The Stakeholder State

Repeal, repeal, repeal

Keir Starmer’s former Head of Political Strategy, Paul Ovenden, wrote an article for The Times last week which is well worth reading. There is a growing consensus that the British state is shackled by bureaucratic and legal processes which prioritise state-funded NGOs and the “whatever it is, I’m against it”, anti-business, anti-building, anti-progress online mob. Some call it The Blob.

Ovenden is by no means the first person to notice this and it is telling that his analysis is much the same as Boris Johnson’s chief spad, Dominic Cummings. Starmer himself has complained that bringing about change is harder than he expected.

Governments have become fixated on trivia because it is too difficult to do the things they have been elected to do:

Readers will no doubt recognise the “distracted boyfriend” meme, in which a bloke eyes up a girl over his left shoulder, oblivious to the death stare of his partner. Well, plaster “colonial reparations”, “banning vaping in pub gardens” or “holding a bilat with a foreign leader who happens to be on a shopping trip in London” over the object of his attention, add a plaintive “change?” banner to the furious girlfriend and you’d have a handy visual metaphor for the frustrations of government.

The obvious question this raises is how a government elected on a vast parliamentary majority, at a time of mounting public impatience, with fundamental problems to fix, allows itself to become distracted by this sort of political folderol.

Unlike Cummings, Ovenden does not think the civil service is the problem. He thinks that the real obstacle to change is an assortment of interest groups, influencers and lawyers that he terms the “stakeholder state”.

The Stakeholder State isn’t the civil service. In fact, many of those most committed to the cause of tearing it down are themselves civil servants. Instead, it is incubated by a political perma-class that exists within every party and every department, one whose entire focus is on preserving their status within a system that gives them meaning and whose politics could broadly be described as a) anything at some point and b) nothing at any point.

That does sound rather like the civil service, to be honest. Let’s just call them bureaucrats and remember our Public Choice Theory.

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. If the language of priorities is the religion of socialism, then consultations and reviews are the sacred texts of the Stakeholder State.

It isn’t a grand conspiracy. There aren’t secret meetings or handshakes. Rather, it is a morbid symptom of a state that has got bigger and bigger while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself.

Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere: in the democratic powers handed to arm’s-length bodies or the many small government departments too powerless or captured to resist lobbying efforts. The Stakeholder State ferments between the NGO and the campaign group, the celebrity letter-writing campaign and the activist lawyers. It is given voice by political podcasts where everyone violently agrees. It is canonised through a corrupted honours system.

If you want to imagine a typical scene in the Stakeholder State, it is a government elected on a promise to build an entire generation of housing and infrastructure in just five years spending time and money lobbying itself to water down those commitments through its own quangos.

The government lobbying itself with taxpayers’ money is something I have been writing about for years. It is a real problem. But Ovenden is perhaps too generous to the Labour Party and gives too much weight to political podcasts. At the end of the day, it was Labour backbenchers who put a stop to welfare reform and who watered down the government’s attempt to make building houses easier. Yes, they were lobbied by The Blob, but they could have said no if they wanted to.

We don’t have to keep picking the pockets of the productive parts of our economy in order to fund inflation-busting pension increases for millionaires or an unsustainable welfare system. We don’t have to strangle small businesses at birth with regulatory burdens. We don’t have to fatten the pockets of wind-turbine operators by paying them not to produce energy. We don’t have to import antisemitic Islamists who wish us harm. And we certainly don’t have to treat British citizenship as a scrap of paper. On all this and more, we can simply choose not to.

The exciting bit is how easy this can be. We don’t need a revolution to achieve it. We don’t even need years of legislative fights. The public consent for change has been granted in every major election and vote going back to 2016. A government with a stiffened spine and renewed purpose could dismantle much of the Stakeholder State quickly. In doing so it would quickly find its nerve again and it would salvage something precious — the sense that politics can deliver the change people are crying out for.

We can indeed simply choose not to, but I don’t think it will be as easy as Ovenden makes out. It is a sign of how tough it will be that he doesn’t explicitly say what needs to be done. Spelling it out would startle the horses. We need to strip funding from all politically active NGOs, charities and pressure groups. We need a true bonfire of the quangos. We need to - for want of a better word - purge those “arm’s-length bodies” and government departments that have been “captured” by ideologues. Above all, we need to repeal or significantly amend a number of laws, including the Climate Change Act, the Equality Act, the Children and Families Act, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act, the Town and Country Planning Act, the Employment Rights Act, and the Human Rights Act. We probably need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Much of this will be unpopular, and not just with the “stakeholder state”, because all this legislation sounds nice (governments never call a law ‘The Anti-Growth Act’ or ‘The Business Suffocation Act’). Some of these laws have only just been introduced.

The government - this government, the last government and the next government - is in a strait-jacket of well-meaning but badly drafted laws that have been exploited by activist judges and single-issue campaigners. There is no point complaining about the judges and the campaigners. The only way out of the woods is do the one thing that politicians can do and change the law.

Politically, it will take some doing and it seems unlikely that a former human rights lawyer is the best person to do it, but until it is done, everyone who leaves office having achieved nothing will have the same complaint.