Douglas Carswell's Blog

Technocrats v Googleites - the real Coalition divide?

The real divide within the Coalition is not between Tory and Lib Dem, nor between deficit-denier and those who can add up. Rather it is between two different types of reformer; the technocrats V the Google-ites.

The demise of the rotten Parliament, followed by the rise of the Coalition mean that there is almost universal consensus on the government side of the Commons about the need to reform Westminster and Whitehall. While everyone wants change, two distinct approaches to reform have emerged.

On one side are the “Google-ites”. Their vision is simple; change should make government more directly accountable to Parliament, and Parliament more directly accountable to the people. Comfortable with the kind of hyper accountability the internet brings to public life, they talk of wiki-politics and crowd sourcing.

Against them are the technocrats. They believe that if only the man in Whitehall was left to work out what was best for Whitehall, he could then govern us all more wisely. At best they see little need to involve real people in the grandee game of governing. At worst, they fear crowd sourcing and direct democracy as mob rule.

To technocrats, change is all about streamlining Whitehall and changing processes. If Google-ites sound like they’ve stepped off the ‘plane from California, the technocrats self-consciously employ the language of the corporate boardroom, believing that business-talk automatically makes public administration more effective.

The Google-ites want to scrap quangos, not simply because the cost too much. They recognise that quangos lack the dynamic that comes with accountability, creating public policy sclerosis. 

The technocrats see quango reform as a process of tidying up. When news leaked out the other week that dozens of quangos might be for the chop, the Institute for Government helpfully popped up to tell us that this might not be such a wise idea.   Scrapping quangos, said the technocrats favourite think tank, won’t save that much money. Besides, we needed all that expertise. 

Casual listeners might have assumed that the Institute for Government was commenting as a benign by-stander, interested merely in improving the way the country is run. The reality is that the Institute for Government, with its collection of Whitehall grandees, is promoting an aggressively technocratic agenda in direct conflict with the Google-ites.   Behind the urbane tones, a fierce battle is being waged that will decide if government is made outwardly accountable to the people, or more inwardly accountable to itself. 

The Institute for Government appears to have hijacked much of the reformist agenda, promoting something very different to the kind of changes envisaged by the Google-ites.

Rather than dismantle the quango state and push power out, in keeping with the vision David Cameron set out the Open University in Milton Keynes, the technocrats seem to defend it. 

Google-ites suggest that every quango needs to have its budget annually approved by Parliament (as happens in normal democratic states). The technocrats suggest instead that the Commons approve the creation of any future quangos. Google-ites want those we elect to confirm quangocrat appointments. The technocrats want “better training” for Whitehall's chimps. Google-ites want to restore public confidence in government by making government answer directly to the people. The Institute for Government instead promotes measures that would entrench their lack of accountability to the public.

In the early 1970s, the Conservatives entered office promising to disperse control over the economy. They ended up imposing a prices and income policy. In 2010, we enter office promising to disperse control over public services and politics. We need to ensure our reformist agenda is not hijacked by the vested interests in Whitehall.

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