Producer capture

For big organisations the fleeting contact with any individual customer can become less important than the continual orders from departments and head office. Internal processes influence reward more than the service given to the customer. And internal processes can be the result of political jockeying among head office departments, which are several layers away from the customers.

This can have a direct effect on customers, as John Humphrys tells in the case of a flight attendant. What's really striking is the bad experiences reported with the NHS. He had taken his small son to the local A&E.

It could scarcely have been a more trivial injury - a splinter in his finger - but it was swollen and turning septic and I had made a bit of a mess of trying to get it out myself.

Neither the nurse I saw first nor the doctor who joined her would do it. Not because they couldn't - it would have taken them a few minutes - but because of the rules which say only A&E units with specially trained paediatric staff can deal with children. That meant having to travel miles into Central London to another hospital.

They told me they did not have "after-care" facilities in case of complications. But it's only a splinter, I said, not a life-threatening injury. It made no difference. Rules are rules.

So off we went and eventually - after seeing two receptionists, two nurses, three doctors of varying seniority and one X-ray technician and receiving a large dose of painkiller (unwanted) and a bottle of antibiotic medicine (unused) - the splinter was removed.

The patient, I am happy to say, survived with no complications whatsoever, but what should have taken a minute or two had taken five hours and heaven knows how much it ended up costing the poor old taxpayer.

And he attacks the self-serving, vacuous slogans with which state bodies patronise us at our expense.

When the state provides a service, the body providing it is usually big, and more interested in serving its central masters than the local people who ultimately pay for it. In this model the local community has hardly any influence over its police, hospitals and schools - and the aim of bureaucrats, both in Whitehall and on the ground, is to keep it that way. So much more comfortable.

That is why direct democracy is so important.

The clunking state (where have I heard that well chosen adjective before?) is incapable of making the services it provides responsive and light on their feet.

Just as the cumbersome structure of taxes and benefits restricts mobility. The Reform think tank claims that underlying child poverty (net of transfers) has risen, and the withdrawal of means-tested benefits means that some gain only 11p for every additional £1 earned.

1,875,000 people face marginal effective tax rates of over 60 per cent in 2008-09 compared to 760,000 people in 1997-98.

Politicians' vanity has a lot to answer for. Frighteningly, they genuinely think they alone can provide proper services and set the 'right' income levels for households.

Next - forgetful of Canute - they'll be imagining that they can change the climate. Oh ... they do.