S3E7: Why Our Political System Is Broken
How do politicians escape accountability for their lies? Why is there wasteful spending on poorly conceived projects that aren’t based on evidence? How has a tax system been created that is more than confusing? Ian Dunt is a political writer and commentator. He’s a columnist for the i, former Editor of Politics.co.uk and used to host the Remainiacs podcast. He has written a book called ‘How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t’. Is the UK political system broken beyond repair?
What you should remember from this episode
Ian Dunt is a journalist and the author of How Westminster Works… And Why It Doesn’t.
He gives the example of Chris Grayling who screwed up probation by privatising it. The reasons people re-offend are complex - like housing, drug programmes, therapy, education etc. And when you optimise something like probation for profit, it creates economic incentives for doing the wrong thing, like cutting costs, which lowers the quality of the service and ultimately failed massively. People died.
Unsurprisingly, there were no consequences for Grayling. This is because too much power is handed to ministers in the UK - way more than most democracies, says Ian.
There’s hardly any chance to stop minsters from exercising power. And after they screw up, they often get promotions. Why is there no accountability?
There are four institutions that Ian argues should hold politicians to account - the press, Treasury, Parliament and Civil Service. But these institutions suffer from the same problems politicians do - they’re amateur generalists.
We might think that the voting public picks our politicians but that’s not generally the case because most of our politicians are elected in safe seats. In fact, only 79 seats changed hands at the last election and that was considered a huge swing. This is problematic because political parties essentially pick most of our politicians - in closed rooms - not the electorate because in safe seats, whoever the parties choose will win. They tend to pick ideologues and partisans - they don’t care about people with deep expertise. They pick people in their own image.
Ministers are moved so frequently between posts - Ian says two years is a long tenure - which doesn’t give ministers enough time to develop expertise.
You’re rewarded for moving as often as possible, and it’s the same in the Civil Service. There’s no recognition for developing deep knowledge. They are amateur generalists.
It’s the same in journalism now. Journalists can’t go deep because they have to churn out so many articles a day. And all of this means we fail at political scrutiny as a society.
Political parties control what happens in Parliament. This means MPs don’t scrutinise independently because they succeed individually by doing what their political parties tell them to do.
The Treasury is the most powerful restraint that exists on our Prime Minister today. They’ve got power because they control the money.
We have a massive financial counter incentive to attract the best talent - we don’t pay people enough to be civil servants (or politicians or journalists).
We lost the institutional knowledge from the Civil Service of how to do stuff so we hire consultants instead - which ends up being way more expensive for the country.
The Treasury has a very specific problem when it comes to investing outside London or the South. They historically made these decisions based on a cost/benefit analysis, and it’s nearly always a better investment from a cost/benefit analysis perspective to invest in the South than the North. This is hopefully changing though Ian says.
Ian argues we are sugar-rushed children in journalism. Our national coverage is short termist, surface level and entertainment led. And it’s tough to argue with him.
We often have experts arguing for particular things which get turned down by the Treasury, e.g. supporting children who missed out on education in Covid.
Trying to change the tax system is often political suicide which means there’s very little political appetite to make it better.
