Fergus Finlay: Democracy risks being strangled by the red tape of proceduralism

The context for this discovery was an interview with Francis Fukuyama. He is famous for a book he wrote in the early 1990s called The End of History, and he’s often been criticised for the title of the book, although, in fact, he wasn’t far off the mark at the time.

After the collapse first of the Berlin Wall and then of the Soviet Union, his basic argument was that liberal democracy had won.

All the main ideological battles were over. Communism was gone, fascism was gone, dictatorships such as Pol Pot’s and other cruel regimes were gone. Democracy and some forms of capitalism were all that were left and were the only models ultimately acceptable to free people.

Fukuyama was being interviewed by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics podcast. 

They had no interest in suggesting Fukuyama was a busted flush because history hasn’t ended. Instead, they got him to reflect on how the world had evolved since the end of communism, and a fascinating conversation was the result.

In the course of it, Fukuyama talked about proceduralism — principally as the reason democracy might ultimately fail. Democracies that are utterly bound up with procedures, he inferred, find it really hard to get things done. 

Dictators, whatever their other drawbacks, are much better at implementing.

'Nothing was allowed to get in the way'

In 2007, I was in Shanghai. 

We were taken one day to a place called Songjiang University town, just outside Shanghai. It was described to us as a sort of third-level education hub. It was massive — enormous buildings, tens of thousands of students, full of life and busyness. There were seven universities there, covering fine arts, law, and engineering sciences.

It hadn’t existed at all five years earlier. Once they decided to do it, they designed it, built it, staffed it, and populated it within half a decade. They had timelines in advance, and they met them. They were given a budget for the entire project, and they delivered it on budget. And by the way, they also built a railway to ensure it is connected within minutes to the centre of Shanghai.

I don’t know what had to be bulldozed in order to build Songjiang. 

But nothing was allowed to get in the way. 

When you think about that, and then you think about what happens when a really well-functioning democracy like ours decides to build a much-needed national children’s hospital, it would make you wonder, wouldn’t it?

But I want to give you an example from the real world.  I’m looking at a Gantt chart — I only discovered what they are recently too. 

They are visual layouts, similar to a spreadsheet, that enable engineers and managers to keep track of projects. To make one, you set out all the tasks you have to do and figure out the time each will take. Then you can plot a timeline from start to finish, showing what needs to be done to get to the end.

Much-needed housing  

The Gantt chart I’m looking at is for a significant housing project that I know very well. It’s a local authority regeneration project. 

It will replace very old housing with new and future-proofed accommodation, and it will add nearly 500 apartments, as well to the stock of social housing in the inner city.

It’s a really important project and everyone involved is desperate to see it done. The management of the local council is totally committed, the government has said several times that the money is in place to finish it, and public policy needs it because it will make a real contribution to the housing crisis. Every public representative in the area has given the project his or her full support. 

Senior government ministers have visited the project and received deputations from the community.

Above all, the local community needs this project. They have been promised regeneration since well before the Celtic Tiger collapsed, and the conditions in which they live are increasingly difficult. There is a real sense in which this community has been let down. 

Gantt chart says no 

But that sense could change now because there are sites here all ready to be built on. All it needs is planning permission and then a builder on site.

That’s not what the Gantt chart says.  It says something entirely different. 

It sets out 25 procedural steps that have to be taken before the project can even go to planning permission, then a delay while the project waits for permission, and then a further 15 procedural steps before the project goes to tender and construction begins.

The procedures are all set down by planning law and public procurement law. Value-for-money analyses, environmental impact assessments, brief development, team construction, detailed cost planning, endless pauses for approval by different government departments — it goes on and on.

Part of the reason for the endless series of procedures, of course, is a reaction to the past, when an awful lot of development happened in Ireland without adequate control at all.

It's nobody's fault

But the consequence is that as things stand, this project, wanted by everyone involved from top to bottom, might — with a fair wind — be finished in 2035. The existing residents, who have already been waiting so long, might see their new apartments in 2031. That’s if everyone works really hard to deliver, as I’m sure they will.

So it’s nobody’s fault. 

But it’s unjust and it’s crazy. The people who live in that community deserve way better, and the social housing crisis demands way more.

What we need versus the rules 

What’s happening to this project is happening to housing projects all over the country. Exactly the same thing is true in relation to new hospitals, new energy infrastructure, new environmental projects, and new schools. 

The balance between what needs to be achieved, and the rules that need to be followed, has gone utterly askew.

And if you think that this only happens to big capital projects, you’re wrong.  

Rules defeat decency

There are all sorts of areas where rules and regulations take the place of compassion or even decency. I could write reams, for example, about the way we treat disabled drivers in Ireland.

It’s one of the big reasons why a country that is one of the richest in the world is failing to deliver. We can’t solve basic quality-of-life challenges because we can’t ever, in any circumstances, find a way through the fog of proceduralism.

We have policies for everything — the right policies, a lot of the time — and the ability to implement nothing. It’s damaging and corrosive and it leads to pent-up frustration in communities that don’t deserve it.

That frustration elected Donald Trump in the States. The slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’ gave Boris Johnson a whopping majority in the UK. If we don’t learn how to implement better, that’s the space we’re creating.