Quangos Must Be: Accountable; Controlled; Scoured From Biased Politicos AND Have ALL Silly Funding Reduced. It Would Easily Bring In A Minimum of £50 Billion A Year.

The Quangocracy now governs Britain – it's time Westminster took back control.

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The expectation that the first 100 days of an administration will determine the rest of its lifespan is something of a contrivance. Why have governments become fixated on the figure? I once thought it had something to do with Napoleon Bonaparte, whose return from exile on Elba to his defeat at Waterloo and the restoration of Louis XVIII to the French throne was known as the Hundred Days (it was actually 110).

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But the real culprit was America’s President Franklin D Roosevelt, who first used the 100-day gambit to persuade voters that he was the man with the required energy and decisiveness to tackle the Great Depression. Later, President John F Kennedy deployed it to great effect. Since then “the first 100 days” has become the yardstick by which to measure presidential effectiveness and, like many Americanisms, it has crept over here.

This weekend marks the first 100 days of the new Labour government and if a coherent agenda was supposed seamlessly to unfold during that time we have yet to see it. For a party that claimed to have a plan for running the country it has made a pretty poor fist of it so far, with in-fighting leading to the defenestration of the Downing Street chief of staff Sue Gray. Since she was meant to be the interface between the politicians and officialdom, this is a pretty serious loss. As a former senior civil servant, she was expected to know which levers to pull in Whitehall to get the right results.

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But over the past 25 years or so, these levers have had nothing on the other end. The powers of the government and of parliament have been given away to outside bodies. Foremost among these, of course, was the European Union, and, since we have left, sovereignty should have been restored in full.

However, in a number of crucial areas this has been proxied out. The first act of the new Labour Government in 1997 was to hand full control of monetary policy to the Bank of England and a committee of faceless economists.

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Supporters say it ushered in a long period of interest rate stability, though, as the cost of borrowing was close to zero for many years, that is a questionable claim. We also do not know the counterfactual – what would have happened had there been no change during what was a fairly benign era of low inflation until recently. The Bank made serious errors as inflationary pressures grew, but it is Government ministers who get it in the neck, not the governor. If you are going to be blamed, why not have control?

The same is true of the Office for Budget Responsibility, set up in 2010 ostensibly to offer an independent and authoritative analysis of the UK’s public finances. The OBR has become less of an auditor than a straitjacket constraining the Chancellor’s room for manouevre. A good thing, too, you might say – except that the Chancellor should be accountable to parliament and ultimately to the electorate for decisions. How many people know the name of the OBR chief?

The most powerful of these anonymous bodies is arguably the Climate Change Committee, which has the statutory power to make sure the Government sticks to an increasingly improbable net zero timetable.

Then there is the Supreme Court, 15 years old this week and another innovation that constrains governance because it can overturn the law of the land. In 2009, Tony Blair’s government decided to dismantle what had been a perfectly workable, if somewhat haphazard, constitutional settlement.

In doing so, it shifted the balance of powers within the British system, establishing a European style constitutional court which sits uneasily within a common law jurisdiction without a written constitutional code.

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We have uprooted centuries of ad hoc but effective arrangements in order to bow before the phoney gods of modernisation. Even the terminology has changed. Around the turn of the century, political discourse began to refer less to “government” and more to “the executive”, counterposed with the concept of “the judiciary”. People no longer spoke of a “balance of powers”, the long-standing British constitutional dispensation, but to a “separation of powers”, along US lines.

To that end, Labour abolished the Law Lords and set up a Supreme Court physically removed from parliament, transforming its outlook and priorities. The growing use of judicial review and the rise of so-called judicial activism has upended the relationship between the three interlocking pillars of our constitution: the legislature, the government and the courts.

Few politicians appear fully to understand the scale of this change. Kemi Badenoch is one who does, having identified the restraints imposed by arm’s-length bodies as factors in the failure to carry out a properly conservative programme in government.

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But the Tories were complicit in giving away these powers, and wresting them back now is virtually impossible. Nor can the bodies that wield them be ignored. When Liz Truss brought forward an emergency Budget and froze the OBR out of the process the results were calamitous.

These constraints apply not just to the Tories. Labour, too, will find decisions dictated to them by committees beyond their control, setting impossible targets, hemmed in by rules reinforced by the courts. Just look at the Rwanda policy for an example of a government unable to get its own way despite the support of parliament.

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Today, Rachel Reeves is to deliver the “major measures” for her October 30 Budget to the OBR for its perusal. A shake of the head and the Chancellor’s entire strategy goes down the pan.

Since the OBR was a Tory construct, a new Labour government had the opportunity to dispense with it; and yet Ms Reeves is planning to give it even more power by introducing a statutory “fiscal lock” so the body cannot be sidelined, as it was in 2022. If ever a politician has created a rod for her own back, here it is.

What is the point of being in government if your decisions are always being second-guessed by unaccountable organisations? Sir Keir Starmer may have a majority of 165, but as he approaches his 100 days he has about as much chance of deciding his own fate as Napoleon did on the road to Waterloo