How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't

Product Information

As a Bylines reader, you may already be active politically, or at least interested in positive change. If you’ve never read a political book, this book would make a great first choice and provides one useful strand of knowledge to help explain what’s wrong with our country. Below are some example insights that will help you decide if the book is for you (or for your apprentice activist if you are in a gifting mood).

The general theme is the dominance of machismo (exacerbated by winner takes all nature of the first-past-the-post system) and unnecessary rush in everything - from legislation to ministerial tenure that results in bad policy and terrible decision-making.

Summary

There is only so much you can fit in any book, and this one is bursting with information and proposals explaining clearly the changes that are needed. If there was room for one more chapter, I would have liked to see something about how those changes could actually be achieved.

Lifting the lid on British politics, How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn’t exposes every aspect of the system in a way that can be understood and challenged, from the heights of Downing Street to the depths of the nation’s newsrooms, from the hallways of the civil service to the green benches of the Commons. This book bravely charges into some complex procedures and rules and, in the circumstances, does an admirable job of explaining how they all link into the wider problems of the system of governance. Put simply, and addiction to traditionalism for the sake of it and complacency has bred a system that is Executive dominated with the pretence of genuine parliamentary democracy attached. Anyone sitting down to watch the news will get the sense that something has gone terribly wrong. We have prime ministers who detonate the economy, secretaries of state who are intellectually incapable of doing the job and MPs who seem temperamentally unsuited to the role. Expertise is denigrated. Lies are rewarded. And deep-seated, long-lasting national problems go permanently unresolved. Most of us have a sense that the system doesn't work, but we struggle to articulate exactly why. Our political and financial system is cloaked in secrecy, archaic terminology, ancient custom and impenetrable technical jargon. The book is at its most illuminating when it focuses on one of the least scrutinised power blocs in the UK: the civil service. Dunt cites the example of Antonia Romeo, the civil servant who carried out Grayling’s ruinous probation reform, which was cancelled in 2018 after offences spiked, costs spiralled and probation providers went bankrupt. Romeo was nevertheless promoted. “No one lost their job, or was penalised, or even rebuked,” Dunt writes, echoing Dominic Cummings’s fundamental criticism of the civil service, that promotion bears no relation to performance. First, there is Chris Grayling’s 2013 privatisation of the parole service purely in the interests of his own political advancement. Experts queued up to explain that his reforms wouldn’t work but Grayling just didn’t care. From his perspective, he needed to implement a policy change swiftly, showing his own right-wing credentials, to position himself for a promotion in the next reshuffle. The consequence of Grayling’s privatisation was a breakdown in the capacity of the probation service to keep tab on probationers, resulting in a spike in reoffending. Human misery on an epic scale for the sake of one unimpressive man’s ambition.I listened to the audio version of this book, which is read by the author himself, and it is a great way to consume the material. Ian’s narration style is easy to listen to and, since it is his own material he is reading and he knows it inside out, I felt his narration made it very easy for the listener to follow with the emphasis in all the right places. I found myself finding excuses to keep listening, as I was so engaged with the material. The book is wide-ranging, starting off with how an individual becomes selected to stand as a candidate in a general election, through the election system itself, the parliamentary system of the Commons and the Lords. the civil service as well as looking at the changes in the media in the digital age. Whilst there was not a lot in the text that was new to me, it did make me think deeper on these issues and how we have sleep-walked into a rather inefficient system. The Prime Minister is at the same extremely powerful (being able to replace ministers at will and immediately, to the detriment of understanding the subject matter and good policy decisions), but also somewhat weak, due to limited own capacity for policy, as they have only the small staff that can be fitted into Number 10 Downing Street - a building unfit for modern work of government. Statutory instruments (basically a different way of making law that doesn't involve reading a bill in parliament / with the amount of crutiny a normal piece of legislation has) has now become so overused by modern successive governments that a huge amount of our laws are simply being produced by dictat, with zero element of democracy weighing them down. A subject as complex as how the British Government works and what is functionally wrong with it is a bewilderingly dense subject. However, I feel that the author has done a brave, well researched, methodical and clearly explained effort to do this.