Who runs Britain?

The paradox of executive power

I wouldn’t recommend watching Liz Truss’s new YouTube show, unless you’re a pyschologist studying personality disorders. But if you do tune in you’ll see someone determined to blame everyone else for her failure. In her mind the fault for her demise rests with the “blob” of civil servants, central bankers, regulators, do-gooder lefties, and judges who thwarted her entirely reasonable plans.

She’s an extreme case. But politicians of all sides have an increasing tendency to blame the machinery of state for their frustrations. For many Tories, including plenty saner than Truss, their failure to get to grip on multiple policy areas, from prisons to immigration, was due to being constantly stymied by the blob.

After a difficult 18 months many in Labour have reached a similar conclusion. Just before Christmas, at the parliamentary liaison committee, Starmer complained that:

“As Prime Minister, every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arms-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”.

A few weeks later his former director of strategy, Paul Ovenden, wrote a widely circulated column which coined the term “stakeholder state” to explain what his old boss meant:

“The Stakeholder State is not a single phenomenon. Instead, it is the gradual but decisive shift of politics and power away from voters and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore. In this state, the government rows with muffled oars in order to appease a complex coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations.”

Yet the British prime minister, assuming he or she has the backing of a majority in the House of Commons, is one of the most powerful executive figures in any democracy. They are not constrained by a head of state with any meaningful powers, or an elected second chamber that can frustrate legislation permanently. The judiciary is independent but parliament is sovereign. By strong convention the courts do not overrule primary legislation. The prime minister can, should they wish, scrap regulators, ignore lobbyists, employ whoever they want in the civil service and override any negative court judgement. It is in their power to just do things.

As Health Secretary Wes Streeting put it in a recent speech that was seen as a not very coded attack on Starmer:

“The most corrosive sense of all is fatalism, the idea that things can’t change…The right encourage this argument. They’re rolling the pitch to come in with a chainsaw and tear up public services entirely. Bafflingly, some on my own side of the political divide have begun to parrot the same argument. They complain about the civil service. They blame stakeholder capture. This excuses culture does the centre-left no favours….And we should be in no doubt that they are excuses….We are not simply at the mercy of forces outside of our control. Our fortunes are in our hands…. Where there aren’t levers, we build them. Where there are barriers, we bulldoze them. If people in charge aren’t up to the job, we replace them.”

While Streeting is right that the excuses are unedifying, it is nevertheless true that governments do keep struggling to make the machinery work for them. The danger in his argument is it assumes the only problem is lack of will. In many cases it’s true that ministers don’t even try to force the machine, having little idea of what they want to do or much curiosity about how to change things. But even when they do know what they want it’s still incredibly difficult to get things done. Understanding why matters.

One of the apparent paradoxes of modern British politics is that frustrations with the machine have got worse even as executive authority has increased. This should act as a warning to those who think simply taking on more power is the answer. Instead we need a more precise diagnosis of why ministers feel such a lack of control despite having so much theoretical clout.

Three Problems