Our deputy editor argues that there is a fundamental tension between the traditional conception of ministerial accountability and the modern tendency to govern through quangos and arms-length bodies.
In the event that Northern Ireland did become a weak link in the UK’s border security, it is not difficult to imagine a future government preferring to start quietly hiving off Northern Ireland.
Resigned and despondent, the Tories sit in a powerful legislature and does little with it. Instead, ministers act like chairmen, rubber stamping the decisions of their departments, instead of leading them.
To insist that judges must have the final say would displace Parliament’s proper role as the ultimate decision-maker in our constitution.
Having seen the work my team and colleagues across the country do, I have no doubt that the public are best served by those who they can hold fully accountable.
The rebels have a fair case that the Government’s previous attempts to thread the needle on deportations have failed, and may fail again. But that doesn’t mean their amendments would get planes in the air.
It is important not to mistake the salience of high-profile controversies as a sign that the system is failing; indeed it often is the exact opposite. As a sign of the effectiveness of the current regime, look no further than the premiership of Boris Johnson.
If the Government wants to avoid the next Horizon scandal, whatever it is, they need to do more than merely strip the Post Office of its power to prosecute.
“My working assumption is that we’ll have a general election in the second half of this year”.
There’s thus far little evidence that the upcoming leadership contest will feature any sort of reckoning with the party’s woeful performance in government at Cardiff Bay.
Rather than giving them more powers, as Labour will do if it wins the next general election, we should make them more transparent.
MPs like me spent too much of the pandemic period looking the other way, and getting out of the Government’s way. It’s time we stepped up to make that right.
The Supreme Court could only decide it had the power to strike down legislation if it already possessed that power. Authority cannot be established by appeal to itself.
Day to day, it is much more congenial to be a “steady hand on the tiller”, even if this is a terrible quality in the captain of a ship going in the wrong direction.
Fail to address the challenge head-on, and conservatives will find that our constitution continues to evolve away from its roots, each new Labour government bringing in new measures to ‘modernise’ our ‘anachronistic’ system.