The next Conservative (or Reform) government needs Trumpery.
You have to admire the energy of Donald Trump in issuing his decrees the moment he entered his office. Love or loathe what he did, his immediacy of action was beyond what our politicians have ever done – and if Conservatives regain power, they should do the same.
The well established Whitehall process is designed to prevent hasty action, or anything at all above a snail’s pace. After a general election and after the victorious party leader has chosen his or her Cabinet, there is a day of two or group photographs and press releases, official photographs, writing profiles and all that gubbins. The new ministers move into their offices, get their feet under the table, and start learning what they are allowed to do, with the assistance of their senior civil servants. Eventually they might be able to make decisions, but until then they are dulled by approving appointments and signing innocuous-looking routine papers. They are house-trained by the bureaucracy.
It takes a very short time before most ministers go native, and go into bat for their team, the ministry, instead of for the public.
Mill observed:
But where everything is done through the bureaucracy, nothing to which the bureaucracy is really adverse can be done at all.
Trump bypassed all that, by not going through the bureaucracy. He did so because his office gives him personal power to do so, and more importantly because he had prepared long in advance. British ministers have delegated power, still enjoyed in their own persons but hedged around by laws, and have not hitherto prepared in advance. They still have authority wide enough to make sweeping changes at once.
In the British system, most changes that are needed will require Parliamentary approval. Others will not.
- For changes ministers can make alone, or by order-in-council, these can be rolled out before the minister has sat down, as long as they have been prepared in complete, scrupulous detail in advance, before the election is even called. It would be a good discipline for the new ministers to pledge to sign pre-prepared orders before their bottoms have met the chair.
- For changes requiring a change in the law, the Bills can be prepared in advance, and be put before the Speaker on the day after the State Opening.
Much should be in the hands of ministers, but cautious statutory rules leave them bound head and foot, while much else should be established by solid law but is handed over to a minister’s discretion. Unknotting that wrong-way-roundedness is a separate topic, but it provides an opportunity: ministers are given extraordinary powers, and as long as they use them for the proper purpose, they can achieve changes.
Radical changes need planning. In the Whitehall process this requires that all be scrutinised by the wise heads of the Civil Service, amended, reworded, shaped to fit expectations, and spewed out after months or years often bearing little resemblance to the policy that went in. However changes planned outside the system, by party staffers and consultants paid from party funds, can do as good a job, do it faster, and do it without distorting the intention. Then a new ministerial order can be slapped on the desk by the new minister before he sits down.
Changes that do not need Parliamentary approval include:
- Freezing or limited civil service recruitment;
- Sacking diversity teams, and ordering the tolerance of heterodox opinion;
- Changing the entry requirements / aptitude tests to encourage diversity of mind in the civil service;
- Abolishing non-statutory quangos;
- Abolishing or rearranging government departments;
- Removing from all walls maps that omit Ulster or Scotland;
- Establishing an office to scrutinise spelling, grammar, standards and practices in communication and the drafting of statutory instruments.
The immediate changes which require an Act of Parliament or a statutory instrument are matters for an article on their own. Ministerial action can be important too, and should be immediate. Exactly what should be done will be examined separately..