Remainers have never been more powerful
Four years on from Brexit, those who tried to block it are back – and want to take permanent control
One of the more troubling aspects of the current political scene is the return to prominence of those responsible for the constitutional near-meltdown and the collapse of the Conservative Party to 9 per cent of the vote in summer 2019. One such is the former attorney general Dominic Grieve, who left the Tories that autumn, lost his parliamentary seat, and disappeared into obscurity. Yet here he is again, authoring a report published this week on the governance of Britain, together with a bunch of retired judges, lawyers, civil servants, and other such grand panjandrums of the British state.
Their report reveals much about the preoccupations of our permanent mandarin class and the great and the good. Grieve’s foreword says “public confidence in our democratic processes is at a low point” (we can all agree with that) and that their proposed solutions would “make the exercise of power in the UK more structured, transparent, effective and responsible”. But the solution does not follow from the diagnosis. What the report’s authors seem to mean by it is people like them setting limits to, or even controlling, what ignoble politicians are able to do.
They want the Civil Service code to be legally binding. Permanent secretaries’ accountability to Parliament, not to their ministers, would be strengthened. Political appointments would be severely limited. Appointments to the Lords would be made not by the prime minister but by another independent body composed of…people like them. The Ministerial code would become law and an appointed commissioner would rule on it, with his or her own power to set rules on finances, conflicts, adviser appointments, and, bizarrely, ministerial training. An independent enforcement body would monitor the other bodies. And so on.
In short, actual politics, actual choices made by the electorate, would be replaced by serious responsible people operating serious institutions, totally insulated from populism or any other below-the-salt opinions: Plato’s guardians (or should that be Guardian readers?) for the modern world.
I am sure Telegraph readers can see the two big problems with this. First, who says that the commissioners, the experts, the permanent secretaries, know any better than the politicians? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But if you don’t like the government or MPS, you can kick them out. There’s no kicking out the guardians, though, and when you try they are just replaced by others like them. They, however, can get rid of politicians: as we have seen, the parliamentary standards processes now have the de facto power to suspend or even remove MPS, on flimsy grounds, because MPS now dare not challenge the Commission’s rulings.
And, second, we’ve already been trying this and it isn’t working. Of course we need effective and respected institutions. What we don’t need is a further proliferation of quangos, expert groups, judicial reviews, human rights provisions, Ofcoms and the like. We already have quite enough of these things and they obscure the fact that process is not the same as substance. You can have perfectly operating institutions that are in fact totally incapable of dealing with the country’s actual problems – institutions in which the checks and balances, the coordination and scrutiny, have overwhelmed the capacity to make things happen. Just look at housing, at energy, at immigration – and much much more besides.
You might think that “surely these people cannot think that even more of the same is the right solution? Surely they must have learnt something?” Well they don’t seem to have learnt from the catastrophic disintegration of the May government. The heart of the problem there was Parliament deciding to act independently on Brexit, as if it were itself the government. Yet they propose to repeat exactly this – to give Parliament control over the government’s business and to make it impossible to call an election ahead of time unless Parliament agrees. They seem to believe, as so many now do, that somehow a formal continental-style separation of powers has crept into UK governance under the cover of EU membership. If so, it needs expunging, not reinforcing.
The truth is that we have badly functioning institutions and we have an elected government that does not properly control the permanent government. The solution is not more of the same. Until we are honest about these realities, until we cut through the thickets of process in the interest of getting things done – as the Government is trying to do on Rwanda, albeit not determinedly enough – voters will continue to despair about the ability of elected politicians to solve their problems. That despair is the real problem the country faces and it needs fixing soon.
We left the EU four years ago this week. Sadly, with a couple of exceptions, no current minister acknowledged the fact. Yet the Conservative Party owns Brexit. Whether ministers like it or not, or maybe even wish it hadn’t happened, it’s the central policy of the Party and the government. They must be prepared to defend and explain it – to show why it’s so important that Britain is a proper democracy once again. For if voters come to believe Brexit is failing, then the Conservative Party will inevitably fail too.