Bureaucrats are eating away at democracy
The case of Darren Grimes is another alarming example of blatant bias in our government quangos
Darren Grimes’s court victory over the Electoral Commission is a win for David against the Goliath of the regulatory state in a war that democracy is otherwise losing against bureaucracy. The next prime minister must tackle the menace of regulatory quangos which have too much power, too little accountability and an apparently blatant bias on key issues.
The Electoral Commission, some of whose commissioners are openly sympathetic to Remain, investigated Vote Leave and Mr Grimes three times. The third fishing expedition was at the behest of lawyers for the Remain lobby and eventually turned up the fact that Mr Grimes had ticked a
wrong box. For this, a young man was going to be fined £20,000, saddled with legal costs, his reputation trashed, and he was even to be denied the chance to cross-examine the commission in court when he appealed.
Here was a quango acting as judge, jury and executioner, deterring young people from politics, and with expensive lawyers at its beck and call – paid for by you, the taxpayer.
The Charity Commission, going after the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Legatum Institute and even Leave donor Jeremy Hosking’s use of a steam train, has shown a similar tendency to join an establishment witch-hunt against Leavers. This contrasts with its seemingly lenient approach to allegations of sexual exploitation at Oxfam, only acting after the media took up the scandal. The Information Commissioner lambasted Vote Leave for destroying data when she herself had said it was best practice not to keep it. It is hard to imagine that any of this would have happened to Remain campaigners if they had won the referendum.
Yet this would be just as bad if biased the other way. It is the opportunity for bias that is the problem, and it is not confined to the issue of the referendum. Hundreds of budget-maximising, state-funded agencies, charged with running much of the country but largely beyond democratic accountability, are now in a position to tell you what you can and cannot do (even how long you should sleep), to punish you if you do not obey, to pursue political objectives with effective impunity and to hire expensive lawyers at your expense if challenged.
True, the Conservatives are paying the price for not appointing more of their allies to run such organisations, as the Blair government so ruthlessly did. Putting a Green Party candidate in charge of Natural England was generous to the point of barminess. It is exactly that sort of appointment which encouraged extremist pressure groups, like Chris Packham’s Wild Justice, to bring a lawsuit against the organisation on the issue of general licences for the control of vermin, using the same bounty-hunting lawyers who conducted “lawfare” against soldiers who fought in Iraq. It also almost certainly encouraged Natural England’s staff to appease this lobby at great cost to wildlife conservation.
But it is not just a matter of appointments. Tories rightly grumble
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that their supporters don’t volunteer to join quangos, because they have better things to do, like generating wealth and on the whole believe that people should not be telling others what to do.
But at the heart of this issue lies a creeping change in the way we live. Under the common law, a Briton was always free to do anything that was not specifically forbidden, but was responsible for any harm caused, in contrast with the continental, Romannapoleonic tradition that the civil law dictates what is allowed. Vote Leave and Darren Grimes found that in order for the former to spend money on behalf of the latter’s organisation during the campaign, it had to obey certain rules. It sought the advice of the Electoral Commission, tried its best to follow that advice and was then damned for doing so.
On leaving the European Union on October 31, Theresa May’s successor must rein in the growth of this regulatory state and return to the default that people are free to do things unless they cause harm, and that politicians are answerable when things go wrong. There is a layer of unelected bureaucracy between people and democracy and it is getting stronger and more biased by the day.