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 Who Runs Britain Vote 2005
Who runs Britain? That’s the question we’re asking in this year’s Today Programme Christmas poll. We’ve invited three ‘bloggers’ to follow the arguments. Read their biographies.
You can also comment on the blogs on our message boards:
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Thursday 15 December: OLIVER KAMM
The wisest comment in this series to date was made by Professor Anthony King in this panel discussion. The answer to the question 'who runs Britain?' is 'nobody and nothing'. Most of today's discussion, at least from Baroness Williams and Lord Butler, thus centred on the different question of relative shifts of power within the political system. The argument is that the power of the legislature has diminished in recent years compared with the power of the prime minister and the media. (Baroness Williams mentioned also the power of the Treasury, presumably alluding to the unusually influential role within government of the current Chancellor.) This was not the issue at hand, and nor was it correct.
Complaints of the accretion of prime ministerial power are nothing new. Forty years ago the Labour politician Richard Crossman maintained that "the post-war epoch has seen the final transformation of Cabinet government into Prime Ministerial government". This was nonsense then and is nonsense now.
Discussions of the power of the executive relative to other branches of government and other institutions make little sense apart from the character of the office holders. It so happens that two of the last three prime ministers have been singularly successful, for better or worse, at dominating their respective parties. This had little to do with the power of office or the size of government majority, but was related to the sway that each personality had within the party system and the Commons. Consider a wider historical perspective. Britain has had ten prime ministers since 1945, not counting Tony Blair. Only three held office for longer than five years, while the outstanding counterexample, Mrs Thatcher, was removed from office by her colleagues with such ruthlessness that it has caused ructions within the Conservative Party ever since.
The Prime Minister has a contingent and sometimes precarious constitutional position in which he is unable to direct policy on his own and may face vitriolic public criticism. Tony Blair has dominated the political scene for so long first because of the political weakness of the Old Labour cause that he supplanted, and secondly because the Conservative Party has for well over a decade declined to behave like either a party of government or a serious Opposition. The most effective brake on the power of the executive is for the Opposition to mount a credible case against it.
There is a much better case for saying that power has shifted towards the centre and away from local government, and that the impartiality of public administration has been eroded under governments of both parties. The picture is a little more complicated than that - there has of course been a shift also to different forms of regional government, with devolution - but it is a fair judgement. Certainly the last 20 years have seen a sharp curtailment of the independence of local government in raising revenues, and an expansion of decision-making by politically-appointed committees. That is a significant shift and one that compromises the checks and balances of a pluralist system of government.
In the context of a discussion about who runs Britain, however, this is a secondary issue. The extent to which our political system can influence individual behaviour is quite limited. Public attitudes may be shifted to a certain extent: I am certain that, for example, race relations are better for laws against racial incitement, even though politicians cannot abolish prejudice. But in areas of greater moral ambiguity than the evils of racism (as almost all political issues are), a prudent government will respect those limits rather than try to legislate them away. Governments that fail to adhere to that informal convention of parliamentary democracy will not be around for long.
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