Only a bonfire of the quangos will save us from this Leftist meddling
Do the quangocrats never sleep? While the rest of us have been on holiday, the public bodies, executives and authorities that have assumed responsibility for overseeing swathes of national life have been busy preparing their latest barrage of pettifogging interference.
The Advertising Standards Authority announced the first two “sexist” adverts banned under its new gender stereotyping rules. The Institute of Economic Affairs, meanwhile, released a paper finding that targets drawn up by Public Health England to cut sugar from the national diet will make it all but impossible to manufacture parma violets, Liquorice Allsorts and (my favourite) sherbet lemons. Steam train operators may need to spend millions in order to comply with health and safety rules ordered by the Office of Rail and Road after a passenger was killed on the (non-steam) Gatwick Express. Not to be outdone, the head of Natural England suggested that grouse moor owners should be prosecuted for the deaths of hen harriers on their land, even if they were not responsible.
I don’t remember voting for any of this, and the successive governments that have farmed out responsibility for such frustrating meanness have assumed that most people don’t care one way or another. But that is untrue. So widespread have the quangos become that it is impossible not to be annoyed by their inevitably statist and invariably patronising output. Except it’s hard to identify who to be cross about. The leaders of these bodies are interchangeable members of the same Blairite “woke” BBC class who always seem to be pursuing the same faddish ideas. They also benefit from low awareness of their existence.
The latest official report, which I assume is meant to make it easier for the public to know who is making decisions in their name, puts the number of “non-ministerial departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies” at 301, and is littered with jargon about “arm’s-length bodies” and “MPM frameworks” that seems more likely to confuse than illuminate. While they are often only operating within laws and guidelines imposed by politicians, that muddying of the waters also gives ministers a way of distancing themselves from unpopular decisions.
It is time to take back control. Although we finally seem to have a government that is committed to personal freedom and responsibility, imposing right-thinking leaders on these bodies is unlikely to work. They are arms of the state, and “the blob” has a way of inoculating itself from even the most determined reformer. No, we need a bonfire of the quangos – and this time a real one.
It needn’t mean the Government leaving large areas of the economy unregulated. But I would like to see the Health Secretary taking responsibility for reformulating the recipes of our favourite consumer products, and the Environment Secretary laying down the law to grouse moor owners. They might then find that the continuous drip-drip-drip of Left-liberal interventionism isn’t all that popular.
Although we finally seem to have a government that is committed to personal freedom, ‘the blob’ has a way of inoculating itself from even the most determined reformer