Who has power?

In their assault on quangos, politicians are not being honest about the trade-offs

Power is the goal set by all opposition leaders. Often more in hope than expectation. Many famous words have been written about the dangers of power and its pursuit. But if politics is the art of the possible, power is the precondition.

In 1994, Tony Blair famously observed that “power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile.” An injunction to prioritise winning, this was Blair telling his party in opposition that to deliver change, you must be in government. Two years into his premiership, the ‘scars on his back’ told a more complicated story of power subverted.

It’s a potent source of political frustration. Both the 2016 EU referendum - ‘Take Back Control’ - and 2019 general elections - ‘Get Brexit Done’ - were deliberately framed in these terms. Pithy and memorable, these slogans successfully tapped into a widespread sense that politics - and by extension government - was not working as it should.

Four decades before Brexit, Edward Heath, the Prime Minister who had taken us into Europe, posed voters the inauspicious question ‘who governs?’ Heath’s unexpected defeat left Labour to contend with a creaking political order. Fast forward to 1979, and the country was ready for Margaret Thatcher’s strong medicine, but not before the Labour government had offered a taste. As Phil Tinline charts in ‘Death of Consensus’, a turbulent decade had meant few on either side still believed things could go on as before.

Perhaps to the greatest extent since the late seventies, today’s left and right are again united in a view that power is not where it should be. For defenders of democracy, it’s a charge worth taking seriously.

“Checkers and blockers”

The online right in the UK is preoccupied by the notion that Blair-era reforms have shifted power further away from elected politicians, to judges, regulators, quangos, an “activist blob”, shadowy organs of the ‘deep state’. Thus, they claim, the right can be in office, but never in power. Not until they dismantle this architecture of ‘woke’ (by abolishing the Supreme Court and repealing the Human Rights and Equalities Acts, for starters).

As the Conservatives spent longer in government, these ideas became increasingly commonplace - even in Downing Street. At the time, the Labour opposition dismissed it as mere excuse-making by politicians unable or unwilling to defend their own record.

However, since coming to office, politicians who promised change have resorted to familiar-sounding arguments. Josh Simons, a key Starmer ally and the former Director of the think tank Labour Together, told Parliament that it had “ceded too much power to unelected and sometimes unaccountable bodies”. “Why vote”, he asked, “if the people we vote for are not in charge, but lawyers, economists, quangos or agencies are?” Jonathan Hinder, another Labour MP, has claimed “[t]he British government does not run this country”, arguing that politicians need to ‘take back control’. (One wonders if that’s quite what 17.4 million people in 2016 had in mind.)

Keir Starmer, himself a former civil servant, has condemned the UK’s “cottage industry of checkers and blockers using taxpayer money to stop the government delivering on taxpayer priorities.” His grudging acknowledgement that in a democracy, elected politicians must carry the can, was mere muscle memory. Labour will go on blaming its own powerlessness.

A balancing act

Last month’s spring statement is the issue in microcosm. In one telling, the word of the OBR is law, dictating the chancellor’s decisions. In another, Rachel Reeves chose to be bound by her fiscal rules and to retrofit policy to uncertain projections; the OBR is just the scorer.

In all likelihood, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini budget showed what can happen when the OBR is sidelined. Trade-offs are inevitable. The elected chancellor faces a check on their actions from unelected officials. In return, the country benefits from independent economic forecasting. Finding the appropriate balance is a continual task, and a legitimate source of disagreement: Reeves would have been well within her rights to disregard the OBR’s slightly lower valuation of government welfare reforms. Trade-offs, however, are uncomfortable political territory.

For example, as the price of winning the last election, Labour decided not to acknowledge the fiction that was the Conservative government’s departmental spending plans. Instead both parties chose to deflect and dissimulate rather than have an honest conversation with voters about the state of the public finances. Unable to admit to this “conspiracy of silence”, the government is on the hunt for scapegoats.

If politicians are unwilling to acknowledge the trade-offs inherent in democratic government, institutionally and politically, it paves the way for a Trump-style wrecking ball. Development, tax and a host of other agencies gutted, a vaccine sceptic heading up public health, former officials threatened with treason charges: a leader intent on pushing the constitution to its limits. And once a thing is broken, the pieces never go back exactly as they were.

Of course, the institutions themselves are not without question. Trump 2.0 is a reckoning for those of us who revelled in the ostentatious resistance of elements of the US state apparatus in Trump’s first term. Moreover inertia and groupthink are inevitable in any large organisation. No doubt there is more the civil service could do from within to promote innovation.

As voters, too, we need to ask ourselves if we’re being honest in our expectations of modern government. Technocracy may feel remote, but in an evermore complex world, with the state expected to do more and more, what is the proper relationship between politicians and administrators? NHS England is a study in this tension: set up to remove politicians from day-to-day management, but ultimately seen as insufficiently responsive to government, even superfluous. Starmer’s plan is to give more power to innovate to the front line. Are we prepared to accept the risks that come with that?

Trust is the prize, honesty is the price

To know who has power is to know who to blame. For power to seem so elusive, even to those elected to wield it, is not good for trust in our democracy.

There are no easy answers. Government is too complex to invest all the power in elected politicians - nor, as the examples of the US, Turkey, Hungary and others show, would that be desirable. Some public bodies, as Michael Gove observed recently, do need to exercise their power at arm’s length.

Yet expertise is by its nature specialist. Single-issue expert bodies will act in accordance with their brief. It is up to elected politicians to bring a broader perspective. This may lead them to question the conduct or existence of particular quangos. There is nothing unreasonable in that, per se. The public rightly expects its elected politicians to take charge and make changes. But it should be done with humility and honesty, cognisant of the task politicians asked each quango to carry out in the first place. Characterising quangos en masse as deliberately seeking to thwart the government, in the way Keir Starmer has done, sets a poor example.

It’s a cliché, but politics is not working. Starmer and Kemi Badenoch may well be right that a rewiring of the state is needed. But inflated rhetoric and half-baked excuses will convince few. Better to give voters the respect of an explanation that balances their legitimate desire for change with honesty about the role of quangos in our democracy. And whatever the complications of modern government, politicians must not lose sight of the constraints they also place on themselves. Dishonesty begets distrust.

Steve Gilmore, Media Officer, Unlock Democracy