The rise and rise of the ‘tantric sector'
For the past 25 years I have commuted to London from Otford, a delightful village outside Sevenoaks. I do this in adherence to Sutherland's Law – not the excellent 1970s BBC series featuring Iain Cuthbertson, but a rule of my own devising which states that you should always travel from the smallest airport or railway station possible.
Recently, much of the station car-park was closed so a colossal pedestrian footbridge could be constructed 50 yards away; this replaced a pedestrian level crossing at the same spot, which lay along a footpath connecting one part of Otford to another. In 25 years, I have seen pedestrians using it on three occasions. Yet the construction of the bridge must have cost well over £1 million. This seemed insane.
Being a fair-minded person, I wondered if the bridge had been constructed at the request of the locals. Nope. The Otford Village Voice website revealed – in a piece wittily headlined 'A Bridge Too Far' – that local opinion was against the bridge. The Otford Society opposed it in March 2017. 'At that hearing, adjudicators from Kent County Council supported Otford's concerns about safety and inconvenience and threw out Network Rail's appeal with a unanimous 5-0 verdict… yet Network Rail decided to appeal [again].' (Given the legal and bureaucratic costs involved in this process, and the final-salary pensions of everyone involved, we should now perhaps revise the bridge's cost upwards by another £1 million or so.) This despite the fact that no injury has been recorded on the level crossing since it opened in 1862.
It's a textbook case of what happens when a large bureaucratic entity meets local knowledge. The bureaucracy is only interested in its own narrow remit (usually blame avoidance through slavish adherence to established procedure), whereas local opinion is alert to the second-order effects of the decision. What the locals spotted was that in many ways a bridge (with 64 sometimes icy steps) was more dangerous than a level crossing. It would also lead people to ditch the safe shortcut by instead walking down a dangerous road. The Otford Village Voice is a family publication, and so did not phrase it in this way, but they saw that the odds of someone being mown down by a speeding Milf in a Porsche Cayenne high on Whispering Angel while late for the prep-school pick-up (a demographic which comprises 30 per cent of all Sevenoaks road traffic) were higher than those of being hit by a train. But the bridge went ahead anyway. As Leon Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed (now there's a segue you weren't expecting): 'From the point of view of… society, the policy of the bureaucracy is striking in its contradictions and inconsistencies. But the same policy appears very consistent from the standpoint of strengthening the power of the new commanding stratum.'
But the real scandal here is not the bridge, even though there are a thousand ways you could improve public safety more effectively with £1 million. It's that date: 2017. That's eight years ago. If you are going to make dumb decisions, at least do it quickly.
The traditional description of the British economy usually divides it into two: the public sector and the private sector. I prefer a new classification. Alongside the public and private sectors there is now what I call the vast tantric sector – 'tantric' because its main motivation is to drag everything out while delaying consummation indefinitely. It's basically a form of white-collar welfare. Not everyone in HR, procurement, legal, finance or compliance or indeed management consultancy works in the tantric sector, but many do. Their effect is to slow down all useful activity, while occasionally making themselves seem indispensable by solving problems they themselves defined or created.
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