There is nothing to stop the Scottish Nationalists, or their sympathisers, producing policy privately, or supporting think-tanks to do so on their behalf. But they should pay for such work out of their own funds. (If they can find them.)
At Westminster, meanwhile, we’ve got the latest development in what seems to be the new, less shouty iteration of so-called muscular unionism.
His measured communications approach is superior to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss’s tendency towards needless provocation without any commitment to structural reform. But that reform must happen, regardless of how unpopular it may be.
Above all, they shouldn’t become preoccupied with Woke to the exclusion of everything else. This is the trap that many Labour backbenchers and much of the Left is falling into.
You don’t need to buy the wilder conspiracy theories about a deep state to recognise that it would be irresponsible to ignore the machinery of government.
Review Net Zero interventions, cut immigration; freeze Civil Service recruitment, reduce railway subsidies – and tell the Bank of England to stop selling bonds at a loss.
Seventy-three per cent of respondents blames civil servants for the current difficulties. Only six per cent believe that they’re not responsible at all.
If you bluntly tell your officials to do their jobs, you are accused of bullying; if, like Braverman, you are by nature polite, you find yourself undermined in other ways.
“Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall; And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.”
Depending on ACOBA’s recommendations, there is the possibility of Gray being unable to work with Labour in the run-up to, or even after, their transition to government.
Since 2010, the Party has a truly terrible record of retaining its reformers – especially those capable of understanding and reshaping the structures of government.
Perhaps it is time to start to learn to love quangos; perhaps with greater democratic control, such a romance would be possible.
Our system of government is broken, and voters feel powerless. Only a radical overhaul of Whitehall can address these problems.
It represents a power-grab by town hall bureaucrats, an attack on families’ common-law rights, and an unworkable extension of the database state.