Restore Britain: none so blind

Y’know, I must be a terrible writer because some people seem to think that my previous post was about hospital parking. It seems I need to express the point in more explicit terms. The point is that Restore Britain is churning out the usual lightweight bullet point slop that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny - and it is not a trivial problem.

Rupert Lowe is farting out this stuff without first coordinating with his own people. That means every policy announcement is as much a surprise to his lieutenants as it is everyone else - meaning poor Charlie Downes and Harrison Pitt have to justify this garbage whether they think it’s a good idea or not. The party is constantly in reactive mode, responding to the whim of the leader - which is the exact same top-down mode Reform operates on.

Of course, I’m assuming this stuff is going out without their knowledge because Downes and Pitt cannot possibly be dumb enough to have allowed Lowe to tweet this stuff without supervision.

But it also says a lot about party priorities. Of all the things I could think of to include in a health policy, free hospital parking would be nowhere near the top of the list. As I understand it, there are varying approaches around the country, and it’s really up to local NHS trusts how they manage their own estates. Wrexham hospitals have free parking, which is apparently causing chaos, prompting some to say "Maybe the hospital should introduce parking charges as I'm sure there are non-hospital users taking advantage of the free parking."

For my part, I would be looking at why hospital car parks are so horrendously oversubscribed. My own reading of the problem is that there are discharge bottlenecks in the system and too many unnecessary hospital admissions, which requires a policy to deal with the dysfunctional care system and the GP system. This is why you might want to write a health policy before churning out sloppy slogans. Policy should inform messaging, not vice versa.

Still though, my post didn’t go down very well with Restore supporters. As with Farage’s Ukip, when you’re dealing with a cult of personality, they will go to extraordinary lengths to defend this dross. You’re simply meant to “get on board” and not complain that the party is making all the same errors as every Farage -led enterprise. This I’m not willing to do, even if it costs me the little support I have.

There’s a reason I poke holes in slop policy. It’s because somebody needs to do it before the opposition gets stuck in, and more to the point, I’m wired to do it. In my former career I was a database developer for a lot of years, and in that time I worked on gas invoicing systems, accountancy systems, facilities management systems, aerospace engineering systems, route-planning software, CRM systems, document management systems, inventory systems, legal systems, citizens advice and welfare systems, social services systems, estate security systems, and a couple of short stints with the MoD.

This isn't a boast because all of my jobs have been as mundane and dull as it gets, but the one thing that's kept me going is the sheer diversity of applications for the same technology, and I've taken a look under the hood of most major industries and the public sector.

In this gig you get a real insight into how things really work, and a realisation that things that seemingly work very straightforwardly on the surface depend on sophisticated systems and a lot of structured thinking, where even small tweaks to the system can have major ramifications, some of which can be disastrous if you failed to anticipate them. Most DBAs have made at least one major error in their career usually because things didn't work the way you assumed.

This informs my approach to policy analysis. Before you even think about tinkering with things, you have to look at why something works the way it does, why previous attempts to improve it have failed, what went wrong when they tried, and whether you still face the same obstacles. Many times have I rocked up to work with a brilliant idea only to be laughed at by more seasoned DBAs who've tried the same.

As such, I've learned not to tell managers that fixes are easy or quick, because you never know until you've done a preliminary analysis. Removing a field or changing a datatype can seriously mess things up in ways you never imagined, and no matter how many times you run it in the test environment, you can never be wholly sure it will work in the live production environment. Maybe virtualisation and cloning has solved this problem but a lot of businesses are still working on clunky twenty year old systems that are simply too complex to replace. The HBOS deeds vault still ran on 1990's green screens last time I looked and they scour ebay for microchip spares.

That's the reason I'm suspicious of politicians who tell me there are simple and fast fixes to complex policy areas, especially when they show no evidence of understanding how the system works and lack the curiosity to ask basic questions. I know a bullshit artist when I see one.

Again, I know this from experience because when I was younger I'd often assume systems would work so much better if only I was in charge, only to learn that things evolved a certain way for legacy reasons, and it isn't worth the cost and of trying to unpick settled decisions when you can optimise in other ways. This is why I'm very sceptical about ECHR withdrawal after looking at all the circular dependencies. You have to be prepared for the possibility of screwing things up beyond repair and getting kicked out.

This is all to say that you really want to think about things before meddling with them, and you don't want to tell people you can fix things if you don't know for a fact that you can. That does tend to piss people off - as the Tories found to their great cost. If this point hasn’t landed by now, I don’t see much of a long term future for Restore or Reform. Even if either can get elected, they’re not getting re-elected.