Nobody's Fault

When something goes wrong in Britain now, a familiar calm settles over the wreckage. A review is announced. Lessons will be learned. An inquiry is established, hears evidence for years, and publishes a report which says, in careful language, that the failure was systemic. And there the matter rests. The system did it, and you cannot sack a system.

This is usually told as a story about complexity, as if responsibility simply evaporated somewhere in the wiring of the modern state. It did not evaporate. It was piped away. Over four decades Britain has built an architecture of government whose most reliable output, whatever else it produces, is that failure lands on no one. The architecture is now so good at this that it should be understood as a design, not an accident.

The case for building it was real, and deserves stating at full strength. Ministers meddling in operational decisions produced genuine disasters, and taking day-to-day power out of political hands protects against caprice. Complexity is real too: the single guilty man is often a fiction, because most catastrophes are chains, not villains. And a culture that hunts scapegoats gets cover-ups. Aviation became the safest way to move a human being precisely by promising engineers and pilots that honesty about error would not end their careers. Independence, complexity and blamelessness all have honourable cases.

But look at what was actually built. Aviation's bargain has two halves: nobody is punished for the honest report, and the report then changes the world - findings bind, fleets are grounded, checklists are rewritten within months. The British state copied the comfortable half and dropped the demanding one. An inquiry that reports a decade after the event, into decisions taken by people who have since retired, under ministers who have since rotated twice, is not a mechanism of correction. It is a mechanism of deferral - grief management on a national scale, with a publication date.

The circuit with no earth

Trace any failure and you can watch responsibility thin out at every join. The minister answers to Parliament, but the function sits with a regulator. The regulator sets the framework, but delivery belongs to an arm's-length body. The body contracted it out; the contractor subcontracted. Every join is individually defensible. The chain as a whole is a circuit with no earth - current flows, and nothing ever discharges.

Subpostmasters were prosecuted on the evidence of a computer system that did not work; the convictions were eventually quashed, and a public inquiry has set the failure out in detail. Ask which person could have been removed by any voter at any point in that chain, and the trail goes cold. People infected by blood the health service gave them waited most of a lifetime for the state's apology - which, when it came, was given sincerely, by people apologising for nothing they themselves had decided.

It was not always like this. In 1954 the Crichel Down affair ended with the resignation of a minister, Thomas Dugdale, over failures in his department he had not personally committed. The doctrine sounds almost exotic now: the person at the top answers for the machine, because someone must, and the someone should be the person with the power to change it. That doctrine did not die because it was disproven. It died because everyone in a position to kill it had an interest in killing it, and nobody whose interest it served was in the room.

What the voter has noticed

The cost is not abstract. "Nothing ever changes" has become the default sentiment of British politics not because voters are sullen but because they have noticed something true. The parts of the state that fail are increasingly the parts no vote can reach. A ballot can change the face at the dispatch box; it cannot touch the quango, the framework agreement or the delivery body where the failure actually lives. A public that concludes its vote is decorative has not misunderstood the constitution. It has understood it.

The repair is not a hunt for scapegoats. It is the opposite. Scapegoating is what happens when responsibility is vague and the mob picks a face. Real accountability is a design property: fewer joins; a named owner for every public function; inquiries that report in months and bind the way aviation's do; a working presumption that wherever public power goes, a person goes with it who can be asked, and can be removed. That is also - not incidentally - the only arrangement under which a wrongly blamed official can be properly defended. You can only clear a name if a name was on the door.

None of this requires new money. It requires the one thing the current architecture was built to avoid: someone standing where the buck stops. A state in which nothing is anyone's fault is a state in which nothing is anyone's job.