Douglas Carswell's Blog

Politics will be dominated by those with ideas to disperse power

Steve Richards has an excellent article in today’s Independent, where he writes about the new theme in politics in which “concentrations of power, whether in banking, the media, the police or politics, must be held to account.”

He is right - although the theme of holding concentrations of power to account is not entirely new. It’s more or less the basis of much Western liberal thinking running back hundreds of years. What is new are the tools increasingly available to make it happen and reverse a century of centralism – as some politicians are starting to grasp.

Back on May 26^th 2009, David Cameron gave a speech in Milton Keynes in which he talked about:

“a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power. From the state to citizens; from the government to parliament; from Whitehall to communities; from the EU to Britain… we must take power from the elite and hand it to the man and woman in the street.”

Whoever drafted the speech seems to have cut and paste straight from The Plan, which, published a few months before, suggested:

“a wholesale shift in power… to redistribute power back, from Brussels to Westminster, from Whitehall to town halls, from the state to the citizens… to disperse power among communities”

The Plan  even spelt out the detailed reforms needed to make it happen. 

The current government does not lack the intention to do these things - the problem is not what should happen, but how to make it so.  Perhaps a Downing Street Policy Unit comprised of ex-management consultants and unelected courtiers is hardly a crucible for radical thinking.  (Incidentally, how’s that Nudge Unit working out?)

It has, therefore, been left to the Whitehall machine - and all the vested interests found there - to deliver.  Hence the glacial pace of change.  

Richards is absolutely right when he suggests that politics is going to be dominated by those with ideas about dispersing power. But as in the 1970s – when even Ted Heath understood that we needed to disperse economic control – it is not enough to know what needs to happen in the future – but how to change things.  It was left to the grocer’s daughter to deliver what the grocer promised.

I hope that it is this government that gets to deliver on the promise to disperse control and decentralise power.

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