Butler: Blair aloof from collective responsibility
A former head of the civil service has attacked Tony Blair’s style of government.
In an interview with The Spectator magazine, Lord Butler of Brockwell said the Prime Minister was more autocratic than his heroine, Margaret Thatcher.
Lord Butler, who served as Cabinet Secretary under Conservative Party leaders Mrs Thatcher and John Major, accused Mr Blair of ceding too much power from Ministers and Parliament, overly using un-elected special advisers, and stressing spin over content.
The peer said Mr Blair’s “on the sofa” style of office rested power from Parliament, producing “bad” government and founding statesmanship on a “grave flaw”.
He lambasted politicians for delegating decisions to unaccountable quangos as a means to distance themselves from political ramifications when policy went wrong.
In reply, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said the Government ought to and would be judged on results, not style.
“There is too much emphasis on selling, there is too much central control and there is too little of what I would describe as reasoned deliberation which brings in all the arguments,” the peer told The Spectator.
“The Cabinet, now – and I don’t think there is any secret about this – doesn’t make decisions.
“I think what tends to happen now is that the Government reaches conclusions in rather small groups of people, who are not necessarily representative of all the groups of interests in Government, and there is insufficient opportunity for other people to debate, dissent and modify.
“It isn’t wise to listen only to special advisers, and not to listen to fuddy-duddy civil servants who may produce boringly inconvenient arguments,” said the peer.
“It is clear that politically-appointed people carry great weight in the Government and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but if it’s done to the exclusion of advice from civil servants, you tend to get into error, you make mistakes.”
Now a Master at University College, Oxford, Lord Butler said Britain was the worse for an executive that operated free of any inhibitions imposed either by Parliament or the public.
Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimons took a different view, saying Westminster had more open and more transparent decision making than under any other government.
“We have five year plans, for example, we have the comprehensive spending review over three years, we have invested and we are the first government in 20 years to invest in parliamentary council to make sure that the drafting of legislation is better.”
Conservative Party leader Michael Howard said the peer’s comments were “unprecedented” and “devastating testimony”.
