THE WEEK

Poison. Spies. Nuclear stand-offs. For weeks and weeks the focus of the news has been on rows over customs barriers and trade regulations. So it comes as a huge relief to have two main stories that are overtly “political”, not framed by economic commentators lecturing us on whether this or that set of administrative arrangements is more conducive to an increase in GDP. The sense of relief is no minor matter: it reveals something profound, I think, about the alienation of the body politic from government. Citizens need to feel they’re part of the political story – in particular to feel that rule-making is done by people they’ve elected. Yet the distinctive feature of the modern regulatory state is the widespread delegation of powers to unknown, unelected policymakers sitting on politically unanchored boards, tribunals and commissions. Was it for this that Emily Davison threw herself under the horse?

The tendency for administrative authority to replace democratic authority is an issue that American scholars, unlike our own, have been grappling with from the 19th century on. They even invented a doctrine (the “non-delegation” doctrine) designed to prevent lawmakers handing open policy remits to agency officials. Maybe in the era of globalisation we just won’t be able to reconcile our democratic ideals with the managerial needs of international capital. But if we persist in assessing policy outcomes by exclusive reference to what voters can put in their shopping baskets, rather than what they can feel proud of or connected to, we may have to reconcile ourselves to popular fury. Jeremy O’grady