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| Bureaucratic war | Bureaucratic war |
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| David Cameron invokes a false image of the second world war (PM invokes wartime elan to energise Whitehall enterprise, 19 November). He implies that during the war Whitehall saw an anti-bureaucratic revolution, where normal rules were circumvented, and that we need that spirit again given we are in the "economic equivalent of war" today. In fact during the war there were many more rules, and a vast increase in the number of civil servants, generating vastly increased quantities of forms, chits, reports, permits. He perhaps means to say the state had new powers to act authoritatively, which it clearly did. But the political context was quite different – a coalition which represented most of the people, ruled out attacks on labour and the poor, was committed to fair shares, and saw a decrease in economic inequality. Where there was relaxation of standard procedures, as in weapons procurement, it led to a huge waste of resources, delaying, not accelerating, victory. David Edgerton London | David Cameron invokes a false image of the second world war (PM invokes wartime elan to energise Whitehall enterprise, 19 November). He implies that during the war Whitehall saw an anti-bureaucratic revolution, where normal rules were circumvented, and that we need that spirit again given we are in the "economic equivalent of war" today. In fact during the war there were many more rules, and a vast increase in the number of civil servants, generating vastly increased quantities of forms, chits, reports, permits. He perhaps means to say the state had new powers to act authoritatively, which it clearly did. But the political context was quite different – a coalition which represented most of the people, ruled out attacks on labour and the poor, was committed to fair shares, and saw a decrease in economic inequality. Where there was relaxation of standard procedures, as in weapons procurement, it led to a huge waste of resources, delaying, not accelerating, victory. David Edgerton London |
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