Douglas Carswell's Blog

Margaret Hodge MP is right

That is not something I ever expected to write about the uber lefty Chairperson of the Public Accounts Committee. 

But in the struggle to ensure democratic oversight of the Whitehall mandarinate, she is spot on.

For years, regardless of which party sat on which side of the Commons chamber, most key public policy decisions have been taken by a remote mandarinate.  This cosy clique of erudite, Oxbridge-educated officials ran government - with only a few ministers occasionally able to shift established priorities. 

As far as the Whitehall grandees were concerned, squabbling parties competed to provide the different departmental spokesmen.  The views of the vast bulk of MPs were irrelevant. Those of the voters that elected them, comprehensively ignored.

From immigration policy, to Europe policy, to endless defence procurement cockups, failure went unchallenged.  Discredited orthodoxy – in the Treasury and education department in particular – went unchanged.

Thanks to the internet - and the MPs expense scandal - deferential democracy is dead.  People are demanding more accountability over their MPs. 

As a consequence, MPs are starting to demand accountability from government. Elected by the whole House, select committee chairmen have taken to asking the mandarinate what it is that they are doing for the rest of us - rather than churning out patsy reports as they used to. 

Unsurprisingly, Sir Humphrey doesn't like it.  He prefers to hide behind the fiction of accountability via ministers instead.

So, in time honoured Sir Humphrey style, he has briefed a friendly journalist, complaining via Sue Cameron in today's Telegraph.

“That Margaret Hodge is being beastly”, Sir H whines, after Ms H rather wonderfully made one particularly evasive official promise that he was not lying. Having served on the Public Accounts Committee, my sympathies are 100 percent with Margaret Hodge.  Even when it was embarrassingly clear that the officials giving evidence in front of us had presided over one hopeless cock up after another, we met only evasion and bull.

The permanent secretaries are, according to the briefing, "outraged" at the way these impertinent elected MP johnnies have taken to asking questions.  Some top officials threaten that they might even - shock, horror - "walk out".  Good. Off you go. 

Today's briefing will only strengthen calls for proper Parliamentary oversight over Whitehall.  More and more MPs in all parties are starting to recognise that we need a system of confirmation hearings to make top Whitehall officials answer outward to the people, rather than to one another.  

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