty sure that if you actually added up the numbers, they wouldn't look so good. Ten times out of ten, when someone claims that they want to "just get on and do the job", they mean that they only want to do all the fun parts of the job and leave all the difficult or boring bits to some other poor fucker. Which might or might not be a viable organisational model, but it does leave the question open of how we motivate the poor fucker, something upon which Dillow, Civitas and Nick are basically equally silent[1].

David Ogilvy, among many other very intelligent maxims, nearly all of which have fairly general application, used to say that nearly every person you brought in off the street was probably capable of writing one really fantastic advert. But that this was of basically no use to him professionally, since what he needed was people who could turn out good adverts consistently, and to order. That's the whole underlying problem here - you just can't build any sort of scalable system based on the assumption that important parts of the job will be done by a maverick genius walking to his own personal drumbeat.

This is a really depressing and shameful fact and people have been complaining about this since TS Eliot, since William Morris, since Ned Ludd, but the fact is that nobody's really found a replacement for Taylorism yet and when they do it will be as big a deal as the Industrial Revolution. But in the meantime, we don't do ourselves any particular favours by talking crap about results, or by pretending that knuckling under to producer group lobbies or introducing bullshit voucher systems has anything to do with "democracy".

Endnote: By the way, Nick started his journalistic career in Birmingham in the 1980s. Anyone who covered the same beat as the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad knows perfectly fucking well why it is that the British police today have such a huge and unwieldy burden of paperwork weighing them down.

[1] Actually Chris D, if I understand him right (which I might not since it always seems desperately unconvincing to me) tends to claim to have some sort of silver bullet solution that would get rid of nearly all of the administrative overhead in modern business and public services, by having smaller work units run as workers' co-operatives. Frankly, I think this is putting more of a load on Hayekian spontaneous organisation than it can bear, and needs to be accompanied by something approaching an actual conspiracy theory to explain why this amazing and simple model has never actually been used or worked anywhere. (Employees of the John Lewis Partnership or textiles manufacturers in Mondragon; spare me, please).