The coalition government is meant to be revolutionising everything in its sights. But when it comes to ancient constitutional convention, plus ça change
‘Radical’ welfare reform; ‘radical’ policy programme; Cameron ‘the revolutionary’ – that has been the story for the past nine months. But does it stack up? For evidence, download the draft Cabinet manual published just before Christmas.
The title itself is misleading. It is about more than when the Cabinet meets and who gets to attend. The document offers ‘a guide to laws, conventions and rules on the operation of government’. To all intents and purposes, here is the British constitution on display.
The cliché that Britain had no written constitution was always brainless. We’ve had fundamental law since at least the Act of Settlement 1701 – that is the legislation that says you can’t be monarch unless you are an upstanding Protestant. What we lacked was codification – and the new manual, a pet project of Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell and originally approved by the Labour government, brings together myriad conventions, hard and soft ‘understandings’, fixed procedures and statute law.
As the ultimate ‘how do’ of British government, it will needle some. Restive Eurosceptics on the Tory backbenches will find it stuffed with references to European Union statutes and imperatives.
Yet so much is also mired in the British past. There is enough Victoriana here to keep Antiques Roadshow going for years. The manual is a reminder of how unmodernised our system of government remains. Professor Peter Hennessy, himself now a crusty ornament in the House of Lords, once compared it to Gormenghast; Mervyn Peake could certainly have written some of these paragraphs.
It isn’t just the obvious anomalies, such as the crown dependencies (exactly why does the UK subsidise Isle of Man residents?) and our semi-theocracy (how else to describe a situation where the bishops of London and Winchester along with 24 other Church of England priests make our laws?). In the twenty-first century we go on languishing under such higher mysteries as the ‘royal prerogative’, which is basically a way of spending money without legal permission.
From the way the Commons operates to the oddity of the office of prime minister (to get paid, its occupant has to swear an oath as a commissioner of the Treasury), the system drips antiquity. And it matters. What management sense can we make of the manual’s prescription that Parliament ‘will normally’ understand administrative decisions are not one for which ministers can be held responsible? Why shouldn’t the Cabinet secretary be appointed through open competition, rather than ‘on the advice of the retiring Cabinet secretary who will consult with a number of [unnamed] individuals’?
The Cameron government is slashing and burning and, for many, that is radicalism enough: it means jobs lost and services abolished. But when the smoke clears and the government has shrunk the state to its desired level, the institutional landscape won’t have changed much. The way we govern ourselves will still be anachronistic and, to a considerable extent, dysfunctional.
Take the civil service. Why do we need a separate cadre of public officials who don’t look much different from those who work for arm’s-length bodies, councils or the NHS? Take audit. Why should the National Audit Office’s peculiar relationship with MPs impede the rationalisation of how public spending is accounted for?
Take local government. If the Cabinet manual is the constitution, local government appears not to be part of it: councils simply don’t figure. The reason Total Place foundered is that Whitehall departmentalism is getting ever tighter. For all his talk, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude is not enforcing shared services or the rationalisation of inspection. Silos rule OK.
It’s not that the British constitution is immutable. In retrospect, Labour’s first term between 1997 and 2001 was a time of astonishing change, including the Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act. The manual has barely caught up with the dynamism of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution.
But so far, the Cameron government’s constitutional reforms amount to little more than proposed alterations to parliamentary elections and boundaries.
Forget Nick Clegg, this is a Conservative administration and in a profound sense it is indeed conservative.
David Walker is the former managing director for communications at the Audit Commission
