At the age of 66 I feel like a first-time voter. As a member of the House of Lords, I was not allowed to vote in the last three general elections. But I retired from the House in 2021, so democracy here I come. I shall scan the ballot paper with interest: who is standing for head of the Office of Budget Responsibility, or chair of the Climate Change Committee? I would like to read their manifestos, since they seem to be the folk whose ‘models’ tell the country what it must do, brooking no dissent.
What’s that you say? It doesn’t work that way? How quaint of me to think that the mighty quangocrats who wield so much power should have meaningful accountability to parliament, let alone the people. Joking aside, I have now seen how government works close up. Stealthily but steadily, almost all real political power has been stripped from elected councillors, MPs and even ministers over the past two decades by ‘officials’ and handed to ‘experts’ in quangos, nationalised industries, arms-length bodies and courts.
Watch a clip of Yes Minister and it’s like looking at something from the political Cretaceous period, because Humphrey and Hacker were on equal terms. Today, when Hacker suggests a policy, Humphrey reminds him that he has devolved responsibility to the National Paperclips Authority, or it’s not within his power, or judicial review will stop it, or it’s against human rights law, or he’s bullying Bernard by asking him to turn up to work.
MPs are little more than human shields whose job is to take the blame for decisions made by bureaucrats
Rory Stewart tells alarming stories of civil service obstruction in his memoir. When he tried to stop aid going to jihadis in Syria, he was told it was not within his power, then that the decision came from a ‘small group’ of senior civil servants who outranked him. He called their bluff, exposing these excuses as false. But when he wrote to the prime minister, his draft was edited to remove his argument; when he reinserted it, they ‘lightly edited’ – i.e. re-removed – it. When he wrote his own letter to the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser, the chap refused to pass it on.
In my nine years in the House of Lords, I saw this at first hand. No matter how cogent my argument in the chamber, or even in a select committee, and no matter how polite the minister’s reply, most of the time she or he might as well have just been saying: Sir Humphrey says no. Who was the monkey and who the organ grinder? Parliament was mostly an elaborate charade. It was one of the reasons I decided to retire.
This growing democratic deficit is not only a slow-motion coup; it’s surely a big cause of our stagnation. More and more people are drawing salaries for interfering in more and more ways in small matters that affect the freedom of ordinary people. There are few quangos with a vested interest in change. The economy is increasingly run for producers, not consumers.
For example, the sloth-like speed of our planning system is a lucrative symbiosis that rewards local officials, consultants and their lobbyist chums while its barriers to entry suit the developers just fine. The planning system fattens inexorably, and is indifferent to criticism because who is in charge? Not the housing minister: he’s just there to take the blame, while being quietly thankful it stops any development in his own constituency.
All bureaucratic bodies do the same thing, regardless of their titles: they maximise their budgets and widen their remits. The Office for Civil Society, the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and the Zebra Crossing Authority (I made the last one up) all have the same goal: to expand and endure. I recently spoke to a quango chairman who, with great honesty and no little pride, listed his main achievements: ‘I’ve doubled our budget and increased our head count by 2,000.’
That same quango now gives itself ‘up to’ (i.e. at least) four months to reply to the simplest application. It darkly hints that decisions might come quicker if you hire its commercial arm to prepare your application – which is blackmail by any other name. I dare not name it for fear of retribution when I next need its permission for something.
The bigger these agencies get, the longer it takes them to make a decision, the more time they spend talking to themselves and the less time they have for us, their supposed customers. Notice how the key people are often ‘on courses’ (golf ones, sometimes).
MPs are little more than human shields whose job is to take the blame for decisions made by bureaucrats. The ever-growing reach of parliamentary standards rules, implemented by appointed outsiders, keeps them in line. This is not to deny that bad behaviour happens and must be punished. But even virtuous MPs live in fear of a vexatious claim of misbehaviour launched by a politically motivated enemy in the permanent bureaucracy.
Even ministers are scapegoats. The job of the health secretary is to apologise for waiting lists and scandals, not fix them. The job of the defence secretary is to shield admirals from blame for ordering two aircraft carriers and forgetting to equip them with planes. The job of the foreign secretary is to represent the views of the Foreign Office (and foreigners) to us, not vice versa. For many ministers, this devolving of responsibility is welcome and convenient. Notice how successive Post Office ministers from Sir Ed Davey onward enthusiastically denied they could intervene in the Horizon scandal.
The ministers who thrive are those who go along with the system, obediently setting up OBRs (Osborne, G.) and CCCs (Miliband, E.) and football regulators (Sunak, R.). The ones who resist are kicked out for ‘bullying’ (Raab, D., Patel, P.) or eating a cake at a party mostly attended by – you guessed it – officials (Johnson, B.). The leaking and briefing is against the ones who try to resist the growth of the democratic deficit, I notice. It’s not in that sense ‘political’.
It would be a mistake to imply that civil servants are evil. There is no devious plan. The common refrain from Tory ministers in recent years – ‘my civil servants are actually great guys’ – is usually genuine and not always a case of Stockholm Syndrome. But the alacrity with which civil servants have seized on pre-election ‘purdah’ to cancel all Tory initiatives, even ones started months ago, has shocked several ministers I know.
If you talk to quangocrats, it quickly becomes apparent that the thing that annoyed them most about Liz Truss – and boy did they hate her – was that she criticised the Bank of England and fired a senior Treasury civil servant. The effrontery! The Bank of England could not believe its luck when its own disastrous mistakes over interest rates and liability-driven investments were blamed almost entirely on her.
Labour promises to kick the last hereditary peers out of the Lords, completing its transformation into a giant patronage quango. Real reform of the Lords, if it ever comes, must not take the form of elevating experts from different areas of industry and policy: that would be a further victory for the bureaucratic elite. Instead I would grant the power of appointing peers to local councils, or even call people up randomly for service in the Lords like jury service. That would really give Sir Humphrey conniptions.
The toolmaker’s son heading for No. 10 is not just the bureaucrat’s friend, but a knighted quangocrat
Of course, ministers get to appoint the chairs of quangos but even that power is shrinking. Latterly, the Tories in government found that their preferred appointees were kept off shortlists by civil servants on some pretext or other. Partly this was ideological, anybody with a whiff of conservatism being deemed ‘not impartial’ (it happened to me), whereas lefties were fine, but a lot of it was just civil servants gradually expanding their power. I suspect the Starmer administration will not find it as easy as Tony Blair’s did to stuff their chums on public boards.
The toolmaker’s son heading for No. 10 is not just the bureaucrat’s friend, but a knighted quangocrat himself. He is one of them. They are going to love him, but will they allow him any power? To start with, at least, they will let him believe he is in charge. Yes, Sir Keir, of course, Sir Keir, right away, Sir Keir. But the moment one of his cabinet ministers starts asking awkward questions about why something is taking so long, watch them resist. Wes Streeting is my candidate for the first ministerial resignation for ‘bullying’ his officials, for which read asking them to actually reform the NHS.
Brexit was the one victory of the Tories over the bureaucracy – and that was forced on them by events. When David Cameron made a referendum promise he thought a coalition would prevent him having to keep, democracy sneaked through. The democratic deficit in Brussels had grown too obvious to be ignored: the euro-clerisy had overreached. For me, it was the three years of frantic efforts of the establishment to stop, reverse, water down, deflect and delay Brexit that brought home just how bad the democratic deficit has become at home as well as in Brussels. It is a shibboleth of the new elite that referendums must never, ever happen again.
So the ballot paper that confronts me on 4 July will disappoint. I know that real power lies at court, not in parliament. I shall vote Conservative, but only because my local MP is a friend. And I pray that somehow, a groundswell is growing to kick back against the stagnation imposed on a great nation by battalions of beadles and busybodies.