What do I have in common with former Prime Minister Liz Truss. Well, not much, I hope. Only I will stop myself from jumping on the band waggon and rubbishing the entirety of what she has to say. It’s astonishing to think that she was once a fully paid-up Liberal Democrat member. Her exit to the dark side is the stuff of decades past pulp fiction.
Truss’s published plans are clearly as mad a bag of frogs. Damming and disbanding anything and everything that you personally don’t like is a page out of the Trump playbook. Oh yes, there’s a community of enraged folks who will not read the detail and pied piper like follow the music. That will sell a tiny number of books before they pile-up in the high street charity shops of the country. Even they might flinch at stocking her castoffs in print. 10p would be too much.
Now, comes the; ah but. If I go back to the mid-1990s, I was writing about the proliferation of QANGOS[1]. Being a local Councillor at the time I felt a great deal of irritation in finding that so much government policy was focused on taking power away from elected local government and giving it to appointed bodies with no local accountability.
The Liberal Democrat approach has long been that power should be decentralised from central to regional and local government. A great deal of what we have seen in the last three decades has been exactly the opposite. Devolution in Scotland and Wales being the exception. Although, that didn’t make much difference when Brexit came along.
Giving specific powers to executive agencies is not the problem. You might think I’d say it was. No, the problem is the relationships between elected bodies and those who act as its agents. Once a democratically elected body has determined a course of action there’s benefit in having expert agencies, given clear terms of reference and a job to implement specific policies.
Politicians, generally make lossy managers. This is where the Truss / Trump doctrine, that politicians should control or manage everything as being extremely foolish. Centralisation does help when unified action is needed but for the most part keeping all decision making in-house degrades administration and enables it to become detached from reality.
Politicians are great critics. Their skills are best used to scrutinises activities at a high level. To exercise oversight and provide feedback derived from real life experiences (The Post Office scandal being an exception to this general assertion).
The former Prime Minister who holds the record for being the shortest in office had to take responsibility for her actions. In that most peculiar way, UK democracy worked. No well, but at least corrective action was taken in reaction to a calamitous situation.
Take back control in my mind means returning powers to regional and local government. Where QANGOS are necessarily then make sure they are kept under effective scrutiny. A lot of what I have said here is better said in a policy paper from 2007[2]. We know what to do but rarely do we do it.
[1] In the UK, the term QUANGO addresses “arm’s-length” government bodies, including “non-departmental public bodies” (NDPBs), non-ministerial government departments, and some executive agencies.
[2] https://www.libdemnewswire.com/files/2016/02/77.-Green-and-Prosperous-Communities-Local-Regeneration-for-the-21st-Century.pdf
John Vincent 