Our outdated Cabinet structure
The reality of our own Cabinet is that there are only ever four or five individuals who drive strategy.
Our political structures are designed around the idea that the status quo is mostly functioning well. Where there is ongoing public dissatisfaction, or widespread conviction that government could be better, then we should ask whether our state institutions are fit for purpose.
If you had a car that kept getting bogged in the mud, or breaking down under load like a columnist’s simile, you might conclude you need to do more than repairs; you need a tractor, or a truck, or a wholly new metaphor.
This is the conclusion reached by the UK Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
Our system is evolved from Westminster. We have a less archaic cabinet system, but we could adapt many of the ideas for revolutionary change contained in a new report from the Institute for Government think-tank.
Former Tory and Labour prime ministers John Major and Gordon Brown launched the report this week. Brown, whose term as prime minister ended in 2010, declared he was not trying to return to frontline politics. “I’m too old for British politics and too young for American politics.” They took a bipartisan look at why the PM’s office, cabinet and the public service, “do not always work as well as they should and what could be done to radically improve the centre of UK government”. They say successive prime ministers have found their ability to deliver their priorities frustrated by the way the centre of government is structured. I hear an echo.
Starmer may be hampered by a personality that could light up a party by leaving it, but he is proposing revolutionary reforms to the way the UK system of cabinet government works. He will probably be the next UK PM. Cabinet is constitutionally the centre of executive government, but no committee of 20 members can function effectively at strategy. Starmer promises to create an “executive cabinet” that would make important strategic decisions. It would set budgets and spending priorities ahead of presenting them to cabinet.
The reality of our own Cabinet is that there are only ever four or five individuals who drive strategy. In the current government, it would be the PM, Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop, Winston Peters and David Seymour. Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins ran the last government, with Winston Peters during their first term.
Starmer is planning a powerful new policy delivery unit to help the executive cabinet push its priorities. Reporting directly to the prime minister, it would hold departments to account. It would drive major strategies across departments, removing conflicting responsibilities. A senior business figure could be appointed to run the unit, breaking up the groupthink that slows government down.
In the sixties, German socialists recognised the taste for revolution was exhausted in the modern state, and instead proposed a Long March through the institutions: get into government, strategically penetrate the institutions of government, and hollow out capitalism from the inside (capitalism survived).
No-one sensible is interested in establishing the conditions for revolution any more, but the Long March tactic has structural appeal.
As with any change, from alcoholism to weight loss, changing behaviour begins by admitting you have a problem. We have a highly centralised system, but a weak centre. Cabinet is enormous. There are twice as many portfolios as found in most European cabinets.
We have a Minister for Space, whose job could surely be handled by the Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation. We have a Minister for Building and Construction, another for Housing and yet another for Infrastructure. Yet it takes years to decide to build anything and decades more to build. We have ministers for child poverty, children, social investment, social development and youth, and no fewer children in poverty.
The Auditor-General tells us the public service can't tell us what difference it is making. Ministers and the public are unable to judge what we get for our money. Defence is usually one of the more effective government departments, but it was sprung last week for reducing performance targets from 70% met to 0% met so that it could then claim its target had been achieved. When doing nothing is a target, we have a problem.
Cabinet is unwieldy because it is politically convenient to pretend that 26 members of caucus are valued members of the top team. Everyone gets Player of the Day once. A smaller executive cabinet and a unit coordinating government priorities and making sure departments deliver would make governments more effective.
This could be enforced by much stronger parliamentary select committees. Some MPs are better suited to being legislators than executives. If they can’t be in a four or five-minister executive cabinet, some would make a different kind of impact. Government must be on a “war footing” to tackle Britain’s stagnating economy, warned Gordon Brown. In the name of radical reform to get a government fit for today, a shuffle through the institutions here will not suffice. Let the Long March begin.
Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.