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

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That, at least, is what struck me when I worked in the lobby, or parliamentary press gallery, in 2022. It is easy to stir up righteous anger, but Dunt does something far more useful in performing a detailed analysis of why none of this nonsense was stopped before it got started.

Along the way, an “Interlude” details another disaster, the delays and failures in the evacuation of Afghanistan, 2021. e. a ministerial role, the MP knows only too well that they have just embarked on a brutal game of snakes and ladders where the success or failure of their political career is unlikely to have any connection with their own talent. This has continued and even recent governments have accepted expert criticism from the House of Lords as from nowhere else. Turnover has increased, faster than in the many countries where reshuffles require coalition agreement. To control the power of No 10 requires a new department with more staff including expert specialist units operating like the Strategy Unit and others in New Labour’s second term, planning long-term.Dunt stresses how exhausting and time-consuming is the work of MPs, their difficulties in achieving work-life balance. There is almost no political coverage about the impact of Universal Credit, say, or the privatization of probation or the decline of the homelessness unit” (p. Increasingly, they were moved around departments, no longer building up experience relevant to one department. From 1999 to 2005, it defeated the government 283 times, shocks Blair did not expect, but the government accepted a significant number of amendments and rejections, including of compulsory ID cards. He argues that for much of the twentieth century the press was more independent and critical of government because it was funded by advertising.

The recent book by journalist and author Ian Dunt provides a detailed and critical account of many aspects of the UK’s political system, including political parties and elections, parliament and the legislative process, the work of ministers and civil servants in Whitehall, and the role of the media. states Dunt, pointing out that a succession of PMs have used it to reward party loyalists and donors, Boris Johnson most blatantly.As Dunt describes, with a strong majority government it is hard to amend legislation at any stage of its passage through the House of Commons. Dunt is skilled at disentangling the minutiae of political process and explaining who actually gets to wield power when. He describes how MPs rarely stand up to governments with a clear majority—the whips take care of that.

who have created a mass of serious, unresolved problems, including social care, the NHS, low productivity, as “successive governments…have failed to operate with anything even approaching basic competence. 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 is a political journalist with a reputation for independent thinking, and he conducted more than 100 interviews for his book. Bills used to be scrutinized, and when necessary re-drafted, by the Attorney-General, but since Suella Braverman held the role, briefly, in 2020–2022 it has become “a mouthpiece for government policy,” no longer providing objective advice. The select committees are faintly praised as a process where MPs are somewhat freer to contribute openly and consider the greater good beyond the party line.Raab is a former solicitor and supporter of Johnson, “with no experience of foreign affairs or any meaningful accomplishment” (p. The civil service, he shows, is staffed by clever generalists who lack the granular knowledge that would allow them to predict how things might go wrong, or give them the confidence to insist that a Tiggerish minister first establishes an evidence base for any proposed change, including taking data from pilot schemes into account. A similar pattern is playing out in Sudan, where, although Britain quickly rescued a small number of diplomatic staff, Germany and France had evacuated hundreds of their citizens before Britain’s first civilian evacuation flight left Khartoum on 25 April. We will have to lobby for the change that the parties have no interest in delivering if left to their own devices. 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).