Why the British State is “dysfunctional”

The Lords Constitution Committee is looking at constitutional safeguards and on 14 October questioned Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Boris Johnson when the latter was PM.

Cummins gave three main reasons why our political system is failing:

1. Public service no longer attracts elite talented people, who instead have gone into money-making private enterprises.

2. Government ministers have ceased to be masters of their brief and personally accountable to Parliament for the performance of their departments. Their answerability has become a “fake charade.”

3. The Cabinet Office has grabbed political power it should never have had. It was set up during WWI to deal with crisis but at that time it was agreed on all sides that the Office should not be responsible for making government policy or for personnel and public appointments. Now it is.

We are lacking elite talent, ministerial responsibility and speed of execution (cutting through bureaucracy). All three have become “more or less unlawful”!

The problem are interconnected. “If you have duff people you will have duff institutions and it will become hard to attract talent.” Young talent becomes disillusioned and the ablest look for a way out.

Asked whether he thought the constitution was under serious threat Cummings replied that there is “a general collapse of trust in the competence and integrity of institutions” including political parties, the media, Parliament and the civil service. “Because of the internet people can see many of the lies they are told and a fundamental lack of responsibility for things.”

These difficulties are not limited to Britain but are found in other Western countries.

Russia’s President Putin is only a minor threat compared with our own Ministry of Defence (e.g. hundreds of billions wasted in procurement, resistance to learning about drones from Ukraine) and the lawyers in the Cabinet Office pursuing “lawfare” against the SAS.

Are there too many arm’s-length institutions (quangos etc) checking ministerial power? Yes, said Cummings, and it started under the Thatcher government with the idea that these bodies could run like businesses with CEOs; instead their decision-making tends to be opaque. He has been told by civil servants that the quality of MPs is rubbish and they don’t want the responsibility; ministers and MPs have become “infantilised” and are “largely happy with this process.” Fewer arm’s-length bodies would be welcome but ministers need to be made personally responsible as once they were.

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A couple of thoughts:

Labour plans for decentralisation/regionalisation extend this process and the intention from Blair onwards has been to set bureaucratic socialism in concrete and so make a Conservative recovery impossible; even if it ruins the country.

The exact opposite of sclerotic managerialism and failure can be found in the way Elon Musk runs his businesses. I read recently the account of an engineer newly joined who was amazed and delighted that he could suggest an idea and see it modelled and trialed in days rather than bogged down in layers of committee approval.