Politicians have lost faith in politics. This explains the state we are in.
Our MPs have voluntarily handed their powers and responsibilities to quangos, bureaucrats and judges
Why is it, so many people ask, that things do not seem to get done anymore? From new housing to high-speed rail, from policing the streets to deporting illegal immigrants, we are promised action, but so often little changes.
In a complex and interconnected world, politicians cannot always guarantee the outcomes they want: inflation, for example, started as the world economy reopened after the pandemic and Russia attacked Ukraine.
Sometimes policies designed with the best of intentions simply do not work in practice: consider the Coalition-era NHS reforms or the pension rules that divert our savings from UK equities.
Sometimes the problem is a lack of strategic clarity, causing policies to run counter to one another. Here the best example is the stated desire of successive home secretaries to cut immigration, prevented by the reality of our further and higher education systems and poor workforce planning in the NHS. Sometimes the problem is that politicians will the ends – more house building, for example – but not the means: in this case planning reform.
But there is a deeper problem with the way our politics are done and our state is run. Our constitution says the Crown in Parliament is sovereign. A government is formed when a party or coalition can command a majority in the House of Commons, and its ministers act in the name of the King. The Commons, elected by the public, is the ultimate source of political power and democratic legitimacy, and as such it enjoys primacy over the Lords. No parliament can bind its successors, and any parliament may change the law as it deems necessary.
This model has served us well for generations. It brings clarity, accountability, and – excluding the grotesque failure of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act during the Brexit wars – a clear mechanism when a government loses its majority in the Commons. Then an election must be called, and the public must decide.
And yet things are not really working as they should. Parliament has, for example, voted to make the scheme to remove illegal immigrants to Rwanda operational. Yet, 15 months after the deal was struck, the policy is stuck – the Court of Appeal having ruled it incompatible, on novel and narrow grounds, with Article Three of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Parliament has tightened the law to make it clearer to the police that they must prevent the disruptive protests that bring road traffic to a standstill, hold up public transport and interrupt high-profile events. The changes were unnecessary really – obstructing roads has long been an offence – but College of Policing guidance instructed the police to reason with protestors, not arrest them. Even now, officers stand by as criminal protestors film propaganda messages.
So often what Parliament decides is overturned by courts and watered down by public bodies through their own internal policies and published guidance. The Crown Prosecution Service, for example, elects not to prosecute any number of criminal offences, from drug crimes to illegal immigration. The drive to extend London’s Ulez and create equivalent schemes elsewhere derives in part from court rulings in which judges ordered ministers to go further in reducing nitrogen dioxide emissions.
Elsewhere, one part of the state is stopping another from doing what it is supposed to do. Natural England has blocked the construction of 160,000 new homes, citing nutrient neutrality rules and the protection of sites and species that could, with just a little imagination, be protected even if building went ahead. One part of government wants to get tough with the water companies, improve performance and increase infrastructure investment, while others are sanguine about the systemic over-reward of investors and the failures of the regulator.
The state itself is badly misaligned. The devolution of power has occurred in a haphazard fashion over the last quarter of a century, and we need a clearer common understanding of who, ultimately, is accountable for what.
More prosaically, the geography of the state is a mess. If we want more place-based work across different agencies and organisations, it makes little sense for there to be no consistency in the boundaries between, for example, integrated care systems, police forces, fire brigades, probation services, prosecutors and the courts. The list goes on.
None of this has come about in a fit of spontaneous disorder and chaos. The root causes are political decision-making with little regard for operational reality; legislation that sets lofty goals without realistic plans to achieve them, making ministers vulnerable to judicial second-guessing; macro legal frameworks that politicians understand cause real problems yet lack the intellectual courage to change; international treaties that are treated as de facto constitutional laws; and the surrender of executive power to an administrative class that takes political decisions – police chiefs, quangos, regulators, and supposedly expert committees among others.
Politicians should not believe that they – or the civil service – can micromanage the state, let alone wider society. But they should understand that it is their job, in the end, to make sure things work. If the law needs to change, they should change it. If the state is not working, they should reform it. The root cause of all these problems is a passive tolerance of decline and failure, and a political class that has lost confidence in the power of politics. That, in the end, is why these days nothing seems to get done. DT.
