How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't

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The committee stage should be remodeled to mirror the Select Committee system, with a committee of elected MPs—sometimes actual Select Committees—scrutinizing bills, holding extensive witness testimony and evidence gathering, with strong civil service support, and employing outside experts. If an issue does not fit into one of these boxes – the disastrous rise in homelessness over the 2010s, for instance – politicians can usually get away without being scrutinised. Also, spads have grown in numbers but have ceased to be experts from outside politics but younger people chosen on grounds of party loyalty to assist Ministers with their daily tasks rather than to inform and criticize them. You get sat down by the whips and they’re like: ‘Right, these are things you say in your maiden speech. The book is at its most illuminating when it focuses on one of the least scrutinised power blocs in the UK: the civil service.

Westminster – and make MPs How the whips actually control Westminster – and make MPs

How has austerity impacted local government, bus routes, libraries, the judicial system, the selling off of the British state? A similar pattern is playing out in Sudan, where, although Britain quickly rescued a small number of diplomatic staff, Germany and France had evacuated hundreds of their citizens before Britain’s first civilian evacuation flight left Khartoum on 25 April. That, at least, is what struck me when I worked in the lobby, or parliamentary press gallery, in 2022. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. The problem, he points out, is that, “Once a policy has been passed, it effectively ceases to exist for the lobby.Dunt emphasizes how the absence of long-term strategy is another weakness of the Westminster system: first-past-the-post does not encourage continuity and consensus in policy between governments of different parties.

Ian Dunt - Wikipedia Ian Dunt - Wikipedia

This has led to what Dunt describes as an “irrational,” unfair tax structure which facilitates tax avoidance, as the IFS has pointed out. It was approved by the Treasury and required no new legislation, so there was no parliamentary debate, and it was largely ignored in the media, apart from the Guardian which made a sustained assessment of its effects. Dunt begins his excellent book with one such example: the mindless decision of Chris Grayling, then the justice secretary, to privatise the probation service in 2013. Turnover has increased, faster than in the many countries where reshuffles require coalition agreement. Dunt is skilled at disentangling the minutiae of political process and explaining who actually gets to wield power when.The probation system was also torn in two, with officers being randomly assigned to specialise in either the most traumatic and difficult cases or in lesser tasks. Dunt finds that only lobbying from MPs brought about a belated, incomplete, plan to evacuate Afghans who had worked for the British and consequently were in danger of death; many were killed. As Dunt describes, Harold Wilson in his 1964–1970 government was anxious to improve government expertise to match and advance the technical and technological skills of the modern world, to assist his aim to develop the “white heat of technology” through his new Ministry of Technology, and to revive the flagging British economy.

Ian Dunt, How Westminster Works…and Why It Doesn’t Ian Dunt, How Westminster Works…and Why It Doesn’t

MPs are impossibly burdened by having to do two jobs simultaneously, first as local representatives and then as national politicians. In 1968, the committee recommended establishing a civil service training college to provide essential skills. The only reason we know quite how badly Britain handled this is because of a pair of Foreign Office whistle-blowers, Raphael Marshall and Josie Stewart, who sacrificed their civil service careers to detail the disaster. It put MPs on a three-line whip to dismiss the committee report and scrap the existing standards system.

One outcome Dunt describes was the poorly designed, expensive, inefficient disaster of Universal Credit, introduced in 2012. Their recommendations are assisted by outside experts and members gain expertise which they contribute to debates. Along the way, an “Interlude” details another disaster, the delays and failures in the evacuation of Afghanistan, 2021.