| Review of: | The politics of BSE by Richard Packer |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Michael Moran |
| Reviewed in: | Public Administration |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 85, Issue 03, Pages 857-883 |
Reviews
This is a most illuminating book, though perhaps not in quite the way the author intends. Richard Packer was Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) from 1993 to 2000 - the youngest ever Permanent Secretary in that Department, the blurb proudly tells us. Those years of course coincided with the high points of the great crisis of animal husbandry and public health, a crisis usually abbreviated to BSE and more vulgarly called Mad Cow Disease. Some of the dimensions of that crisis are now well established, not least in the multi-volume hearings, and report, of the Phillips Inquiry, though the full public health consequences are even now uncertain. Packer has some unique qualifications for writing a history of the episode. A scientist by training (his degrees are in chemistry) he was of course right at the centre of the political storm. While he has not directly used archival sources in writing this account, he did take some contemporaneous notes for his own use, and has also used his diary of these years to reconstruct some of the chain of events, notably of the years of crisis management when the scale of the disease became plain. And of course he has had access to the massive archive, now posted on the web, of the Phillips evidence and analysis (http://www.bseinquiry.gov.uk).
Much of what is in these pages is of immense value, both to students of the crisis, and to those interested in the culture of Whitehall. There are good reconstructions of the chaos of crisis management, brutally frank appraisals of civil service colleagues and politicians, and plenty of insider knowledge. The whole thing is well above the anodyne quality of civil service writing about Whitehall, and of most political memoirs. As in any institutional recollections there is also a fair amount of malicious gossip and backstabbing - utterly fascinating to about 50 insiders, and entirely tedious for the rest of us. (To do him justice, Packer generally prefers the full frontal knife attack to backstabbing: witness the character assassination of a Cabinet Secretary, pp. 224-7). But the importance of the book lies in its main conclusion, especially, given Packer 's career: 'the advent of BSE was nobody's fault and ...nothing anybody could reasonably have been expected to do would have prevented it' (p. 245). Although Packer has some critical remarks about the Phillips Report, his own views, as he acknowledges, are very close to those of Phillips. Both Packer and Phillips have an essentially fatalistic view of the whole affair. Packer starts with an easy task: demolishing crude journalistic accounts that try to pin blame for the disaster on particular individuals. (He has a powerful interest in doing this, since he was one of the potential guilty men.) He has little difficulty showing that these 'guilty men' accounts are insupportable, and that the disaster was rooted in historically engrained institutional practices. He is particularly good on the way a long-established, and hopeless, regulatory regime for slaughterhouses led to appalling animal welfare and public health consequences. His problem comes when he jumps from rejecting a crude model of individual blame to a fatalistic alternative. This fatalism stands in the way of recognizing how BSE was rooted in the cultural and institutional practices already mentioned, and in the way of recognizing that BSE is itself only one episode in an appalling history of regulatory failure in British government. Packer is so concerned to see off his critics, and to settle scores in the tedious high politics of Whitehall, that he is entirely blind to the way BSE fits this wider picture of institutional failure. The whole affair is reduced to an 'Act of God' (pp. 130 and 198). Occasionally this blinkered vision results in illuminating flashes of the bizarre condition of the official mind. Packer broadly approves of the Phillips Report, but occasionally dissents - not surprisingly - from its rather gentle criticisms. Why, he asks (p. 155), was the list of individual criticisms not balanced by a list of
Older readers will recall the monologue
The Magistrate gave his opinion That no one was really to blame And he said that he hoped the Ramsbottoms Would have further sons to their name.
To reduce BSE to the options of individual culpability or act of God is entirely to miss the significance of the episode - and to miss the opportunity to learn from it.