Douglas Carswell's Blog

Just another government?

I recommend you read Allister Heath in City AM today.  For a Conservative MP like me, it is painful stuff.  Allister pulls no punches is his analysis of the Conservative party and government.

"The Conservative party" he writes, "needs to bring in new blood to advise the Cameroons, rather than relying so much on a small coterie of socially identikit associates and on civil servants."

Indeed. 

The political reform agenda, spelt out so magnificently by David Cameron at Milton Keynes in opposition, has stalled.  Proposals for recall have morphed into something else, open primaries have been abandoned, and plans to reform party funding forgotten.  Just last week, the government disgracefully re-wrote the rules on the Backbench Business Committee, overturning a key part of the Wright Reforms and putting the reform agenda into reverse.

The Policy Unit at Number 10, which one would hope might drive forward ideas for change, is instead staffed by more-of-the-same civil servants and ex-McKinsey people. 

Britain needs bold and radical change.  Yet with the dead hand of the Whitehall mandarinate grasping everything and the voices of radicalism squeezed out, there is a danger that this becomes just another managerialist administration.

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