Constant budget cuts, retirement and low recruitment standards have turned dysfunctional departments like DEFRA into wastelands of incompetence.
The rise in populism around the world happened because too many people are failed by Democracy
And while it's easier to see where the US went wrong with endemic political corruption, abortion and immigration they are now more comfortable with applauding dictators like Putin, because Americans are just sick of waiting for their lives to improve while politicians are bought and sold and lobbyists make out like bandits on every level.
This problem of ineffective democratic governance is spreading.
It’s now possible to undermine multiple western democracies just by making opposition to immigration central to any election like we just saw in the Netherlands and some would argue caused the election of Bors Johnson.
But the UK has an issue that only the extremists on the right like Jacob Rees Mogg who see the civil service as preventing his political agenda - he likes to blame the failure of implementation of extreme ideologies on the laziness of civil servants. But however you view the problem, the civil service’s role of finding legal or health and safety blocks lead to the failure of government across the board.
My view is that it's not laziness, it's that DEFRA are completely ineffective because while the entire civil service is there to implement an elected government’s policy, DEFRA have has no interest in admitting or fixing their mistakes - Something that can only happen when governement employees have never held a real job down so have no idea that businesses need to plan for the future and don’t work to tortoise speeds or bureaucratic timelines.
No one anywhere can justify the regulations DEFRA wrote for catteries and kennels.
There is no sense in pretending that the regulations were written to improve animal welfare because DEFRA wrote dual standards of welfare for every regulation because DEFRA deided to formulate an unworkable rating system that wasn't needed by anyone.
And three years later DEFRA are still delaying fixing their mess was because they failed our sector, closed businesses and don’t appear to have a procedure to fix their own mistakes.
The fact is that this isn’t an isolated incident because DEFRA haven't performed well in any of the areas they’re supposed to have expertise in - and it's even making the news.
DEFRA are the department responsible for addressing the farming crisis, providing harvest labour, the rural economy and food chain issues - and prior to that DEFRA allowed chemical run offs to be dumped in our rivers and now allow privatised water companies to discharge effluent across our beaches and around our coastline.
And all this prompts me to ask; is DEFRA fit for any purpose or should the people who wrote these regulations and the people standing in the way of fixing them just be terminated, tried and fined or jailed for dereliction of duty as a warning to other civil servants?