A Sip of Claret News
1st March 2025
On Good Governance
Nations tend to have slogans. These phrases are the meshing of politics and prose.
For France, it’s Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité. For the Americans, it’s Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. For the Brits, it’s Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, which is so wonderfully evocative of chivalry and the court of King Arthur that no one seems to mind that they haven’t a clue what it means.
In Canada, the foundational words are Peace, Order and Good Governance.
Underwhelmed? It’s hardly poetry, is it. It’s known as POGG, a wince-inducing acronym.
If you’re not sure what governance is, we’ve recently had a civics lesson on both sides of the Atlantic. Before we go into that, let’s outline some basics in case you’ve forgotten.
Democracy is presented as being little more than ticking a box once every 4 years. But that’s not right. It’s more than that.
Former Chief Justice Jonathan Sumption, so Lord Sumption to you and me, said that democracy is a process, a system of distributing power through as many agencies and individuals and groups and organisations and institutions as possible. Every entity’s ability to get stuff done is shaped and constrained by laws and a constitution, by norms and traditions, by the sheer inchoate nature of civil society.
Democracy is complex, inefficient, and unpredictable.
Governance is the machine that makes things happen – to the extent that anything does.
Good governance is civil servants doing the leg work for the elected government and for governmental institutions (hospitals, schools, pensions, food standard and safety inspections, customs, parks, police, judiciary, the military, and so on). It’s also oversight of governmental institutions and businesses to ensure that they are functioning honestly and appropriately. It’s integrating the concerns of civil society organisations from the Chamber of Commerce to the Chamber of Engineers to the chamber of the outraged, shocked and appalled.
Governance, done well, is invisible.
The Turkish economist, now at Harvard, Dani Rodrik, showed that, all other things being equal, the single best way to boost economic growth is through good governance and not through the control of the supply of money (Milton Friedman), export industries (Jeffry Sachs), unfettered capitalism (Friedrich Hayek), or state intervention (John Maynard Keynes).
So, governance, done well, is not only dull and invisible, it’s also worth the money.
Obviously, this is the best case scenario. No government will ever have perfect governance. Here’s an example: Several months after I applied for UK’s indefinite leave to remain (the American green card), the Home Office phoned me up and told me that it had lost all my original documents and they couldn’t proceed until I resubmitted them.
You know that’s true because there’s no way anyone could make that up.
In the USA, the American government is erasing governance altogether by firing great swathes of civil servants and shutting down entire departments within the state. This concentrates power in fewer hands, endangers the safety of American citizens, facilitates crony capitalism, and adds to the inherent inefficiency of democracy.
The British shouldn’t throw too many stones. The Post Office Scandal, the emerging horror of the Lucy Letby conviction, and the recent release into the public domain of hundreds of documents and emails about the evacuation of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 should give every Briton pause.
This was brought home in a recent Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/18/kabul-afghanistan-animal-airlift-whistleblower-employment-tribunal
The article reports that civil servant Josie Stewart was unfairly dismissed from her job at the Foreign Office after she backed up a colleague who was whistleblowing about the Boris-Johnson-led evacuation plan (or the lack thereof) of British troops, citizens, and Afghans who worked for the British.
The documents and emails just released shed new light on the conflicts and confusions in the Foreign Office. They showed that the Foreign Office was finding out what the then Defence Secretary Ben Wallace had decided from his tweets. That the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson lied. That the media was complicit.
Interestingly, the Employment Tribunal was able to access these documents when the Foreign Affairs Select Committee examining the withdrawal could not. In other words, the oversight mechanism to publicly examine the government was not allowed to fully do so. Nonetheless, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s report was titled Missing in Action: UK Leadership and the Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Which pretty much sums it up.
This employment tribunal and the government’s Foreign Select Committee only tell part of the story.
If you want to read what really happened, read Pen Farthing’s book, Operation Ark. It reads like a thriller. Yet it’s about the human cost of poor governance.
And long live POGG.
Pen Farthing’s book is available at all bookstores and platforms, in paperback and ebook.
Read an excerpt here: Operation Ark by Pen Farthing
Buy here from our store:
Introducing Steve Powell
Steve Powell is a retired bond trader.
He spent the first half of his career at Bankers Trust Company in New York and London. In 1994, he founded his own firm, Smith Point Investments, which he ran for fifteen years. He then wrote the fabulous thriller, Term Limits, Claret Press's bestselling novel.
His upcoming thriller, Stupid, follows a bond trader, who is in way over his head as he attempts to find his missing friend. What starts as an act of compassion becomes a relentless hunt for the truth, with the cost higher than anything he'd ever paid before.
Coming soon from Claret Press.
We are pleased to announce that we will be partaking in the Alternative Book Fair London this year!
Taking place in Islington Central Library, the Alternative Book Fair London has been developed by Islington Libraries and Indie Novella, in an effort to make publishing more accessible. By offering a week of free events, their goal is to encourage more people, especially from diverse and working-class backgrounds, to tell their stories.
Steve Sheppard, author of the comedy thriller Poor Table Manners, will be there, so make sure to find him on March 8th, on the 2nd Floor!
For more information, visit the link below:
In a world where technology is constantly developing and increasingly taking over our lives, we are excited to announce we are publishing a thriller ripped from the headlines, The Mortality Thief by Mark Griffin.
Pencil-pushing risk-analyst Luke Smith has a bounty on his head and the police on his trail. A file accidentally sent to him by an investment bank is his only clue. Inside lies the secret people will kill to keep hidden.
Framed and on the run, hunted by an assassin and pursued by the public, Luke has no choice but to make London's underbelly his refuge.
Can Luke solve the file's mystery, or will he become just another mortality statistic?
Coming soon from Claret Press.
We are excited to present the next episode in our online series Adaptations and Conversations, in which Katie Isbester (Publisher) and her friend, Michelle, discuss the award-winning book Bridget Jones' Diary by Helen Fielding, and its film adaptations.
The original book, Bridget Jones' Diary, was more an updating of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice than an adaptation. Since then, Bridget Jones has become an industry in itself: four books and a how-to manual. Plus the movies.
What does its success say about our society and ourselves?
Join the conversation and tell us what you think on Tuesday 11th March 2025, 7:30pm. It's a free particpatory event on the Claret Press YouTube Live channel.
The link to the YouTube livestream is below:
We are delighted to announce that Former Minister of State for Europe, Labour MP Denis MacShane, will be joining us for our next livestream of Ask the Author.
A renowned commentator of politics both in the UK and the EU, activist and writer, MacShane has been one of Labour's fiercest critics. This live-stream broadcast is open to questions and comments from those who are grappling with the tough questions of politics.
Join the free conversation on Tuesday 25th Match 2025, 7pm-8pm, on the Claret Press YouTube Live channel.
The link to watch the livestream on YouTube is below:
We had the pleasure of partaking in the IPG Spring Conference this past week!
While we consider ourselves well versed in the art of publishing, Claret Press is still growing. There's always room to learn and build meaningful connection, and the Independent Publishers Guild's Spring Conference this year was just the place for that.
We heard two fabulous keynote speakers, Tim Harford of BBC's More of Less on statistics, and children's author Frank Cottrell-Boyce on the power of novels to anchor ourselves in a changing world. We also had talks of AI and how it is undoubtedly stealing from creators. As tech entrepreneur Ed Newton-Rex said, generative AI needs three things: computers in the form of chips, data science engineers to write code, and content to learn from. The first two are paid for - and for a healthy sum too. For some reason we permit tech to NOT pay for creative content. He advised that we tell our government that we want our creators to get fair pay for their work.
''We cannot be mere consumers of good governance, we must be participants; we must be co-creators.''
- Rohini Nilekani, founder of a non-profit focused on water and sanitation issues in India
