PHILIP JOHNSTON: THE QUANGOCRACY NOW GOVERNS BRITAIN - IT'S TIME WESTMINSTER TOOK BACK CONTROL

"What is the point of being in government if your decisions are always being second-guessed by unaccountable organisations?"

 

 

Telegraph: Philip Johnston argues that since Tony Blair’s election, successive prime ministers have transferred power to unaccountable officialdom. It's time for this to end and for democratic accountability to be restored. 

"This weekend marks the first 100 days of the new Labour government ...For a party that claimed to have a plan for running the country it has made a pretty poor fist of it so far, with in-fighting leading to the defenestration of the Downing Street chief of staff Sue Gray...  she was expected to know which levers to pull in Whitehall to get the right results.

...But over the past 25 years or so, these levers have had nothing on the other end. The powers of the government and of parliament have been given away to outside bodies. Foremost among these, of course, was the European Union, and, since we have left, sovereignty should have been restored in full.

However, in a number of crucial areas this has been proxied out. The first act of the new Labour Government in 1997 was to hand full control of monetary policy to the Bank of England and a committee of faceless economists... The Bank made serious errors as inflationary pressures grew, but it is Government ministers who get it in the neck, not the governor. If you are going to be blamed, why not have control?...

...The same is true of the Office for Budget Responsibility, set up in 2010... The OBR has become less of an auditor than a straitjacket constraining the Chancellor’s room for manouevre. 

...The most powerful of these anonymous bodies is arguably the Climate Change Committee, which has the statutory power to make sure the Government sticks to an increasingly improbable net zero timetable...

...Then there is the Supreme Court..."

 

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PopCon says: Hear, hear.