Douglas Carswell's Blog

Full steam ahead for the vested interests

There is, says David Cameron, "a sense that the rich and the powerful – politicians, bankers, the press and the police – have been serving themselves."

And he is right.

Since becoming an MP, I have come to see how public policy is rarely made in the interests of the public. Various vested interests tend to intervene, shaping public policy for their own ends.   

Our monetary policy, for example, which is run by a committee of experts, always seems to favour banks those looking to flog cheap credit and call it growth. We seem to spend our defence budget not in the interests of our armed forces, but in order to suit the corporate aims of those wanting to sell over-priced kit.

Perhaps the most powerful vested interest shaping the way we are governed are not lobbyists or big corporate interests, but the legion of state functionaries who increasingly run government policy according to their interests and outlook.  

Wander down Whitehall and ask who really makes policy in each department that you pass. At the Treasury, it seems to me that our fiscal trajectory has been set by officials under the previous administration in accordance with what seems to be ingrained (and Keynesian) departmental assumptions.  For all the talk of deficit reduction, actual tax and spend policy seems remarkably unchanged.

Foreign and European policy are set by a powerful Whitehall mandarinate.  It is officials like Simon Fraser, the man who really runs the Foreign Office, and Jon Cunliffe, UK ambassador to Europe, who make the key decisions - not ministers or those you vote for.  It is Cunliffe's predecessor, Kim Darroch, who is now our National Security chief, with a massive cross departmental writ

Claiming that Whitehall mandarins are accountable, via ministers to Parliament, is a bit like claiming that the Press Complaints Commission properly oversees tabloid newspapers. 

It's nonsense. Worse, both forms of faux accountability lend a bogus legitimacy to systems which lack real accountability.

Consider how last week the government announced the closure of the coastguard station in by own constituency at Walton-on-the-Naze. Who made this decision?  Notionally, it was of course ministers, in the sense that they presented and justified it all to Parliament.  But when you realise that the closure programme was proposed by quangocrats to the previous set of ministers (who had the good sense to reject it), you get an idea of where this particular policy is really coming from. 

Again and again, ministers seem to be simply reading from the script handed to them by the permanent officials - the most powerful vested interest of all.

Restoring confidence in Britain means renewing the idea that those who govern answer to the governed. That means taking on the vested interests – the Whitehall mandarinate, the big corporations, the SW1 people.  It means making government properly accountable to Parliament, and Parliament properly accountable to the people.

So far, the changes that we need have yet to happen.

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