Jim McConalogue has an interesting piece in Comment Central. It is a familiar angle on an old problem but Dr McConalogue reminds us how pervasive and unaccountable rule by quango has become.
Our MPs need to take back control from the COVID-19 quango state
To rephrase an old adage, we might nowadays insist that we have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the European state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed by the COVID-19 quangos. The point is brought home again, given that it seems clear we must review again the way in which government decides when to use quangos to deliver objectives – and if they can (at all) provide genuine public accountability.
The problem is that many of our quangos have been deciding on huge swathes of government policy yet remain insulated from parliament. It would serve the Cabinet Office well to review how it directs policy to enact law through such public bodies in a way that appears accountable to the electorate.
Similar to our 47-year experiment with European political, judicial and social integration, the uncontrolled growth of administrative power continues to raise serious doubts about whether we can work within our regular democratic practices, including the supreme role of parliament – as accountable to the public – in our governing arrangements. The promise of accountability has worn thin.
I saw the problem up close during my career. Environmental monitoring and enforcement was gradually centralised from the seventies onwards, supposedly to bring in certain efficiencies. [Pause for hollow laughter.] In the end it turned out to be a gradual move from local approaches and local accountability to rule by national quango.
When I retired, it was already well on the way towards rule by EU quango and this highlights a feature of national quangos. They seem to be comfortable with ceding power to transnational quangos, appearing to welcome a gradual loss of direct responsibility as a corresponding loss of direct accountability.
5 comments:
Another take: https://thecritic.co.uk/beating-the-blob/ , making the point that "The Blob is not so much a machine as the intellectual background radiation"... and as such any Conservative effort is wading against a strong current.
I've argued elsewhere that Boris needs more new MPs who have not become domesticated by the Blob. Perhaps all the confected outrage against Boris is the Blobs' unconscious self protection kicking in?
Accountability? Does anyone today actually have any use for the concept, such that they find themselves doing something different in pursuit of it? To me it seems like some archaic phrase like "The divine right of Kings" or those funny legal loopholes that allow you to collect turves from the common during lent. When I consider what I would have to do to hold someone like the police or doctors or teachers accountable, I just give up. You would need to become a full-time fanatic, knowledgeable of bureaucratic processes and legal phrasing, calm enough not to get written off as a lunatic, but determined enough to pursue your quarry for years.
Good luck to those who can do this. Perhaps they are ultimately the ones who guarantee our relative freedoms. But it is the nature of the blob to protect itself by making accountability ever more amorphous, distant, hard to even envisage for the average punter.
DJ - I'm sure you are right, the confected outrage against Boris is the Blobs' doing and it is all about self protection. After Covid they may think he is essentially anti-Blob although he probably isn't.
Sam - there are people who can do as you describe, but nowhere near enough. Transparency seems to be the best general antidote and it is still possible that we'll see more of it, but it will be ruthlessly opposed.
Not just Quangos though is it? HMRC, DVLA, Border Force etc - whole swathes of bureaucracy with authority over regulation, laws and infrastructure affecting all of us acutely have been 'outsourced' to arm's length agencies with no direct democratic control and what appears to be minimal government control. So we get not just health and safety regulations but removal of motorway hard shoulders, backdated tax rules, rewritten road rules all with no democratic involvement, indeed often even in opposition to government policy and wishes.
Woodsy - no it isn't just quangos. They may be linked to a ministry or department, but in reality they have all become a kind of quango in that they are autonomous. Hard to know what is the best word. Swamp and Blob are quite widely used but don't really capture the issue.
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