In his latest column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, looks at the Climate Change Committee and the unaccountable power it has.
Last week we witnessed a standout example of Britain’s out-of-control quangocracy with the publication of the Climate Change Committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget.
The purpose of this report is to give the government a roadmap to hit its wildly unrealistic and eye-wateringly expensive target of the UK becoming carbon neutral by 2050.
The CCC put forward some recommendations for truly dramatic changes we will need to embrace in the coming years – from a radical reduction in meat and dairy consumption, a huge shift away from petrol-powered to electric vehicles, heat pumps becoming the norm in British households and ever greater reliance on renewables (more details further down in this update).
I am enormously sceptical about the CCC’s recommendations and especially about their jaw-dropping optimism that their plan can be rolled out virtually for free (they estimate we only need to earmark 0.2% of national income to achieve their epically ambitious programme). But my scepticism is really neither here nor there. I want to live in a society in which a whole range of wild and whacky ideas are put forward, scrutinised and debated.
The issue I have is the privileged status given to the CCC. If its members want to set up their own environmentalist think tank in their own time and at their own expense to contribute to public discourse, that’s fine by me.
The problem is that they are an entrenched quango, unaccountable and incredibly powerful. The government needs to provide a public justification if it wishes to diverge from the CCC’s recommendations and, according to the London School of Economics, they could find themselves in court if they don’t embrace the CCC’s programme.
On a technical level, the CCC might be described as a merely advisory body but in practice it is setting government policy. It’s a monumental task to map out the full extent of the quangocracy. At last count there are some 444 arms-length, “independent” bodies in the UK. In aggregate, they are far more powerful than the 650 MPs we actually elect. Whether its blocking planning decisions, decarbonisation, money-printing or deciding what can and cannot be said on television, if you want influence then you are far better off to become a quangocrat than a Member of Parliament.
When I am able to meet up with former Cabinet ministers, I am now pressing them to explain how much power they actually wielded in office. Their stories are depressingly similar. You can get things done, but typically only at the margins. The “system” essentially runs each department with ministers often only able to make fairly marginal tweaks and even then only with colossal determination and effort.
I’m all in favour of politicians listening to experts and canvassing ideas and advice from a variety of authoritative sources. But the experts must not be able to overrule the politician. The “experts” need to rely on persuasion, not on statutory powers.
Mending broken Britain will require a restoration of democracy and Parliamentary sovereignty. That will mean methodically going through each of the 444 quangos and deciding which should be nationalised (place under full control of a government department), which should be fully privatised and expected to stand on their own feet and which should be abolished altogether.
Listening to experts is one thing. Embedding so-called experts into an unaccountable and impenetrable policy-making process is something else altogether. And it needs to end.
Keep the flag of freedom flying.
Click on the image above to watch a short video Mark recorded about this subject. Please feel free to share this post and the video.