PK in The National: Good bureaucracy gets in the way of The Grift and it's not a bad thing
Starmer's big plans to get out the 'chainsaw' and embrace Al within civil service may be jumping the technological gun
This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my weekly column in The National, published Saturday, 15th March, 2025
IT’S not hard to defend people against dorks gleefully wielding chainsaws. But it seems this symbolic prop against bureaucracy, as waved around by deplorables like Argentina’s Milei and America’s Musk, has crossed the Atlantic.
Before Keir Starmer launched his AI-driven assault on the administrative “flab” of the UK civil service this week, his henchfolk had already been briefing court journalists with a choice phrase.
As the plan’s originating think tank Labour Together had internally put it, this was “Project Chainsaw” (the label only limply denied by official spokespersons).
But with tens of thousands of civil service jobs aiming to be cut, and the number “£45 billion” of tech-driven savings being brandished, the image of whirring teeth is hardly frivolous.
There’s such a tangle here – of big-picture considerations (AI replacing human jobs, the longstanding role of bureaucracy) and of short-term ones (signalling to electoral coalitions your toughness) – that we have to unpick some of the strands first.
Straight away, we should be clear on what’s novel about the “democracy versus bureaucracy” rhetoric coming from Trumpland.
If you remember, from 1986, president Ronald Reagan’s “nine most terrifying words” in the English language – “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” – you might think there’s not much new here.
Consider also, for a moment, Elon Musk’s business model – dependent to the tune of $38bn on government patronage and funding. Facing this, all Musk’s hacking away at the federal budget looks like a hypocritical clown show.
But that doesn’t capture the nub of the severe attacks on bureaucracy represented by Doge (Department of Government Efficiency) in the US. What is being established in Trump 2.0, according to the academics Stephen E Hanson and Jeffrey S Kopstein, is often misrecognised as authoritarianism or fascism.
Instead, Hanson and Kopstein suggest we should see it as “patrimonialism”.
The term was first coined by the great social theorist Max Weber. Patrimonialist leaders “pose as ‘fathers’ of their nations, running the state as a sort of ‘family business’, and doling out state assets and protection to loyalists”, says Hanson in a recent interview.
“As Weber pointed out a century ago, this mode of state-building is one of the oldest political forms in human history”, Hanson continues. “But most analysts never thought patrimonialism would make such a powerful comeback in the contemporary era.”
What patrimonialists hate most of all, Hanson implies, are the values of an independent, reliable, universal civil service. A good bureaucracy truly gets in the way of The Grift.
“Whether we realise it or not, we all depend on bureaucracies staffed by qualified experts to live what we now consider to be ‘normal’ lives”, Hanson explains. “Prior to the invention of the modern state, rulers facing famines, wars and natural disasters frequently consulted oracles and soothsayers and relied on the advice of unqualified cronies, leading to terrible, unnecessary human suffering.
“If we destroy the modern state bureaucracy in the United States and the rest of the world, replacing it with personalistic rule, we can expect similar results.”
It is noticeable that Donald Trump’s patrimonialism comes along with a denial of climate crisis, caused by fossil fuel use. The very effects of this – extreme weather, increasing migration, crop failure, viral proliferation – are exactly why you might want a functional bureaucracy, according to Hanson’s vision. Bureaucracy is the “gyroscope of state”, as scholar Bernardo Zacka put it. Going by recent months in the American republic, it’s about to topple from its stand.
However, it doesn’t seem – at least so far – that patrimonialism underlies the anti-bureaucratic chainsaws in the Starmer project. What drives his ministers seems to be something very tangible – the many millions of physical letters and human-conducted calls that are done each week, between civil servants and citizens.
Is the assumption that much of this administration could be done by AIs?
The reporting quotes an internal mantra, intended to guide these upheavals: “No person’s substantive time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality and standard.”
There are echoes and challenges here. The echo is with the philosopher Roberto Unger’s axiomatic words: “No-one should have to do work that can be done by a machine. Everything we have learned how to repeat can be expressed in a formula, a rule or an algorithm. Everything that can be expressed in a rule can be embodied in a physical contraption…
“The purpose of a machine should be to take over tasks we have already learned to repeat, so that we can preserve our supreme resource – time – for that which we have not yet learned how to repeat”, continues Unger.
“Throughout history, economic organisation has often forced people to act as if they were machines. In doing so, we squander the true potential of machines: their ability to liberate humanity.”
Unger concludes: “The most powerful combination is that of the person and the machine – the person always one step ahead, venturing into the unknown, the not-yet-repeatable.”
Inspiring. But not quite our Starmer context - which is unequal and distorted cost-saving.
Where the super-rich are protected from suffering a wealth tax. Where civil service job layoffs – instead of a humanity sustainably liberated from labour – are what’s valued. Where any savings that are generated feed into a burgeoning military budget. (We really need to be “one step ahead” of those machines.)
There’s another interesting challenge. It seems to me StarmLab presumes that AGI – artificial general intelligence, capable of the smartest human performance and beyond – is imminent.
In terms of its revolutionary potential, we could do a lot worse than have AGIs be trained and customised to civil service values.
As Weber writes, the bureaucratic official should act “sine ira et studio” (without hatred or passion).
The good bureaucrat’s attributes – that is, “adherence to procedure, acceptance of subordination and superordination, ‘esprit de corps’, abnegation of personal moral enthusiasms, commitment to the purposes of the office”, as Paul du Gay paraphrases it – should indeed be shared by these powerful, human-equalling (or even surpassing) machines.
Yet in search of a saving big political narrative, the Starmerites might have jumped the technological gun. If cheap or underdeveloped artificial intelligence is the vehicle for change, one could predict an endless miasma of “bad bureaucracy” stories.
We could be experiencing subtler but even more frustrating versions of Little Britain’s “computer says no”. A society in which crude AIs perpetrate egregious redlining and exclusion from services and benefits.
What should the Scottish perspective be on all this? Unusually for me, committed propellor-head that I am, it’s “wait and see”.
As far as possible, I think the general approach should be Ungerian. Not artificial intelligence as the job-replacer for public servants, but their life-enricher.
To quote colleagues at Edinburgh University, we should take a “techno-moral” stance. Which would be that there is such a thing as a bureaucratic vocation, and that AI tools should be “mirrors” (as Professor Shannon Vallor puts it) to that vocation.
A mirror. Much more soulful and (literally) reflective, as a metaphor for how we handle bureaucracy and technology. Lay down your chainsaws, dorks.
Subscribe to The National here.