The parliamentary system in the UK was born in a time of civil unrest and war: the English Civil War. I’ve long believed that as a result it was conceived to impose stability, and for the last four hundred years it’s been relatively successful in this capacity.

Moving into the 21st century, we’re beginning to uncover it’s limitations: it’s neither adaptable nor responsive enough for the challenges we face.

Our Party political system doesn’t help much due to its inherent risk aversion: risking electoral failure for the sake of innovation? Consequently the main Parties have migrated to an safe, but unproductive, middle ground, where they swap places in power only when the current incumbent makes themselves unelectable.

It’s not limited to Government, our Western style society has become to heavily dependent on legislation and convention to decide what is, or is not acceptable, and what can, or can’t be done.

Dependence on complex judicial guidance is dulling the ability of individuals to make reasoned decisions, generating an irrational fear of risk, and leading to innovative paralysis in the face of change.

Unfortunately, it’s risks we’re going to have to take, and change we need to embrace if we’re going to survive the coming transition to what could be a better and fairer World… may be the best system will evolve along the way.

Tax credits were an obscure approach to returning public money to those most in need, but often the least likely to understand how get them. The system complexity justifies a tax credits section in the Revenue and Customs website.

Cutting VAT by 2.5% in order to stimulate the economy never seemed very likely to work. Unless ‘work’ is defined as creating additional work for businesses that need to cut cost. Several market analysts speculated this tax cut was administratively simpler than trying to get the Treasury to work out how to give tax refunds.

Finally, there’s the latest plan to encourage the employment of long term unemployed by offering employers £2500 for each individual. On Bloomberg this morning, Hugo Sellert — Head of Economic research at Monster Worldwide — was less than convinced. He was a little concerned about skewing the labour market: shouldn’t individual employment be determined on experience and skills, not whether there’s a handout?

My thoughts turned to another key discipline of Agile development, refactoring: leaving code cleaner, and easier to understand, than you found it. This isn’t done as a separate activity. Whenever you’re working on a particular piece of code, look at it as a whole and ask yourself, “could this be improved”?

Refactoring the legislative system of the Country would be a huge job, but done incrementally not impossible. Take an Agile approach and one day we might find we have a much less buggy society.