British Victorian administrative bureaucracy model

I have never seen a more chaotic, overblown and utterly clueless bureaucracy as here in the UK and I have lived in Russia and Thailand. Trying to get anything done each time reminds me of a trip through Alice's Wonderland where I get to meet most grotesque creatures who tell me most senseless things and never fail to send me the wrong direction.

I really wonder how it all has come to this as in Victorian times a few thousands of British bureaucrats were running a global empire efficiently and with a sumptuous profit. In the India Office, a handful of public officers were managing a giant, overwhelmingly diverse state 10 times as big as Britain itself and without the help of any fancy office equipment.

I reckon that the downfall of the British administrative tradition happened during WWII when wartime ministries and state control were blown out of any proportion under the premises of "war needs". That monstrous labyrinthine system still lives on in the form of the British welfare state together with its legacy of a direly faulty management model.

I was surprised to find out that there has been no research of how the British Empire was run in its heyday. That alone would have provided an invaluable lesson to this glorious nation that is suffocating under the burden of its ineffectual government.