Three interesting pieces on policy-making by politicians and civil servants, happiness and (police) budgeting in today’s (11th April) Times (of London) in the Opinion section. This last one was by the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police who makes some interesting observations on matching budgets to policy objectives relating to what the police should be doing with constrained budgets, while the comments on Happiness and GDP are by Libby Purves who reviews what people really want in terms of quality of life and the efforts of the Statistical Services in measuring “beyond” GDP.
The opinion article entitled War in Libya: What a godsend for Whitehall was written by none other than Sir Humphrey Appleby as a memo to Bernard Woolley; and clearly he is no longer enjoying his retirement as much as he should. He reasserts the primacy of the civil service in policy making and belittles the efforts of Prime Ministers and minor politicians in actually governing the country. What would Gord and Reg make of this piece of mischief-making?
