Review: Isabel Hardman, Why We Get the Wrong Politicians

This is a hand-wringing book by an Establishment political journalist about Establishment politicians and Parliament. It’s readable, full of interesting anecdotes, and good in the parts which emphasise Parliament’s failures at what is supposed to be its job, legislation. The detail assembled there is worth having. The book pairs with the more academic work The Blunders of our Governments, by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe,  reviewed on this Blog on 11 June 2013 and mentioned several times by Isabel Hardman.

One book can’t do everything but three things are missing which bear on Hardman’s case.

First, the history. We may think of Parliament as sovereign in the UK, but technically it is the Queen in Parliament who is sovereign. That technicality is explained by a history in which Parliament developed as a creature of the Executive,  that Executive finally formalised as a Cabinet which constitutes Her Majesty’s Government, its head appointed (and still appointed) by the Sovereign. So Parliament developed as second fiddle, though by the 19^th century it came to acquire more power than ever did the state Dumas of Imperial Russia. Its power expanded with the expansion of the franchise, but its members remained subject to Executive manipulation, the carrots of jobs and bribes, and later the sticks wielded by  government Whips. Theresa May’s billion pound bung for the votes of ten DUP MPs did not come out of nowhere. It was an ordinary exercise of Executive prerogative.

Second, the voters. Those who argued for the expansion of the franchise through the 19^th and early 20^th centuries twinned their case with a demand for the expansion of popular education so that voters would be prepared for their tasks as citizens. But the British educational system never got into the business of educating citizens; it stuck with God, the Queen and school uniform and still does. As social media have now made clear, if tabloid newspapers had not already done so, the result is that many “citizens” are not really up to their job.

Third, there is the long term decline of Great Britain, a decline marked by periodic adventures - Suez, Iraq, Brexit - which each time leave it a weakened power. The decline has now gone so far that one can reasonably speak of a failing state - Hardman instances several areas (for example housing and social care) where the state has ceased to cope with the demands created by demographic and economic change. 

In failing states, politics does not attract all the talents; it attracts the crooks and the also-rans. When it comes to it those are people who can’t deliver. The Conservative Party likes to tell the story of Harold Macmillan who as Housing Minister in the early 1950s got considerably more houses built than his (talented) Labour predecessor - much or most of it, social housing. He did it with the benefit of what was still very much a war time command economy, it’s true, but he did it without benefit of computers or social media. Nowadays, you can be put in charge of Brexit, as was David Davis, and simply not turn up to work, throw in the towel - and still get invited onto state TV as if you might have something worth hearing about. Put in charge of negotiating trade deals, as was Liam Fox, you can end up able to show the Faeroes and Fiji and not much else; but you keep your job and continue to appear on state TV.

Review: Anthony King and Ivor Crewe The Blunders of Our Governments

Any reader of the London-based satirical magazine Private Eye will be familiar with the substance of this book, despite the contrary claim of its authors (page ix). The book is a chronicle of British government incompetence over three decades - 1980 - 2010 - a period in which both Conservative and Labour parties were alternately in power. Both parties have major cock-ups to their debit accounts: the Poll Tax and the Child Support Agency (Conservative); the Private Finance Initiative for the London Underground and the National Health Service IT scheme (Labour). There are many others. All of them were chronicled, sometimes in depth, by Private Eye as they were on-going.

King and Crewe are less than generous towards Private Eye; they mention it once in the 415 page body of the book (page 199). But then the British Establishment is ambivalent about Private Eye and King and Crewe are paid-up (more accurately, paid for) members of the Establishment: they are senior academics, salaried from public funds and researching with support from public funds. Private Eye is a must-read for the Establishment but, like a pornographic magazine, it must not be seen to be read.

Despite the handicap of their Establishment status, King and Crewe do a very readable job chronicling failures of government policy, all of which cost the taxpayer money and many of which directly harmed vulnerable individuals (including people the policies were supposed to benefit). The chronicle occupies the first couple of hundred pages of the book. They do not even touch upon defence procurement or military operations, both disaster zones, confining themselves to civilian policy areas.

They preface the Chronicle with a disclaimer - something which is in their own terminology surely counts as a Prejudice. They say they are not trying to establish a "British outpost of the American Tea Party movement" (page xi). But why not? If governments repeatedly squander vasts sums of taxpayers' money, as King and Crewe claim that they do, fail to learn from their mistakes and blindly go on expensively proving themselves incapable of delivering the policies they promise to deliver, then it is surely a reasonable position to suggest that one solution is to give them less money to play with. Why encourage fecklessness?

King and Crewe consider such questions closed. It is not part of the way their group thinks. Instead, they devote a full dozen chapters to classifying and analysing why, where and how British governments go wrong and end up with expensive policy failures. These chapters are insightful, but King and Crewe are unable to identify any drivers of change which might push voters or politicians into changing a not-fit-for-purpose system. In contrast, it is quite clear that there are numerous stakeholders in a dysfunctional, sub-optimal system - for example, private companies who can rip off the state and politicians who know that they will be rewarded regardless of how may failures they achieve. John Prescott (to take an individual who they criticise by name) now sits in the House of Lords, despite having no identifiable achievement to his credit, and he is not alone: many of the individuals they have interviewed in the course of their research now have their knighthoods and peerages (page 450) regardless of whether or not in their careers they made a hash of things.

Some of their suggested changes could no doubt be acted upon by a reforming administration, but it is hard to imagine that increased accountability would be one of those changes. The only form of accountability which seems to work is the very, very crude electoral one. King and Crewe name and shame Gordon Brown repeatedly, and they characterise him in ways which ensure that you think he would have made a terrific 1950s American politician in the paranoid mode of that period. But it took the voters to get rid of him - and even then, and apparently without embarassment, the Labour Party invited him as the keynote speaker at the subsequent Party conference and gave him a standing ovation. Small wonder that some of us no longer vote.