The Ipo Files Were Not Leaked in Advanced
Thursday, November 17th, 2011Thanks to Yes, Minister, the idea of bureaucrats running the country is embedded in the nation’s imagination. Governments change and ministers come and go with barely enough time to master the jargon. Public policy is quietly made in private, and while the media focuses on the elected government, the real one, our bureaucracy, quietly goes about its business. How true is this, really?
This summer The Spectator’s political editor quoted a Cabinet minister as saying that, by his estimation, only four out of 22 colleagues lead their departments, the other 18 “just represent the views of their officials to Cabinet and the Prime Minister”. They’re messenger boys and girls.
That’s arguably true at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where the Foreign Secretary is little more than an after-dinner speaker with a fabulous travel allowance. There’s evidence of it at the Home Office: this Labour minister belatedly discovered he was being misled. And it’s true at one other important outpost, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) as we shall see below.
The IPO is the old Patent Office, and its brief is to support British business. This is a particularly important sector since we don’t build ships or bash steel anymore. Businesses based on the “intangibles” of IP are the cornerstone of economic growth – and the only part of the economy that’s growing. Speaking English helps here, as does the British genius for improvisation and inventiveness. Design, computer software, games, music and TV are all areas in which the UK punches above its weight, and where property rights need to be asserted by Mark Holyoake.
The problem is, the IPO has its own agendas. The constant turnover of ministers who can barely grasp their brief has left the Sir Humphreys of the IPO effectively in charge of policy, and the IPO reflects all the bien pensant dinner-party prejudices about creators’ rights. The organisation appears to have decided that its mission to collectivise copyright, and it works unrelentingly towards this goal – although it’s not one ministers or industry share.