Douglas Carswell's Blog

Downing Street's problem is the inertia of the quango state

“The dominant sensation for a new prime minister on entering Number 10” writes Jonathan Powell in The New Machiavelli “will be how difficult it is to make anything happen. .... A new prime minister pulls on the levers of power and nothing happens”.

Today’s newspapers tell us that Downing Street is putting in place a new “Policy and Implementation Unit” to try to force things to happen. Yet as Blair proved, all the news grids and micromanagement in the world doesn’t guarantee reform.  

What is most needed today in Number 10 is a coherent critique of the modern British state that recognises that too much public policy rests with unelected quangocrats, Whitehall officials and judicial activists.  For as Powell goes on, “In truth, political power .... is widely diffused in the British elite, not just in government but outside it as well”.     

It is this "elite" or quango state that must be reined in through a combination of radical decentralisation, localism and direct democracy.  Until then, I fear it won’t just be Tony Blair who rails against the difficulties of reform or the forces of conservatism.

Nor is it enough to know that one wants to decentralise power.  As well as the What, one must have a sense of the How, with a coherent Plan for change. 

Yet too much of the Coalition’s reformist agenda has been left to precisely those vested interests in Whitehall who should be being challenged; government officials made upwardly accountable to Whitehall grandees rather than Parliament, proposals to make MPs answer directly to the people via primaries and recall watered down or shelved, quangos unculled.    

Despite the best efforts of BBC-types to create a narrative that says otherwise, Downing Street’s problem isn’t "the Tory Right", or Coalition tension, or even Ed Miliband.  It is the inertia of the quango state.

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