As the country prepares for its seventh prime minister in a decade, some are asking: is Britain ungovernable? I’d like to pose a parallel but meaningfully different question: is there a government that wishes to govern Britain?
Every government since at least 1979 has practised one form or another of this politics of abdication. Andy Burnham, if he does indeed become prime minister, will not break with this approach
There can be no understanding of our governing crisis without a recognition that it has been in situ for more than half a century. In that time, successive governments have as a matter of policy outsourced decision-making, oftentimes in the name of better governance.
One of the appeals of the European project to Britain’s political elites was its centralisation of decision-making on matters they considered too sensitive to be decided nationally, which is to say matters where voters refused to conform to the policy preferences of the elites.
In the early days, Conservatives saw the European Economic Community as a backdoor hack through a political and economic order gripped by public ownership, price controls and industrial strife. If decision-making could be removed from Parliament and rerouted to Brussels, policy directives devised by Berlaymont bureaucrats could be presented to MPs as a fait accompli.
