An excerpt from Stand & Deliver: A Design For Successful Government (2014) Ed Straw
Let’s try and pull all this together – the context, what’s wrong, the nineteen causes of Labour’s loss in 2010. The roots of failure may seem many and diverse; but the themes are common.
We all criticise government. Many say we should not be so harsh. Certainly, if you or I worked in that system we would struggle to do any better. But all the criticism of the system is justified. To use a chant from the football terraces – it’s crap and it doesn’t know it is.
In the course of writing this book I have come to realise that the current system demands cash for honours, and requires secret deals with news media empires. That is the price of election, not the occasional product of a sleazy prime minister or two. The current system leaves ministers and civil servants wide open to preferential lobbies that are, therefore, rife – any industry lobby usually gets what it wants at our expense. And leaves these industries soft and flabby and globally uncompetitive – a pretty poor industrial policy. And, in its effect, the constitution insists on bulk spinning – everyone becomes a spinner. It does not have to be this way, but that is the system we have.
I have come to realise the contribution to government failure made by the systems according to which party leaders are elected, and of the way parties are funded; of the maldistribution of political authority, of over-politicisation and apoliticisation; and misplaced power, all generating failure.
The consequent concentrations of power creep up on us – in party politics, in government, in banking, in large companies, in the news media, and in large public sector organisations and their cousins running government services in the private sector. At first we accept it as an inevitable and acceptable price to pay – for efficient business, for example. But it never stops and eventually it goes way too far. It is currently rated ‘taking the piss’. Parts of these functionaries of our country behave well, but far too many do not, and their behaviour dominates in many adverse ways – seen and unseen.
The problem is not that politicians are only in it for the personal power (although some are), or that senior civil servants are clinging on to their status and cashmere terms and conditions (although they do), or that if only a different party were in power all would be well (it never is), or that public sector staff are too used to warm and fluffy work lives (although many are). We find politics in the wrong places, like scorekeeping, and kept out of the right places, like making things happen. All of this behaviour is the product of what the system of government demands and allows – the rules that stipulate how government should work. Slack rules allow slack behaviour, what you can get away with, duck, or bodge. There is nothing to say it should be otherwise. No controls, no imperatives, no disciplines … on governments (nor on us). All organisations need these. Who is to blame?
The fundamental conclusion is that the reason governments fail is because they have not been designed. They have not been designed to succeed. They fail because they have far too much authority, far too little discipline on what they do, and too few rock solid obligations written into tamper-free constitutions. They fail not primarily because of the leaders and policies of the parties, but because the system in which they operate is so out of date that failure is inevitable. They and we are locked into a government system of vast dysfunction, with a default setting for muddle and error. What surprises me is when things work.
Why, then, do we continue to use the old banger for governments to ride in? Because the rules for governments – as distinct from the rules for us – insist on it. This is the point to talk about the C-word. Constitutions lay down how governments should work, what they can and can’t do, the obligations on them. Our constitution is the rulebook for those in power. It should never be left solely to the political classes and academics to debate and amend, as happens now.
Constitutions are like the rules for a game – and we know if the rules are good the game is too, and if they aren’t we give up on it. Constitutions have to be obeyed by governments – the courts and the judiciary stand at their end to enforce them. Our constitution needs to work much harder. If we raise the bar then we raise what is demanded of government.
Organisation starts (and often stops) with its constitution. Indeed, the hidden hand of a constitution is found at the heart of much organisational success and failure. A constitution is a set of fundamental principles according to which a state is governed: what is required of a government; what is allowed and not allowed; how power is deployed; the independence of the judiciary; rights and responsibilities. Why are our constitutions so inadequate in such important areas? Because the constitutions of governments were written or originated a long time ago, and the remit of government has expanded very considerably in the last century or so. Their scale today would astonish nineteenth-century rulers.
Most constitutions were designed or had their origins 200 years or more ago, from the American (1787) to the French (1958, and with eighteen subsequent amendments). Magna Carta – the best constitution Britain has ever had – was written in 1297 in the form still partly on the statute book. These constitutions were designed to ensure democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Good. But just ponder that since those objectives became enshrined, little has changed other than very limited attempts at extra ‘check and balance’ on government decision, introduced usually in response to some crisis or other.
Then think about how much has changed in the world of government in the last hundred years, and even the last sixty. Decision-complexity has risen exponentially with population, with the number of countries, with globalisation and the scale of country to country competition, with global finance, with technology and with science; the power of bodies in influencing government for better or worse is out of all former proportion, at times seemingly unstoppable – financial institutions, large businesses, and the news media; the pressure on resources is biting; and, if that were not enough, climate chaos is set to grow. What’s more, less is up for political judgement and more for professional delivery as experiments in capitalism versus socialism, inherited versus social justice, have reached their conclusion.
Consequently, governments have not been designed for their modern primary purposes. Today they run very large public services and regulate major industries. Governments have become major doers and deliverers and they are expected to solve most problems. The bureaucracies of delivery have an inevitable tendency to become ends to themselves rather than servants of society – they become inward turning in the absence of forces that make them look outside. When the constitutions were written, governments delivered hardly any services, and faced none of these issues of direct delivery.
Constitutions were never invented to control corporate power. The rights of man came about to protect the individual from arbitrary acts of absolute monarchs. Every democratic constitution in the world has these provisions, and the concomitant independence of the judiciary. In the days when constitutions were being thought about very hard and instituted, marauding corporates did not exist. If they had, the founding fathers here and everywhere else would have had a substantial part of the constitution devoted to protection of the individual against unrestrained or insufficiently restrained corporates, be they legal or illegal. Businesses of current scale are a modern occurrence and their power has grown with their size. Some are near totalitarian in outlook. They lobby in private to prevent increased competition, to maintain an armlock on a common need like pensions or food, and to see off the interests of the public.
Neither were constitutions designed to handle the disproportionate power wielded by today’s news media. The news media has become pervasive with the means of distribution multiplying – a huge leap in scale and therefore influence from the original printed sheets for the few who could read. Deals for political support in exchange for business benefit are standard practice on a small and large scale. For as long as government decisions are skewed towards corporate, media and other sectional interests, citizens and consumers will come a long way last.
Governments were not designed with today’s debt in mind. Historically, debt was incurred to wage war. If it was left to grow and comparative excess prevailed, countries went bust or revolutions broke out, as in France in 1789. Thus controls were grim but effective. Today they are not, debt is easier to obtain, and it is used to finance much more than war. The advent of the welfare state and increasing longevity expanding those supported by it has made the politics of debt hard to resist. Politicians hope that the financial boil will not burst whilst they are in office, but will remain for future generations to lance. No constitutional safeguards envisaged this dilemma.
Neither were constitutions originated when life spans were such that putting off hard choices would benefit one generation at the potentially enormous expense of later ones – choices about who funds pensions and when, and whether at least on a precautionary basis climate chaos is to be taken seriously.
The task of government has expanded seismically. Governments’ capacity for beneficial change is far exceeded by the demands on them. None of these constitutions were designed for this multi-mission of government. No current government in the world has been explicitly designed to succeed. None has been designed according to modern organisational theory and practice. We should marvel that organisations so out of date manage to function at all. This is neurosurgery with a torque wrench. If something has not been designed for purpose then it comes as no surprise when it doesn’t work; so why on earth should we expect undesigned government to work?
At this point, we need to introduce the concept of political authority. As we shall find later, this is where much of the system has gone wrong, and lies at the node of putting it right. Political authority is broadly what we give to a government on election ‘to run the country’. Someone or somebody has to take the myriad of decisions and do the myriad of actions required of any modern government. This is essential – 30 million voters acting collectively could not do it. But that authority is distributed – it doesn’t all go to the government (except in dictatorships). Under the present system, authority is distributed away from the executive to provide some check on government actions – this is such power that parliamentary committees can muster to vet proposed legislation and to review past action; to the second chamber; to independent assessors like the National Audit Office and the Office for National Statistics; to the Civil Service; and to the judiciary (although in the UK this ‘separation of powers’ between the executive and the legislature is scrambled). Political authority is usually split between national, regional and local governments. The powers resting at each vary considerably between countries.
But our constitutions have large holes in them. The political authority of governments includes much score-keeping simply because our constitutions are silent on it. Watch how politicians debate the numbers. Governments wriggle and squirm to spin every number from crime statistics to debt levels to employment to immigration. But maths really should not be a matter of politics. Absurdly, it largely is. About once a decade small steps in the right direction are made via the independence of the Office for National Statistics and the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility, both charged with producing valid and not politicised figures.
Next the holed constitution places no obligation to evaluate dispassionately and objectively the result or outcome of every policy, programme, law, institution, expenditure, or agent of government. The results of government are either uncollected or are a matter of argument. Results should never be matters of political judgement accept where they are not clear. But in the absence of any systematic assessment, tabloid opinion, urban myth, prejudice, misinformation, spun defence, and most often simple ignorance substitute. Equally large holes exist as governments do not have any obligations to deliver beneficial change effectively. Too much becomes left to politics and lobbying, crowding out what should be matters of the quality of decision-making and of good organisation. Civil servants and ministers are usually ignorant of the subjects on which they are being lobbied and bend to the best or loudest argument. The government has masses of political authority to take the wrong decision on a lobby’s behalf, all in private.
Amongst the elites with the political authority, is a pervasive self-serving culture that the complexities of government are way beyond the common person: only they have the abilities to govern. They are wrong, but the tendency has been for authority to be smuggled quietly to the centre. But much has been learnt about how to make decisions well in organisations. None of this new knowledge is reflected in the way that governments are constituted. Governments can still make decisions in any way that they please.
So what fills the constitutional void? Politics and politicisation. The original house was built soundly, but wings have been added successively without applying a building code – the foundations of representative democracy, justice, and rights remains standing, but the rest is flawed. It leaks and disenchants. The consequences of this laissez-faire political authority lie all around us in the form of the nonsenses that are deemed irreformable in practice or that we have to accept in the name of some apparently greater good.
This book makes the connections between performance and a constitution, between the rules for government and lived experiences, and therefore the central place of its constitution in a society. The analysis is organisational, the solution is constitutional, and the change will be political.
Rather as Gandhi said when asked what he thought of British civilisation – ‘I look forward to it’ – so I look forward to a British constitution. What passes for one now is the so-called unwritten or more correctly uncodified constitution – a mixture of custom and practice, what the Civil Service can get you to believe, academic interpretations of precedent, and the periodic judgements and misjudgements of the courts – alongside the laws that have given some shape: the Bill of Rights 1689, accompanied by Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, Habeas Corpus Act 1679, Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, and more recently the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act. This is piecemeal, not a coherent system designed to deliver. Read the Swiss constitution and, without necessarily agreeing with it all and noting its omissions by comparison with the Treaty, decide if it is not a far better set of rules to govern a country than the obscure and fungible rules of the UK – in fact the latter is a set of rules for a muddle with pockets of high privilege, which is precisely what we have. We return to the point that the constitution and ethos of any entity are what determine its performance and behaviour.
My ambition is to create the concept of, and the desire for, world-class government. This would stem from a 21st century constitution, and an ethos amongst leaders to strive for the best. The constitution would embrace the main pillars of effective government, not just what government was 200 years ago.
So, what would a design for successful government look like? What are the essential building blocks? The rest of the book sets these out.
