Fred De Fossard is Head of the British Prosperity Unit at the Legatum Institute.
British democracy doesn’t die in darkness, it dies strangled by process. For all Conservative ministers’ complaints about the progressive-left blob that governs policymaking in the United Kingdom, one of their abiding habits is to keep empowering them through their own actions.
Two examples come to mind, and they should be top of the list of reforms for any future conservative administration in Britain. One is the inexorable rise of government via consultation. The other is the march of arms-length bodies (or, quangos) which govern the country without democratic control, which we see being explored in the Post Office-Horizon public inquiry.
Public consultations have been sold as a way of increasing transparency and the quality of government. In reality they have often become Potemkin exercises where the Government is able to signal that it is doing something without actually doing it; or, worse, a policy colonisation process by a self-selecting public-sector clique of lobbyists, charities, and interest groups.
Despite there being no legal requirement to conduct them – something too few ministers grasp – public consultations have become one of the prominent features of Government today, part of our de facto 21s-century constitution, whose pillars also include the Human Rights Act, Climate Change Act, and the Equality Act.
The year has began with an illustrative nugget. After promising to allow businesses to trade using imperial measurements, and announcing their intention multiple times over the last few years, the Government has all but abandoned the measure. Only one, small, expansion of choice has been permitted: the ability to sell wine in pint-sized bottles. This climbdown follows a public consultation whose responses supported retaining the status quo.
This is another example of how the Conservative Party in office has surrendered its political instincts or interest in its voters. It had proposed a modest increase in choice for businesses and consumers, one which was overwhelmingly popular among Conservative voters, and – according to YouGov – reasonably popular across all age groups, only to kill it through consultation. This, the Government described, was a process of “careful consideration”.
If Conservative ministers have decided that it is a bad idea, they should say so. Instead, we are left with the situation where policy is decided by a self-selecting group of people who chose to respond to a consultation, wildly out of step with the views of the public as a whole.
This is far from a Government elected on a mandate to break the constitutional deadlock that prevented our departure from the EU: it shows a retreat into process, with voters a mere afterthought.
With the Conservative Party so far behind in the polls, one might assume ministers would utilise the sovereignty of Parliament in what time they have left to do a few popular things, and legislate for the views of Tory supporters. There is still no sign of this happening; indeed quite the opposite, if the legislative agenda in the recent King’s Speech is any guide.
The Government seems intent on eroding democracy further, by handing more powers to arms-length bodies, so the state will get even bigger, but less accountable. The Competition and Markets Authority is soon to be given new powers to regulate the digital economy; a brand-new regulator will oversee English football, despite the country boasting the most successful footballing economy in the world.
Meanwhile, nothing is done to reduce the economically destructive actions of bodies like the Environment Agency and Natural England, which prevent hundreds of thousands of homes being built, and forbid the dredging of rivers, regardless of the risk of flooding.
Conservative MPs used to tell their constituents that once we left the European Union, accountability for Government would once again rest with Parliament, rather than an agency in Brussels. Instead, the independent, but taxpayer-funded regulator now reigns supreme.
The public inquiry into the Post Office-Horizon scandal shows the disastrous places this can lead. In 2010, while the state-owned Post Office was busy falsely prosecuting postmasters for theft thanks to their own faulty software, Ed Davey (then the responsible minister) wrote to the Justice for SubPostmasters Alliance to say that the “Government has adopted an arms-length relationship” with the Post Office, so it is run “without interference” from elected ministers.
Taxpayers and voters pay the bill, but nobody is held to account. That is not democracy.
This approach is fast running out of road. Arms-length bodies have been given the power to ruin people’s lives and effectively to make laws of their own. From the CMA trying to reorganise the digital economy, to the Bank of England imposing diversity requirements on financial services firms, or the Climate Change Committee’s attempts to halt road-building and cut demand for flying, we live in an era of suffocating regulatory supremacy.
Rishi Sunak has even signed away corporation-tax setting powers to the OECD, surrendering something which no prime minister has ever done before.
The resigned and despondent Conservative Party sits in a powerful legislature and does little with it, leaving us in a state of cosmetic democracy, as my colleague Radomir Tylecote has put it. This is a sorry state of affairs for a Government whose predecessor got Brexit done for a reason: so that democracy could indeed “take back control”.
Instead, ministers act like chairmen, rubber stamping the decisions of their departments, instead of leading them. If British conservatism has a future, it must stop government-by-stakeholder, re-democratise the state, and end our recent experiment in the banal tyranny of process.
Fred De Fossard is Head of the British Prosperity Unit at the Legatum Institute.
British democracy doesn’t die in darkness, it dies strangled by process. For all Conservative ministers’ complaints about the progressive-left blob that governs policymaking in the United Kingdom, one of their abiding habits is to keep empowering them through their own actions.
Two examples come to mind, and they should be top of the list of reforms for any future conservative administration in Britain. One is the inexorable rise of government via consultation. The other is the march of arms-length bodies (or, quangos) which govern the country without democratic control, which we see being explored in the Post Office-Horizon public inquiry.
Public consultations have been sold as a way of increasing transparency and the quality of government. In reality they have often become Potemkin exercises where the Government is able to signal that it is doing something without actually doing it; or, worse, a policy colonisation process by a self-selecting public-sector clique of lobbyists, charities, and interest groups.
Despite there being no legal requirement to conduct them – something too few ministers grasp – public consultations have become one of the prominent features of Government today, part of our de facto 21s-century constitution, whose pillars also include the Human Rights Act, Climate Change Act, and the Equality Act.
The year has began with an illustrative nugget. After promising to allow businesses to trade using imperial measurements, and announcing their intention multiple times over the last few years, the Government has all but abandoned the measure. Only one, small, expansion of choice has been permitted: the ability to sell wine in pint-sized bottles. This climbdown follows a public consultation whose responses supported retaining the status quo.
This is another example of how the Conservative Party in office has surrendered its political instincts or interest in its voters. It had proposed a modest increase in choice for businesses and consumers, one which was overwhelmingly popular among Conservative voters, and – according to YouGov – reasonably popular across all age groups, only to kill it through consultation. This, the Government described, was a process of “careful consideration”.
If Conservative ministers have decided that it is a bad idea, they should say so. Instead, we are left with the situation where policy is decided by a self-selecting group of people who chose to respond to a consultation, wildly out of step with the views of the public as a whole.
This is far from a Government elected on a mandate to break the constitutional deadlock that prevented our departure from the EU: it shows a retreat into process, with voters a mere afterthought.
With the Conservative Party so far behind in the polls, one might assume ministers would utilise the sovereignty of Parliament in what time they have left to do a few popular things, and legislate for the views of Tory supporters. There is still no sign of this happening; indeed quite the opposite, if the legislative agenda in the recent King’s Speech is any guide.
The Government seems intent on eroding democracy further, by handing more powers to arms-length bodies, so the state will get even bigger, but less accountable. The Competition and Markets Authority is soon to be given new powers to regulate the digital economy; a brand-new regulator will oversee English football, despite the country boasting the most successful footballing economy in the world.
Meanwhile, nothing is done to reduce the economically destructive actions of bodies like the Environment Agency and Natural England, which prevent hundreds of thousands of homes being built, and forbid the dredging of rivers, regardless of the risk of flooding.
Conservative MPs used to tell their constituents that once we left the European Union, accountability for Government would once again rest with Parliament, rather than an agency in Brussels. Instead, the independent, but taxpayer-funded regulator now reigns supreme.
The public inquiry into the Post Office-Horizon scandal shows the disastrous places this can lead. In 2010, while the state-owned Post Office was busy falsely prosecuting postmasters for theft thanks to their own faulty software, Ed Davey (then the responsible minister) wrote to the Justice for SubPostmasters Alliance to say that the “Government has adopted an arms-length relationship” with the Post Office, so it is run “without interference” from elected ministers.
Taxpayers and voters pay the bill, but nobody is held to account. That is not democracy.
This approach is fast running out of road. Arms-length bodies have been given the power to ruin people’s lives and effectively to make laws of their own. From the CMA trying to reorganise the digital economy, to the Bank of England imposing diversity requirements on financial services firms, or the Climate Change Committee’s attempts to halt road-building and cut demand for flying, we live in an era of suffocating regulatory supremacy.
Rishi Sunak has even signed away corporation-tax setting powers to the OECD, surrendering something which no prime minister has ever done before.
The resigned and despondent Conservative Party sits in a powerful legislature and does little with it, leaving us in a state of cosmetic democracy, as my colleague Radomir Tylecote has put it. This is a sorry state of affairs for a Government whose predecessor got Brexit done for a reason: so that democracy could indeed “take back control”.
Instead, ministers act like chairmen, rubber stamping the decisions of their departments, instead of leading them. If British conservatism has a future, it must stop government-by-stakeholder, re-democratise the state, and end our recent experiment in the banal tyranny of process.