The rise of the unaccountable experts: why do we allow politicians to give away power?
Trust in politicians is at a record low so we look for other people and other bodies to take responsibility and remove our anxieties
Whatever else you say about her, Liz Truss has provided a great deal of mirth since the publication of her memoir-cum-apologia, Ten Years To Save The West, last week. Among its most improbable and risible notions is that her premiership was brought low by a sinister coalition of vested interests and unaccountable institutions which, to translate for a US audience which she hopes will be lucrative, she described as “the deep state”.
I wrote in The Daily Express when the book came out that there was no “deep state” in Britain, and that in legal and constitutional terms the prime minister actually has enormously broad powers to determine and implement policy. Relatively few bodies are entrenched in statute, and of course none is untouchable as Parliament can make or unmake any body—even, I suppose, itself—and the Conservative Party won the last general election in 2019 with a majority of 80. Truss is, of course, pathologically unwilling, maybe even unable, to admit any fault during her 49-day premiership, and her portrayal of the “anti-growth coalition”, as she once dubbed it, is an exercise in hunting for scapegoats.
Perhaps, though, we should be grateful to Truss for raising the issue in a very general sense, even if she did not do it for the right reasons. In CapX last Thursday, I argued that there is a tendency in the Labour Party under its current leadership to seek to transfer powers from elected politicians, from ministers and MPs in Parliament, to all sorts of non-governmental, “independent” bodies like an Office for Value for Money or Great British Energy.
This forced its way to the front of my mind this evening watching A Mayor for London on BBC1, in which Eddie Nestor moderated an encounter between the candidates for next week’s mayoral election and a studio audience. There was, of course, considerable discussion of policing in the capital, which is in a parlous condition and where there are failings in many quarters. But one member of the audience, expressing understandable frustration, said that politicians “couldn’t be trusted” to oversee the Metropolitan Police. Instead, she suggested, that responsibility should be given to “a commission or something”.
I find this sentiment really concerning. Let me say first that I understand it: I know that public trust in politicians is at an historic low, and politicians themselves, past and present, bear a heavy degree of the responsibility for that breakdown. So the instinct that politicians as a class are unfit to manage an organisation which needs to change is absolutely understandable. But our instincts are not always correct.
What do we imagine we are doing when we create these new bodies free from “political” control and interference? We focus on the negative, the thing we are turning away from, and that seems to reinforce our choice. We all know what politicians are like: self-serving, venal, short-sighted, vote-chasing ruffians whose only interest is in courting popularity, certainly not the sort of high-minded public servant we want to undertake such a serious task. So to whom are we passing this kind of responsibility?
As an example, let’s look at the Office for Budget Responsibility, a bête noire of Liz Truss. Its establishment was announced by George Osborne in his first speech as chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010 and designed essentially to provide respectability and independent endorsement of his economic policies, and he took pride in predicting it would create a “rod for my back down the line and for future chancellors”. It provides independent economic forecasts and analysis of the public finances, and is exactly the kind of non-political assurance that casual observers of politics find superficially attractive.
The OBR is chaired by Richard Hughes, a long-serving Treasury civil servant and International Monetary Fund adviser appointed on October 2020 to head the body for five years. He read political history and government at Harvard then completed a master’s degree in development economics and international development at Oxford. He is supported as part of a troika by Professor David Miles, an Oxford- and Birkbeck-educated economist at Imperial College London who also sits on the Commission of the Central Bank of Ireland, and Tom Josephs, who worked at HM Treasury from 2000 to 2010 and again from 2019 to 2022 as well as holding roles at the IMF, the Department for International Trade and the Department for Work and Pensions.
There is an oversight board which consists of the chair and the two officials above, with another three non-executive members. These are currently Dame Susan Rice, an American-born banker who was chief executive of Lloyds TSB Scotland from 2000 to 2014 and sat on the Court of the Bank of England 2007-14; Baroness Hogg, whose father, husband and father-in-law were or are all peers, a financial journalist, head of John Major’s Number 10 Policy Unit and former chair of the Financial Reporting Council; and Bronwyn Curtis, educated at the LSE, fomerly of Bloomberg and HSBC and for 10 years chair of JP Morgan Asia Growth and Income.
My point is, this is not an especially diverse group of people, a narrow clique of professionals. There is nothing wrong with that: expertise is a good thing, and we should always want to attract the world’s best in any field to help run our institutions. But these undoubted experts are unaccountable, whereas Members of Parliament, for all their undoubted faults, have to face the electorate every four or five years (and exist in an unblinking and harsh media spotlight every day of their lives). The traditional set-up of the British state was a balance between these competing elements: power rested with accountable politicians but was often delegated on an operational basis to technocrats.
There seems to be a powerful public instinct now to disturb this balance, and it is the representative and accountable aspect of it which is being pushed aside, because of a knee-jerk sense that politicians are bad, untrustworthy and incompetent. The Labour Party, for example, wants to give more power to the OBR to publish its own economic forecasts, introduce a statutory charter of budget responsibility and further constrain the freedom of action of the chancellor of the Exchequer. Politicians cannot be trusted, so we must surrender to technocrats who know better.
This is dissonant in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum, in the campaign for which Dominic Cummings’s coinage “Take back control” was such a powerful force. It is not even that politicians deny this urge. Last year Sir Keir Starmer said that the phrase “take back control” was “really powerful, it was like a Heineken phrase… it got into people’s heads”. He went on to say that “the control people want is control over their lives and their communities” and that Labour would “turn it from a slogan into a solution”. But that is exactly the opposite of the trend I’m talking about: people are not given “control over their lives and their communities” by moving power from Members of Parliament, who can be held accountable and voted out, to economists or bankers or scientists who are appointed to fixed terms in arm’s-length bodies and public institutions.
There is a lot of responsibility to go round here. Politicians, both those of today and their predecessors, have acted badly enough to forfeit almost all of the trust the public ever had in them (which was never substantial). Other politicians, seeking the approbation of that same public, have abased themselves, agreed with the damning verdict on them, and created the expectation that they can make things better by giving away not just power but also accountability. And we, voters, have to shoulder some of the blame: we pay too little attention to who makes decisions which affect our lives and how they make them, and we treat too lightly the business of scrutinising them and holding them to account.
The result of this is that we have blurred a critical distinction, between the class of politicians and the quality of individual politicians. Because this or that lot is bad, we have allowed ourselves to think, then they are all bad, not only as a collection of individuals but as a type, and that therefore they are not the kind of people with whom we should entrust important decisions and powers of oversight. That can seem attractive for a while, but it is stripping away from ministers, responsible to Parliament, the nation’s representative body, control over areas of policy which have enormous impact on our everyday lives.
We cannot keep doing this. We cannot keep shrugging off responsibility, and allowing others to do so, in the assumption that someone else will pick it up and do it better. And we certainly cannot do that at the same time at complaining that we have no control, that we are powerless, that there is an impenetrable establishment which pursues its own agenda heedless of what the public wants. We are the public, and if these institutions do things we don’t like, it is only because we gave them the power because we lazily assumed they would exercise it better. We all have to stand up, and we need to start now.
If you want to have a go at "unaccountable institutions", surely the OBR are the last people you should hit on? They have no power to do anything except issue predictions (as do lots of other organisations) which you are free to believe or disbelieve. Liz Truss certainly cannot blame them for her failure since she excluded them from the process when she was drawing up her mini-budget. Had she included them in the process, perhaps they might have brought to her attention some of the things she now admits she didn't know!