An excerpt from Stand & Deliver: A Design For Successful Government (2014) Ed Straw
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.Charles Darwin
In the mid-1990s, I had a meeting in Lausanne with the then number two at the International Olympic Committee, the lawyer and Director General, Francois Carrard. As consultants we would often take ideas to clients in the hope that they would then engage us for the project. In preparing a report on London’s Olympic Challenge and how to win a bid to stage them, I’d noticed how often the same problems occurred – every Games used to be marred by late construction, mismanaged ticketing and poorly run road transport. (The latter was so bad at Atlanta that a few competitors even missed their races.)
I drew this to the attention of the IOC in a note entitled ‘Not Re-inventing the Wheel’. Each winning city to stage the Olympics had never run one before – so the wheel of how to set up and manage them was endlessly reinvented, often barely turning. All sorts of posing, politicking, power plays, ego expressing, holy alliances, unholy alliances, and last-minuteism came together in a mixture of random quality and amateurism.
The IOC had seen all of this before and had the knowledge – if only it wished to deploy it – as to how each wheel should be made. My proposal was that they should specify how an Olympics should be mounted in order to avoid these repetitive failures. Being based in Switzerland, where they understand how useful constitutions can be, the IOC went further and designed the organisational system to deliver a Games successfully. And the design is written into law – in effect the constitution for delivering Olympic facilities and operations.
Knowledge transfer is part of it too – Beijing spent four days with the London team debriefing on its experiences. All successful institutions have effective learning engines. The reason the London Olympics worked was because the system designed for them worked. Yes, we were fortunate in having Tessa Jowell as lead minster, and mayor of London Ken Livingstone, two very capable deliverers, and Lord Coe played a blinder in the politics of winning the bid and is a wunnerful human being – but it was the system that did it.
One critical part of this system is this: ‘The IOC make Opposition support a precondition of bidding – something that would not be replicated for other projects – but the Olympic experience underlines the value of political continuity and preventing major project delivery from becoming a political football.’ The IOC has seen the very public and dire consequences of zigzag government on staging an Olympics.
At much the same time as visiting Lausanne, I was designing the central organisation of the Labour Party for John Smith. I needed to know what its objectives were – organisations are designed (or should be) for a purpose. ‘What are they?’ I asked. Silence. The notion that a political party should have objectives other than the political seemed foreign. ‘What about winning elections and governing well?’ I suggested. These were accepted. The new design, along with a lot of work and changes by many others, turned Labour into a formidable campaigning machine, and it did govern well for a while.
I hope the case has been made that the failures of government are caused first and foremost by how it is organised. Which political party is in office is secondary. Most of our problems can be traced back not to the political parties, which are only products of the system, but to the system itself. It is tottering and it is up to us to sort it out.
Objectives of a New System
So, we need urgently a design for successful government – one designed for its objectives, and aligned internally. We’ve seen what’s wrong with what happens now, and thus what to avoid. These failures are the symptoms. We need to cure the root causes of the malaise, and the cure is the Treaty for Government, enshrined in a new Constitution.
What, then, are its objectives? Essentially, a system is needed that generates the best decisions and policies; that implements these well, and preferably really well; that runs the many day-to-day bodies it has at high levels of service judged by the consumers/ citizens and at high and growing productivity; that is satisfying to work in; that does not fund itself on unsustainable debt; that is fair in its decisions and operations between the rich and others, big organisations and individuals, in the application of its laws, in the distribution of welfare, in the raising of taxes, and between current and future generations.
The system should provide routes for us as individuals to influence and understand its decisions – when we want to – that doesn’t have to be fought to contribute to solving a public problem, and that takes the noise out of the relationship between government and individuals; in other words, to rebalance power between the citizen and the government.
Let’s remember too that such a system should exclude ideology and prejudice for their own sake; should proscribe preferential lobbying; should reduce the power and influence of corporates, banks, and the news media, counterbalanced with citizen power; should pins noses to results, not spin doctors; should stop as much as it starts, achieve more and attempt less; should demand more of public sector bodies and their close relatives in the private sector contracted to government; and should minimise waste.
It should attract different kinds of politicians with contrasting formative experiences and the experience and temperament to get things done, and should prevent the psychological flaws of the politicians and civil servants dominating. Government should not be a freak show in private. This is the point where ego confronts democracy, where the psychology of leaders eyeballs the needs of the people, and where the constitution should mediate between the two.
This new system would also limit the obligation on politicians to talk bollocks; would immunise them against business power, gut reactions, and media frenzy; and eliminate cash for honours.
These are fine objectives, but how do get them delivered?
Why Constitutions Matter
In developing a constitution designed to produce successful government and replace repetitive representative voting, we are trying something new. Constitutions have never had this purpose. It is an ambitious agenda, but new constitutions have always been written at times of high ambition.
Constitutions make or break organisations. In their current form, they also prevent dictators and all their horrors. They specify how our representatives are to be elected, for how long, and who has the vote. They bestow further human rights upon us. They ensure separation of powers between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary to provide checks and balances. They scrutinise performance and behaviour, and minimise corruption. They secure free speech. They prescribe which decisions are for the representative bodies and which for referendum. They specify where and what power is held at levels other than central government.
Long-standing democratic countries take these rules as read. Debates arise around the effectiveness of the checks and balances, devolution, and voting methods. The rulebook is relatively settled. Think of a game: if the rules are wrong, the game does not work. If one player cheats, the others lose interest. If the rules are biased, one player always wins (as in a casino). We can see all these faults at play in our constitutions with debt where the rules are wrong, soft corruption where the protected species are cheating and the non-voters opt out, and lobbying where the rules and the benefits are biased to corporates.
That is the reason a constitution is so fundamental to organisational performance – if the rules are changed, you get different behaviour and different players. The new Treaty would produce new politicians and new politics and new behaviour. The tricky bit is designing the various elements to fulfill the objectives.
A recent experience with a new rule for government – the Golden Rule – is instructive. Introduced in 1998 in the UK, it was intended to stop the government racking up debt by stating that government should only borrow to invest and not to fund current spending. It was and is a very good rule. The problem was that its inventor, Gordon Brown, was in effect left to apply it himself. As he sought more political wiggle room, the rulebook changed, and
the game eventually fell apart. The rule was written in such broad terms as to be voluntary. Rulers can never referee themselves.
Its successor government ditched the Golden Rule. After all, it was a product of its political opponents and therefore wrong – a classic case of zigzag – and had also been discredited through misuse. Meanwhile, post the credit crisis and responding to failure, four other countries are adding the Golden Rule to their constitutions – France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
Evidently these countries see writing the Golden Rule into the constitution as the means to good accounting. The golden rule removes from the political playing field decisions on the quantity of debt. The constitution sets the ceiling. It will then depend on the tightness of definitions and the effectiveness of enforcement. So here the decision on the debt cap has been depoliticised.
What decisions would the British Chancellor have taken in the good times of the mid-2000s with this level of control over him? What shape would the UK economy be in now? To put it bluntly, the government would not been have allowed to piss away money we did not have, and are now slowly paying back. Good government depends at least as much on disciplining the decisions of those at the top as it does on their inherent quality. With the right controls they perform better in the job.
What else would be better if it were removed from politics? And what would be better for being within the political remit? How should our rules for government be developed to get the best out of the system and the people in it? How should the power be separated?
What is Political and What is Not?
Let’s remind ourselves that at present once our vote is cast, the political authority invested in the representatives who form the government presumes very wide competence (and goodwill) on their part, if it is to be exercised properly. History shows that too much reliance is placed on this laissez-faire political authority.
There are so many aspects of government that should be: matters of fact, or conclusions arrived at independently, or policies made using all of the knowledge now known about good decision-taking, or modern organisational theory and practice applied in running public services. Politics occupies too much space – space that should be taken by the system and by organisation.
Where decisions are still matters of political judgement or trade- offs or about genuine differences regarding the human condition, a vision for society, or what matters, then the political process would continue. Gay marriage, much of foreign affairs, and a Good Friday Agreement are political judgements. Where else? Wherever constitutional imperatives, feedback, and policy vetting leave the solution unclear. How often will that be? Not as often as you might imagine. Elsewhere, covering broad swathes of what is now political only by default of silent or absent constitutions, the authority would be vested in the system of government, not the party.
Starting with a blank sheet of paper, where would our political authority now be placed to best realise the objectives set out above? Do we want it to go to the government and to a political process? Do we want it to go to non-political bodies with separate duties? Or do we want it to go to a fixed rule? It’s not black and white, so what should go where?
We have seen that to prevent unsustainable debt – one of the objectives for the Treaty – decisions on this have to be depoliticised. In other words, when we vote we would not be allocating this part of our political authority to our political representatives but to a fixed and tamper-proof rule.
Let us then take one of our examples of past government failure from Part 2 of this book and now a new objective – a decent pension system for all. We are certainly not leaving that all to politics to do. The overall objective would be enshrined in a fixed rule. Thus governments would have to provide this. The policy to realise this objective would be developed by the government of the day. But not by any random means they chose – because the process for developing policy would be specified and vetted. Whilst policies and decisions would continue to be a matter for the government, the process for achieving the right policies would not be political. In other words, while governments will propose decisions, the way they have come to that decision and the factors included in coming to it, would be vetted by the system. And if the policy fails the vetting process, then it would be sent back for correction.
Once decisions have been made, future politics will be mostly about government performance. Competent delivery would be a big part of why we elect a government. Delivery is a matter of politics and should be repoliticised, and thus taken out of the de facto control of the Civil Service. Making all the changes work set out in the new pension policy would be the responsibility of the government and ministers. No ducking this one.
Then would come the sharpest control of them all – feedback. Has your party produced better results? Convince us that your party has produced precision-guided welfare that does not pollute on impact. Can you run the trains? Cut public expenditure and produce greater outcomes simultaneously? Have you hard-regulated the banks back on to planet Earth? To return to our example, in practice, is your design and delivery producing the objective of fair pensions for all? And feedback – results and facts – is most definitely not political. Here, our political authority would be allocated to independent scorekeepers.
For Public Service Organisations, whilst results and facts are not political, doing something about them is. Thus underperformance would trigger government action; otherwise the PSOs would be left to get on with it, confident that effective feedback would keep an eye on them.
In summary: objectives as rules, the policymaking process, and feedback and scorekeeping would be depoliticised. Delivery, the delivery system, and priority reform would be politicised. Most public sector bodies would be running in business-as-usual mode, without political input, unless triggered.
I should emphasise that the depoliticisation of aspects of government is not to place them in the hands of some technocratic elite to decide as they think fit as the only alternative to failed politics and governments. Our Treaty provides a system for right decision-making under our jurisdiction where we set the objectives and process.
One further decision for our deployment – we will want to reclaim some political authority between elections on big issues, through the right to referendum, both nationally and locally. How often this is done would be up to us – possibly once in ten years with issues on the scale of membership of the EU. But we might, in time, get a taste for making decisions, as the Swiss do, and hold referenda more often.
In terms of where the power would go then less for the prime minister and Cabinet, less for the senior Civil Service, less for powerful lobbies, less for party funders, less for PSOs. More for the Commons and the Lords, more for independent scrutineers and scorekeepers, more for elected executives, more for other political parties, more for the public, and more for real local government. In practice, governments would achieve more, and therefore ministers would achieve more and therefore be more powerful in a literal and not psychological sense (and crucially, it would be controlled and directed power).
Summary of the Treaty
This Treaty would be put to the people to deliberate, and thence to vote on as a package. Then it would be put into practice through a new Constitution and its set of rules for government and some new roles. It would cover the redistribution of power, the depoliticisation and institutionalisation of comprehensive feedback on results and performance of every sphere of government, and the politicisation of delivery with executive ministers and a new Civil Service (with a modern name) employing the right people for the right roles.
To make the whole system work organisationally, these are the building blocks or the design:
- Feedback
- Abandonment programme
- Policy vetting
- Operations
- People
- Competitive democracy
- Separation of powers, behaviours, tamper-proof rules, custodian role
- Intergenerational fairness, and responsibility deal
