Not only the Speaker has failed

In a piece in the Telegraph this morning Anthony King demonstrates he is somewhat past his sell-by date; when an academic produces this sort of anodyne guff it is high time to elevate them to an emeritus professorship and leave the thinking to those with brain cells left.

He correctly reels off all the indicators of our sick democracy, indicators long propounded on this blog; dismal voting turnout, collapsing party membership, public mistrust and cynicism, the growth of a corrosive and divisive political class. He then correctly lists a catalogue of government failures of the past thirty years. Then he goes off the rails; he concludes that government incompetence causes the indicators of a sick democracy, and if government was better executed then 16m voters would return to the polls, we would hold politicians in high regard and local party associations would have queues of prospective members outside their doors. It is, in other words, an argument not for big government but for even bigger government. This is guff.

What King utterly neglects to mention is that his catalogue of government failure of the past thirty years coincides exactly with the growth of the Big State from the late 70s onwards. The correct conclusion is that big government is bad government, and that the competent State that King looks back to was a small State.

As I look over the anticipated contents of the Queen's speech today, all I see is a litany of legislation to enable the Big State to further control the minutae of our lives; the pub struggling to stay in business after the smoking ban that puts on a lunchtime stripper and a drinks offer is now to be classed as a sex encounter establishment, the drinks banned and will see Jack launching an equalities claim against them for hiring Jill to strip rather than him (men being under-represented in the stripping profession and employers now being obliged to employ more of them). I look back to the words of Ralph Harris and weep:

Alas, you need government, but big government is subject to such flaws, incorrigible flaws. Big government is irresponsible government because they can’t know all the circumstances of the nation, the society, the families that they are administering. Big government leads to all kinds of deals, backstage deals about policies, and all the time they are governed not by the public interest, but by the self-interest of the politicians to maintain their power. You need politicians, but the more you can contain politicians to the central tasks they have to do, the less you tempt them into this vote-grabbing, this corruption and deceit which is inseparable from modern, mass, undiscriminating democratic politics.

While Anthony King catalogues the failures of big government without understanding why it doesn't work, the government brings forward yet another raft of controlling laws that will fail catastrophically to improve the well-being of the nation by one iota, will fail to address our democratic deficit, will fail to use our tax money efficiently, will fail to close the gap between the people and the political class and will fail to make government any more effective than it is now.

The focus today will be on the failure of the Speaker, but the greater failure is not the Speaker's but the State's.