Welcome to our 54 th iteration of the Britblog Roundup, that selection of blog posts that you, the readers, have said that everyone else should go and have a look at. This is the purpose folks, getting the collective intelligence

As to the rest, it’s too late and I’m too drunk to formulate any meaningful thoughts at the moment. Perhaps on the morrow.

(But then again, I’ve just borrowed a huge pile of H.L. Mencken off a mate of mine, so I may be absorbed for a while. Other than his take on FDR, he seems like my kind of chap. Don’t know why I’ve never read more of his stuff before…)

Closer followers of the history of proclaimed “leftist” tendencies may recall that the time-honoured traditional excuse for all failings of the nationalised industries – when we had them – was that the “wrong” people were (invariably!) put in charge of running them. If only those with the (politically) correct convictions, commitment and enthusiam had been put in charge, the nationalised industries would have functioned wonderously – or so the familiar line went, believe me. In those times, we never got on to the stage of recognising that state ownership of business is not essential for securing government objectives or “the public interest”. Indeed, the potential benefit of separating ownership from what is required of key public services is precisely that governments have to be explicit in stating their expectations of performance and the micro costs of operations quickly become more transparent.

The case for keeping policy making and the implimention wings together in the civil service, as well as for maintaining the tradition of political neutrality, it that those who devise policy options remain accountable for their feasibility. Blame for failings can’t be simply brushed off as all due to that other lot.

Heaven forbid that any of this should be construed as suggesting Britain’s civil service is without blemish. About 20 years back a senior civil servant remarked to me in a personal conversation that the public is most often only acquainted with that part of the civil service which is least well paid. The public, understandably, generalises from that experience. That’s worth remembering.

Too late. There used to be a division of responsibility between ministers and their political staff on the one hand and the permanent civil service (principally administrators) on the other.

Guess who kiboshed that?

The trap that the government has fallen into is to look at this the wrong way. Rather than legislate to deal with a demonstrable problem, it’s come out with some pretty draconian legislation to deal with a problem that’s hard to see exists at all – the UK is not in the midst of a sustained suicide bombing campaign, yet this seems to be the premise of the legislation. It has behaved in a wreckless way with our civil liberties, squandering them, rather than admit to and deal with the root cause of any terrorist action: whether you were for it or against is, in part it’s due to (but not restricted to) the UK’s involvement and collusion in the US’s invasion and occupation of Iraq.

That all said, the problem is an old one with our system of government, which is that there has never been an effective check on the power of the executive branch, coupled with an elevetoral system that’s antiquated.

In relation to Paul’s question of pre-existing terror legislation, yes, what existed was already tough, and efficient. Funnily enough, there were a lot of Labour MPs who were dead set against that legislation while the Conservatives were in power. There is only a certain amount that you can legislate for anyway, as no matter what laws you enact, you can’t stop all the bombs.

Speaking of which (although slightly off-topic), given that the IRA were much harder than the current rucksack-waving al-Qaeda fellows, did we not have enough laws to deal with this sort of nonsense already? (he asks, genuinely inquisitively, not knowing either way)

The House of Commons simply can’t keep up with doing all of its traditional state duties (trade and money, war and diplomacy, law and standards) along with managing all of the features of the modern economic and welfare state. The House is supposed to manage, through committees, around a quarter of GDP (in consumption terms), often in technically complex areas like healthcare; that’s before you get into their role in overseeing the regulation of, say, the financial services sector. How on earth this is supposed to work, I don’t know.

That’s why we’ve got such things as the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, and before that a range of other innovations (the Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994, for example) to reduce parliamentary scrutiny. A lot of this is caused by a genuine wish to transact the business of a large public sector through a constitution set up to run a small one.

That isn’t a defence of what’s going on, but I think it’s unavoidable given where we’ve got to. The level of management discretion delegated to appointees in the British state is now truly mind-boggling – the members of Boards of Directors, Governors, Trustees meant to provide accountability and oversight must number into five figures by now. Yet none of us really know how they are, and they know that their position depends on Government patronage – which means avoiding failure and toeing the line, rather than succeeding.

Which is why the constitutional reforms most often talked about – PR, for example – miss the point, if you ask me. Better things would be devolution of whole functions to local or regional political control, with all of the postcode lottery implications; and/or, but certainly more achieveable, a division of the executive between policy and administrative functions.

As to this:

“Yet it is not flawed in that the executive has too little power, as they seem to think, but in that it has far, far too much – and that there is no way of checking its excesses save at the all too infrequent General Elections.”

What’s worse is that they continually seek to expand powers when they seem incapable of using the ones they have in any meaningful way. The classic recent example is their justifying the ‘glorification of terror’ provisions by the need to act over the Danish cartoon protests, which seemed well within the current reach of the law.