Starmer’s hardest task: restoring trust in politics

She’s quite a performer, that Paula Vennells. This week the disgraced ex-head of the Post Office delivered a textbook performance as the wronged leader let down by her subordinates for three straight days at the Horizon IT inquiry. “I didn’t know. Nobody told me. I can’t remember.”

She ducked and dived. She paused for effect when thrown a curve ball by England’s finest legal minds. Every now and then she choked back a carefully-timed sob, reaching for a tissue helpfully provided by the inquiry. “I worked as hard as I could to deliver the best Post Office for the UK. I love the Post Office.”

Here’s an admission: as I dipped in and out of Paula Vennells’s live evidence, in the presence of sub-postmasters whose lives were crushed during her tenure, I kept thinking: “You should be in politics.”  Which is a terrible thing to think. Surely our politicians, like the head of one of the most cherished and important institutions in the country, should be people we can trust. Yes?

And yet we don’t. And who can blame us? Trust, the single, most valuable commodity in mankind’s periodic table of elements, has progressively been debased and corrupted. Not only do we no longer trust our leaders, we take pride in treating them as charlatans. The bit of our brain that does cynicism is getting progressively bigger.

Why is that and can we do anything about it? As Britain heads to the polls on July 4 to elect a new government, that seems like an important question to ask.

One of the things that big corporations and governments have in common – and this is no coincidence – is a sophisticated defence system, a ring of steel that snaps shut when it senses danger: lawyers, spin doctors, consultants, money. You don’t reason with governments or big business. You fight them.

This is linked to an offensive capability that seeks out and destroys anything that threatens it. It’s in the DNA. This is precisely what happened at the Post Office. An organism on which millions of people up and down the country depend turned against the very communities it is meant to serve.

It didn’t listen, it didn’t understand, it didn’t care. Its survival instincts kicked in and people, literally, died. The optics, the media, was what mattered. The parallels with government can scarcely be more striking.

Building “the best Post Office for the UK” for Vennells was not about the people and certainly not about the postmasters. It was part of some lofty, overarching ambition, a legacy project far removed from the nitty gritty of her employees’ day to day life. And, just like a cornered politician, she fought tooth and nail with the tools she had to hide the truth.

The critical element that leads to failure in companies, as in government, is the unhealthy concentration of power. This breeds a deadly combination of greed, ignorance and evasion: all-powerful Prime Ministers or CEOs surrounded by a tiny coterie of advisers operating in an environment with few checks and balances.

Speed is another killer. The desire to move fast and break things in the mistaken belief that you can change years, decades of doing things one way by a stroke of the legislative pen. That was Liz Truss’s mistake. Meaningful change – at least in a democracy — requires long-term thinking and, more often than not, compromise and consensus. Democracy is time-consuming.

You have to take people with you. Holding people’s head under the water because you don’t like what they have to say or treating them as cretins just stores up trouble. Brexit showed us that in spades.

If and when the electorate decides to install Sir Keir Starmer in 10 Downing Street on July 5, he will face a host of problems inherited from the near as well as the distant past. But he will also inherit a system that is almost purpose built to resist profound and lasting change.

He will inherit a Treasury which is obsessively controlling and believes to its very marrow that it knows best. When it wants to it can move at lightning speed, as it did during Covid and the 2008 financial crisis. But most of the time it acts as the drag anchor of government. Its powers are absurdly centralised.

He will inherit a House of Commons where overworked MPs are torn between their constituency work and their obligation to scrutinise and understand legislation they vote for. Most MPs rarely even bother to read legislation, partly because it’s framed in incomprehensible legalese. They vote the way they’re told to — and if they don’t, they can kiss goodbye to promotion.

Stamer will inherit the sorely abused legislative system of so-called Statutory Instruments. These allow governments to pass or change laws without reference to Parliament. There is virtually no chance of an SI being defeated. Boris Johnson loved SIs. In theory governments can use SI under the Statutory Instruments Act 1946 to do as they please. But good laws require proper scrutiny as does good government.

Ian Dunt in his excellent critique How Westminster Works – and Why it Doesn’t talks about a toxic feedback loop: poor scrutiny leads to dysfunctional laws and bad government, whose victims then turn to MPs for help.

Starmer’s in-tray will be heaving: social care in desperate need of reform; regional inequality; the NHS in crisis; public services starved of funds; the unintended consequences of a disastrous Brexit, and so on. To imagine that his team, however competent, can fix these problems without a corresponding change in the way Britain is run is pure fantasy. To bring about real change, Britain needs to change the way it changes things.

At the top of this list is restoring trust between the state and voters. This means better MPs with better back-up and more time to do the job we send them to parliament to do; better scrutiny of the laws we pass; curbing the power of the Whips who terrorise MPs into submission; giving ministers more time to master their briefs and keeping them in the job long enough to make a difference; a bigger, more efficient Prime Minister’s office, but one which is more accountable.

Starmer is right to say that he won’t promise what he knows in his bones he can’t deliver. But he will struggle to deliver without greater competence, accountability and thought.

Another reason – perhaps the most important reason – why a change of direction must go hand in hand with a change of process, is that there’s virtually no extra money to fund big projects. Change must therefore be funded and delivered more efficiently. Rachel Reeves, the likely next Chancellor of the Exchequer, will have to find a way of somehow delivering more with what she has if she is to stick to her iron fiscal rules. That’s a political, not an accounting, conundrum.

My own view – many will disagree – is that the best way to achieve this is to bin the first past the post electoral system in favour of some kind of proportional representation. In essence, that would be a massive extra shot of democracy.

Nearly 80 years after the end of WWII and the birth of the welfare state, we desperately need a national consensus to delegate and devolve power and, above all, trust. But turkeys don’t vote for Christmas and we’re unlikely to see that under a disciplinarian like Starmer.

One of the most disheartening aspects of this election campaign is how superficial the quality of debate has been. MPs parrot the same party line churned out by the leader’s office.

But is anybody listening?

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