The Economist ~ Cabinet Structure

Day 1,682, 09:34 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313



Dear friends,

As you’ve probably all gathered by now, I’m running for President of the UK on the 5th of July. This series of articles is hopefully a combination of manifesto and insight into my plans and thoughts. It’s not written in blood, so I do appreciate comments and feedback, and will take it all into account when (and if) I actually put my plans into place.

This article is about something both mundane and vitally important- cabinet structure. When I was last elected I tried to put some of my experience in cabinet into practice by redesigning the way cabinet works. It stuck for a few months, then we slowly backslid into the model we’ve had ever since. Let me first of all explain cabinet for people who are not familiar with it.

In most cases the Cabinet of the UK is basically the money spending part of the UK. They are people appointed by the President to lead the various initiatives the UK has- most of which were brought in long ago and just kind of carry on going out of momentum. The main Ministries that nearly always exist are:

Ministry of Finance
Ministry of Home Affairs
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Ministry of Defence

The reason these exist seem to be obvious. There are also extra ministries which are a bit more superfluous and tend to vary depending on the President. We’ve had Ministers of Legislative Affairs, Ministers of Health, Ministers of Trade and so on. Usually what happens is a CP decides either an idea is too big for a Ministry or no one individual can manage a large workload and thus appoints another.

The problem I have with this system is it makes the position of “Minister” into a do-er position rather than a leader position. When your Ministers are actually doing all the work themselves, they’re not Ministers anymore. It’s got to the point now where it’s all so confusing nobody really knows who is doing what, and in any case the answer is often “not much”. People take a title for the prestige rather than out of a sense of duty. The idea that anyone would take on a job as a reward is the opposite of the situation a couple years back. Ministerial posts are difficult, time consuming and the rewards of it are reputation and success, not title-wearing prestige.


It's about what you do, not what you're called

The change I hope to make to the cabinet is fairly large. It’s my plan to do away with the whole idea of Ministries altogether and reorganise the whole government from the ground up. It’s my experience that once you drop below Minister level the hierarchy of government tends to turn into so much crap. Especially in Ministries with more than one or two helpers (like MoHA/MoFA) you just end up with a herd of well-meaning players who do very little, and one or two who do a lot. That’s not their fault- it’s just a simple fact that without fixed roles, it’s impossible for them to know what they need to do and impossible to hold them to account.

For that reason when I take applications for my government I’m not going to ask for applications based on which job you want, but rather a kind of open CV about your experience, skills and most importantly interests. There are a vast amount of jobs I want doing this term, and each job will have a specific role, title and will ultimately need someone to do it. Since some of these will involve logging in once a day and some will involve a lot more, there will be something for everyone with half a brain and some willpower.

So now imagine this vast scattering of posts. Some people will probably be annoyed at not getting a fancy title, but titles are, frankly, a load of dung. For example, who do you think I would need more as CP- a Minister of Defence, or a supplier who can give out weapons in #MoD? The answer is a supplier every time. At the end of the day I can quickly step into the shoes of a MoD- in fact there are half a dozen older players, ex-Ministers and ex-Presidents who can do it. But a supplier needs to be reliable, dedicated and have the time to do it. A supplier is a lot rarer find than an MoD candidate, trust me.



Anyway, obviously there has to be some structure above these nominal posts. My plan is to group these posts by their function. For example a market analyst whose job is to track price changes in the UK markets might be grouped as a financial position. Someone whose job is to analyse prices abroad and advise the army on the best price might be attached to the military side of things. The important thing is to make sure that each role goes where it should be, not just where it happens to have been for the last x number of years, or where the title might suggest.

I will go into more detail about the exact nature of posts as I release my substantive manifestos on the key areas- finance, foreign affairs, domestic affairs and the military.

Above these posts will be my “cabinet”. Their job will be to communicate information between all the various positions (where needed) and to me. I’m quite a hands-on type of leader, so I’ll be talking to all the various post-holders myself as often as I can get hold of them. The truth is that government is nothing more than the distillation of information to the point where you can make a decision with all the facts- or at least as many as you can get your hands on. The more facts you have, the stronger the position you are in. In fact the whole structure of my government will be designed to maximise the amount of information we have at all times.

Thanks for reading,

Iain



Ps. I'm not buying votes for these articles, and I hope nobody else does either 🙂

PPs. Thanks for all the support so far. I've had a lot of messages from UK citizens and players around the world and they're all appreciated 😃