One of the low-level criticisms that we hear about the Cameron style of leadership is that there is a very tight inner circle and not as much collegiate decision-making as some would like. I don’t know the truth or not of these comments. What I would say is that one of the criticisms we have always made of the New Labour style is the way that government decisions were taken by a small group, un-minuted, not properly discussed, and not sufficiently chewed over by enough people to iron out potential problems.
So how do we get from this:
To this:
Ideally with extra people contributing as well?
I would argue that many of the Tories’ initiatives or pledges for when in government will encourage this – for example, the precedent of the presumption for publication (of expenses, but I hope that minutes of meetings where decisions are made will be published too) or the crowd-sourcing of IT solutions.
But perhaps the most efficient lever is not a Conservative policy or a Cameron initiative. In government, there are literally hundreds – maybe thousands – of things to decide on every day. In opposition, it’s relatively easy to say you want to see and oversee everything.In government, and particularly as Prime Minister, as Gordon Brown belatedly discovered, it is basically impossible. No one person can control everything.
In fact this is quite a neat metaphor for how the Conservatives’ localism plans would work. I’ve always had my concerns about the practical implications of localism (though not the policy itself) – because you need enough of the right people to make a big and long-term commitment, and because you need central government to say ‘No, that’s not our job’ often. But if the Tories mean what they say about this, it would be an absolutely huge social revolution – the thought of a government minister not instantly responding to the ‘something must be done’ cry, or accepting that different police areas have different priorities, or that local health boards believe that they should spend more on social care for Alzheimer’s sufferers than on drugs and that all of these things are properly accountable to the people who pay for them is currently far-fetched, to say the least.
As a final thought, I came across this transcript of Oliver Letwin discussing the need for a social revolution – it is very Oliver and quite complicated but worth a read.
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