The British government does not run this country. It has given away much of its decision-making power, weakening its ability to direct the country, despite the state’s increasing size. That is the stark reality that this Labour government must confront, and when the prime minister speaks of the need for a more active government, which really does shape the country, he is absolutely right.
More power to politicians, you say? Well yes, actually. The policy options available have been artificially narrowed, across a whole range of issues, and over many decades, causing even more frustration amongst voters already angry at politicians’ inability to deliver on their priorities.
The NHS is a good example of this. The idea that the creation of NHS England could ever depoliticise the health service is absurd – the government was always accountable for the performance of the NHS, so why give decision-making power away? When the government needed to take a firm grip of the health service during the pandemic, it found it no longer had all the levers at its disposal to take decisive action. This Labour government’s decision to scrap NHS England is therefore welcome.
But the issue runs deeper than the NHS. Across government, unelected bodies have been given too much control over key decisions. We have a planning system which makes big infrastructure projects near-impossible to deliver, with vested interests given disproportionate influence, while the stifling effect of “judicial review” has become so pervasive across the public sector that government struggles to get anything done.
Those who suggest we “take the politics out” of a particular political issue are often well-meaning, but this approach is badly misguided. What does it mean, really, to take the politics out of an issue? Is it a vote of confidence in the status quo? Or that technocratic government is better than democratic government? Surely, the future of our economy and public services should be fiercely contested questions, in the forum of democratic politics?
Consider economic policy. The Office for Budget Responsibility is given enormous power to influence government policy through their (often incorrect) forecasts and measurement of the government’s performance, comparing it against the government’s own self-imposed fiscal rules. Indeed, next week’s Spring Statement will be entirely framed by this powerful quango. Might we even question the apparently sacrosanct contracting-out of our country’s monetary policy to a committee of unelected officials? It is difficult to say that a government really “manages the economy” if it does not even have control of one of the most fundamental tools of economic policymaking: interest rates.
And when the voters say, “we want the government to reduce illegal migration”, it is entirely reasonable for them to think that the elected governments of these islands can deliver that. Former foreign and home secretary, Jack Straw, dared to broach the subject of the European Convention on Human Rights and its outsized impact on our country’s immigration policy over the weekend. The current home secretary, Yvette Cooper, is right to at least be considering how some of its articles are being applied in the courts.
Meanwhile, the Sentencing Council recently proposed guidelines that could result in offenders being sentenced differently based on their ethnicity or religion. The justice secretary rightly objected to this, seeking to reinforce equality before the law, yet the Council’s dismissive response begged the question of who is really in charge.
Advice from specialists is essential to good government, but decision-making must ultimately rest with those who are accountable to the public. If we are to stop working class people turning away from politics, thinking that engagement with democracy achieves nothing, this Labour government must urgently show that politics matters, because politicians make the key decisions. Let this be the week that the democratically elected government started to run the country again.
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Source: Politics
