Small Is Beautiful?

President Bauzá's right hand. A question is how far to the right is the right-hand man. Josep Aguiló, vice-president and in command of the economy, industry, employment, business. For a representative of what is intended to be a "small" government, he has got himself one hell of a big department.

Aguiló takes control of Balearic finances amidst a pantomime routine being played out by the governmental incomers and outgoers. It's one to do with the state of the finances in the islands and specific administrations. The government's debt is this high, say the incomers. Oh no it isn't, respond the outgoers. Palma council's up to its neck to this level of debt. Oh no it isn't.

Let's just accept that the finances aren't very good. They are bad enough that the Balearic parliament is owed several million euros by the regional government and is in serious danger of not being able to pay its staff. There's just one example.

The pantomime routine is familiar enough. New lot comes in, blames the previous lot. Aguiló is blaming the previous lot for having approved a budget in 2008 that was too ambitiously expansionist. As it turned out. The Antich administration was clobbered by economic crisis, but it, like the central government, fooled itself into not believing what was happening. Maybe it was a case of trying to keep up spirits, but when Zapatero famously announced there was no crisis, he did so at a time when he was driving an economy whose wheels were fast coming off.

The new government's mantra is one of austerity and small government. Austerity we can probably understand. Can't pay, won't pay, because there isn't any money. But what is small government?

On the face of it President Bauzá's small government is about having fewer ministries and fewer departments within these ministries. The number of directorate-generals have been slashed to the extent that only of the new super-ministries, Biel Company's agriculture-environment-land behemoth, has more or less retained the same number of departments.

Moving the furniture around on the organisation structure doesn't amount to small government. Some savings may be evident from tossing the odd wormhole-ridden Welsh dresser into a skip, but the result is one of being not as large rather than small; the tasks of government remain much the same even if there are fewer bodies to perform them. Maybe it's because they are expected to work harder, but the salaries of Bauzá's cabinet will in fact increase.

Small government is a political philosophy as opposed to a way of drawing an organisational chart. On the principle that structure follows strategy, which it does, or should do, then Bauzá's administration bears a strong resemblance to that of President Antich. The new structure, though, obscures the strategy. Quite deliberately so, you fancy, as this is where small government really kicks in.

Small government, so the theory would have it, is a means of getting government out of people's hair, of not interfering overly in citizens' day to day. The concept, and you can also call it limited government, goes right back to the American founding fathers; Thomas Jefferson was deeply suspicious of governments that were too powerful.

Limiting the degree to which governments control people's lives and tell them how to live is a positive, but Jefferson's principles are not what small government has come to mean. Instead it is shorthand for government not spending money. It can also mean that demands on citizens to spend money, in the form of taxes, are reduced. But they still have to pay somewhere along the line. And the line is one of deregulation and privatisation.

The CCOO union, as I remarked the other day, was probably overstating it when it raised fears of privatisation in education, but the fact that it has raised it makes it a possibility. It is the process of government potentially relinquishing its direct hold over certain provisions that leads to the question about Sr. Aguiló. How far might he go?

The extent of measures that the new government might enact raises again the question as to how much the local Partido Popular is being guided or driven by the national party. Mariano Rajoy, who is likely to succeed Zapatero, has said that what will happen in the Balearics will be an "advance" on what the PP would do nationally. Without overtly saying so, Rajoy is implying that the Balearics are a test bed, an experiment. It's how far the experiment is meant to go that is the issue.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.