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May 22, 2012 Bureaucrats A few months ago, I told the story of how the EU's biofuels policy was put in place through the activities of a "policy entrepreneur" - a senior bureaucrat with producer interests at heart.
Today, the Register carries the story of how UK bureaucrats in the Intellectual Property Office seem to be up to something similar, trying to rework IP law in favour of the Googles of this world.
We also heard evidence of bureaucrats taking an activist role, possibly misleading their ministers.
“Some evidence was not fed through to ministers,” said Andrew Yeates of the Educational Recording Agency.
And the consultation also heard that IPO bureaucrats had been attempting to change international policy before proposals had been discussed, let alone decided, in the UK. This state-within-a-state had its own very active Foreign Office, it seems.
Reader Comments (11)
I don't think anybody contributing to this site will be surprised. I suspect it is rife in every civil service department - it's certainly evident in DECC.
An Englishman's home is his castle kept running through my mind as I read this.
Not surprising. Look at the earlier story, about how Caudrilla people were kept out of a ministerial meeting by DECC gate-keepers. The civil service generally has its 'view' on any particular topic, and will do what it can to prevail, regardless of who the minister is, Conservative or Labour. Which is some areas, that are long term and expensive and don't benefit from interruptions by ignorant, temporary, new ministers, is no bad thing. The Civil Service just needs to be very careful which horses it decides to back.
It's well known that Cameron's highly influential friend and former director of strategy, Steve Hilton, is married to Rachel Whetstone, global head of communications and public policy at Google. Cameron and Whetstone both worked for Michael Howard as special advisor and political secretary respectively.
Steve Hilton is joining Stanford University for a year as a visiting scholar at the university's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Stanford is of course the very university where Sergey Brin and Larry Page were graduate students in The School of Engineering, where the idea for a better search engine was hatched.
Google still has a very close relationship with Stanford, financing multiple projects not only in technology but in social science, political science and internet law.
In 2009 Cameron stated his desire that NHS health records should be placed on a database such as Google Health which operated in the US until this year. It was retired in the US apparently due to lack of adoption.
As has been reported in the news, senior Tories such as, Cameron, Osborne, Vaizey and Hunt and Libdems such as Cable and Davey have had many meetings with Google and attended Google's conferences. It was in November 2010 that Cameron announced a review of intellectual property laws in Britain following meetings with Google executives.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2146552/Tories-held-cosy-meetings-Google-month-election.html
Naomi Gummer, a Google executive was recently a former political advisor to Hunt. Google earns £2.1 billion in the UK but its international operations are based in Ireland where it pays just 12.5% corporation tax.
Whatever civil servants are up to with intellectual property It seems odd that ministers with such close links with Google should be unaware of it.
A few years ago I attended a high level briefing on international agreements and intellectual property. Sorry I can't give specifics, for legal reasons (like me potentially being charged under the Crimes Act) you will have to choose to believe me or not.
What was apparent was that the bureaucrats were happy to concede just about anything on the IP front if they thought they might get some other advantage - in a trade agreement, or influence in the UN, or a defence deal, or just about anything else you can think of. It wasn't even a self-serving conspiracy - they just didn't think it was important, fools that they were. It was just a pawn in a larger game.
IP has no meaning for bureaucrats who operate in the international sphere, as it is essentially a private property right. They will extend it to the point of absurdity (like 70 years after the author's death) or give it away for nothing, with equal carelessness, if it gets them something that they want right now.
I have a friend in DECC. He says it is an ideologically pure church. Dissenters are advised to keep their mouths shut.
Your link to "policy entrepreneur" reminded me of a remark made to me (many years ago) by the representative of an Italian manufacturer at a meeting in Brussels to discuss regulations in our industry. He said the key was to be appointed rapporteur, so you were the one that got to write it all down after the discussions. I am ready to believe that civil servants also enter into discusssions with their minds already made up, seeking to fit evidence to the conclusion they have already reached.
Daylight is the best disinfectant.
Just spent the day on SCEF stuff sending out 129 emails to MSPs. On the one to the minister I wrote words which in effect said: "I am copying you in personally for information, please do not ask your ministerial team to respond ... it will be a waste of time".
Perhaps I was more right than I thought.
Thanks Andrew(s) for picking this up. IP law does I'm sure require change but it's vital to be upfront about the vested interests on many sides. Orlowski's article can only help.
Every department has always had its own paradigm to a greater or less degree. Now they have Common Purpose
Isn't the solution simply to fire, or off-shore, civil servants, say 100 per hour, until the internal politics stop. Might take a few decades but it would eventually wear them down.
The countervailing civil servant plan seems to be to bankrupt the country in such a way that the mandarins at least can comfortably retire to Greece just prior the first lynchings.(cf. Egypt, etc.)