The independent commentary on British political affairs.
The independent commentary on British political affairs.
May 2008
Vol. 11, No. 11
A People's War: Brenda Boardman | The shadow over Brown's plan's to change the way we are governed: … More…
Available for subscribers to download now, in the Print Magazine section.
This article is provided free-to-view for all visitors to thepolitician.org.
There is a political topic I hear debated more often than any other. It centres on this question: when Gordon Brown says that he is intent upon ‘governing in a different way’, does he really mean it? For here is a politician derided by his own former Treasury Permanent Secretary, Lord Turnbull, for his ‘Stalinist’ tendencies. Brown now presents himself as a proponent of collective government, objective policy-formation, and an enhanced parliament.
Are we to believe that our new prime minister can morph from a Stalin into a Gorbachev, working his way to the summit of a centralised state and then reforming it from within? To find an answer we need to examine Brown’s track record; the political environment in which he is operating; and what he is apparently planning to do, in particular to the centre of government and parliament.
Brown’s personal political style is not one readily associated with the more ‘open and accountable’ approach he now advocates. Insider reports suggesting his lack of collegiality and a proclivity for taking decisions in small closed cliques abound. To pick just one, in his book Off Whitehall, Derek Scott, former economic adviser to Tony Blair, describes his dealings with a Chancellor of the Exchequer who was ‘very reluctant to discuss policy beyond a very narrow circle of people’ and ‘having made his mind up on something…was very difficult to shift.’ Even for Scott based at No.10, extracting information from Brown was ‘like drawing teeth.’
This facet of Brown’s personality found its defining expression in the system of Public Service Agreements (PSAs) introduced with the Comprehensive Spending Review of 1998.
Packages of targets and reforms, PSAs were negotiated directly between the Treasury and individual departments and tied to the provision of resources. They enabled Brown to wield an influence across domestic policy unparalleled for a British chancellor of the exchequer. Soon more than 200 Treasury staff were employed full-time enforcing PSAs.
Micro-management and excessive centralisation were denied. (They would be, wouldn’t they?) But commitments such as the one adopted by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2002 to ‘reversing the long-term decline in the number of farmland birds by 2020, as measured annually against underlying trends’, signify a preposterous level of interference. Even a spokesperson for the RSPB or the most fanatical twitcher would find it difficult to justify the involvement of a national finance minister in such minutiae. Can this same controller become a decentraliser?
Behind some of the absurdities of PSAs lay deeper constitutional problems. Brown claimed these devices were ‘an agreement between the government and the public’; but parliament — the representative organ of ‘the public’ — had a negligible role in PSAs. Collective decision-making was eroded since Cabinet members were no longer a group of equals, deliberating together.
Many of them came to resemble instead contracted employees, whose detailed objectives took precedence over the exercise of personal judgement. When a new secretary of state took office in a particular department the PSA remained in place, even though he or she had not been party to devising it.
This tendency conflicted with the basic principle of British political accountability. Ministers answer individually to parliament for their actions. Yet if they have not fully devised their own policies, how can they? The already uncertain status of local government was undermined further as it and other service providers were treated as mere delivery agents acting at the behest of central government.
Viewed from this perspective Brown’s track record is not a cause for optimism amongst advocates of constitutional reform. But there are other reasons to be more positive.
Brown is undoubtedly competent (in my view he ranks among the greatest chancellors of the exchequer, notwithstanding the reservations I have recorded above) and if he turns his attention to a genuine programme of change he is intellectually capable of formulating and executing it. As the head of a government ten years old and suffering from reduced popularity, he knows a new direction is needed. And there is a vogue for more accountable and devolved political authority, however vaguely expressed, on which he needs to capitalise.
The work of the Conservative Democracy Task Force under the chairmanship of Ken Clarke has helped raise the stakes. In two reports, An End to Sofa Government and Power to the People, it has made a wide variety of proposals for Westminster and Whitehall. It advocates the more comprehensive codification of collective government, with provision for parliamentary approval of the rules that are established and the independent investigation of their alleged violation. Greater objectivity in official communications has been recommended. So too has a requirement of parliamentary approval for armed conflict and treaty-making, as well as more pre-legislative scrutiny of bills. The Task Force supports increased control over its own timetable for parliament and enhanced independence and scrutiny powers for its committees; along with greater topicality for parliamentary questions and debates.
There are some weaknesses with the Task Force. There can be a lack of clarity as to how its proposals will work in practice, and a tendency to fall back on the convention — an informal means of constitutional regulation that is now proving unsatisfactory to many, if it ever worked at all.
But the Task Force has asked itself difficult questions and not feared bold solutions. I commend in particular the proposal about treaty ratification. Most importantly it has helped create an atmosphere in which Brown is both given political space to introduce reform and positively encouraged to do so, if he is to appear relevant.
So what has Brown said or indicated he will do? Much of it reaches us through press-briefing (a technique he perhaps wants us to believe is no longer part of his style) and we have surprisingly little to go on.
This paucity of information has led constitution-twitchers such as myself to turn to a speech Brown gave to Charter 88 in March 1992, in which he argued that ‘constitutional change…in the broadest sense’ was ‘at the heart of the debate about the future for our country.’
But away from this archeological dig, it is possible to surmise a number of proposals, which, like those of the Democracy Task Force, relate mainly to parliament and the centre of government. Brown intends to introduce a first (which leaves open the possibility for a second, third and so on) draft constitutional reform bill later this year.
He has committed to giving parliament a greater role in three areas: decisions on war and peace, appointments to public bodies (seemingly meaning regulatory authorities) and in a new code of conduct for ministers. A senior official will be appointed in the Cabinet Office charged with overseeing collective government; and steps will be taken to keep intelligence and security assessments separate from party political considerations.
His two senior advisers on foreign affairs and Europe will be career civil servants. Brown’s Chief of Staff at No.10 will, it seems, be an impartial official too — unlike the holder of the post under Blair, Jonathan Powell. More vaguely Brown is committed to establishing a ‘shared national consensus for a programme of constitutional reform that strengthens the accountability of all who hold power’ and sets out the ‘rights and responsibilities of being a citizen in Britain today’ — seemingly code for a British Bill of Rights.
Brown’s intention is to repeat for the constitution the kind of ‘big bang’ he achieved upon arriving at the Treasury in 1997, when he announced independence for the Bank of England. There are certain issues which he may have difficulty in addressing, for instance the voting rights of Scottish MPs in Westminster, a genuine anomaly given the existence of the Scottish parliament, albeit one seized upon by the Conservatives for partisan gain.
But for those who support democratic reform, Brown has the merit of actually being in power and needing to be seen to have changed if he wants to remain there after the next election. History suggests that the most significant shifts in approach can come during the course of a particular government (for instance, Labour’s move towards monetarist economic policy in 1976), not when a different party takes office.
The apparent desire to effect more inclusive government can soon ebb along with the memory of Opposition. In 1979 the Conservative manifesto complained that ‘the traditional role of our legislature has suffered badly from the growth of government over the last quarter of a century’; and even promised to consider a Bill of Rights. Yet the Thatcher era that followed is not regarded as a model for political decentralisation. For these reasons Gordon Brown is the best practical hope for constitutional reformers, whether he really means it or not.
Dr. Andrew Blick is co-author with Professor George Jones of a paper on the History&Policy website, entitled ‘The “Department of the Prime Minister” — should it continue?’ at http://www.historyandpolicy.org/archive/policy-paper-58.html