Now I confess I share some of his
despair. Trying to get the local council to do something as simple as
collect rubbish on my street is a process that makes me reach for my
revolver. To depend on such institutions for money to feed myself while
jumping through a host of pointless hoops to prove that I really need it
– as Loach’s characters do – would be soul-destroying.
Where Loach is wrong is to suppose that this is a failing of modern
capitalism. Far from it: the worst bureaucracies are the ones run by the
state that we cannot escape.
Remember the process of getting a
new phone line? You applied to the Post Office and waited six months to
get one. If you were out when the engineers came over you’d have to
wait another couple of months. Today the process takes a day or two,
because there are half a dozen or more firms competing with each other
.
Or think about the hassle that the supposed pleasure of going on
holiday once involved. Today, travel agents exist to offer cheap package
holidays they’ve bought in bulk. Just 20 years ago, they existed
because the airline and hotel industries were so bureaucratic that no
ordinary person could deal with them directly. Nowadays
the really crushing part of travelling is replacing a lost passport or applying for a visa – the two last big holdouts of government “service”.
In these as in so many other consumer areas, bureaucrats have been
scrubbed from our daily lives. Trade and competition – the sort of
competition that involves seducing customers from rivals by offering
something better – have driven a phenomenal betterment in the lives of
everyone, including the protagonists of Ken Loach’s dramas. Both
government and business can be bureaucratic, but only businesses have an
incentive to improve.
