Eamonn Butler: Stop the rot by rolling back the State

In August last year, four former Cabinet secretaries – former heads of civil service – each complained to a House of Commons committee that the machinery of government had become too centred on Downing Street. Of course, this isn't just a criticism of the present administration. People rightly complained that Margaret Thatcher over-centralised decision-making, and it can be traced from then.

But New Labour made it systematic. The party had spent so long in the political wilderness that they were determined to get back into office – even if meant biting their Old Labour tongues and backing the toothy young reformer, Tony Blair.

Mr Blair, Gordon Brown and backroom strategists Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell knew full well what past disunity had cost them, and what it was then doing to John Major's Conservatives. They knew they had to present the image of a united front – particularly in the age of 24-hour television news.

It worked better than they could have dreamt. And they applied exactly the same mentality in Government as they had in opposition. They had gone to the country and been given a mandate to enact their ideas. They were the people's Government, and nothing would stop them delivering what they believed the people wanted. Not the civil service. Not wayward MPs. Not the different views within Cabinet. Not even the courts. Decisions would be made at the centre, by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. Others would be expected to fall in. No deviation would be allowed. They were decent people, who had meant to make government more open, but in trying to make it more effective, they made it more closed.

With the tide of government rising, there were few objections. Countless party apparatchiks, MPs and Ministers owed their jobs, and in some cases their grace-and-favour homes, to the patronage of the Prime Minister and Downing Street officials. It all worked to the mutual benefit of the political clan – each supporting the other, and each prospering all the more as this centralised system of government expanded.

But with politicians identifying themselves so precisely with the will of the people, it was not long before the boundary of Party and State became lost. The institutions of government – Parliament, the civil service, the courts, the rights of trial by jury, free speech and the like – were developed over the centuries specifically to protect the public from the potentially unrestrained power of their leaders, and to protect minorities from the baying mob of populism. But now, in a matter of just years, such restraints have been eroded or pushed aside in the name of that populism. They have been ousted by the need for politicians to look good in the media by reacting instantly and "doing something", even if what they do is not merely counter-productive, but indeed unjust.

The confusion of State interests with party or even purely personal interests explains so much of what has corrupted our political system in recent years, or indeed decades. It explains the sclerotic centralism in our public services, the leaking of information, the willingness of MPs to enrich themselves by abusing their expenses – and then, most remarkably of all, to feel themselves genuinely indignant when we complain about it. That is how distant the political clan has grown from the rest of us.

With all the resignations that the expenses scandal has precipitated, there will be even more fresh faces in the new Parliament than there were after the New Labour landslide in 1997. Are they likely to stop the rot?

It is possible, if unlikely. Opposition parties always call for governments to be restrained, but once in government themselves, they start to see, understand and enjoy the powers and influence of office. Yet the only solution to an over-concentration of power is to give power up.

A stronger Cabinet, Parliament, and civil service, stronger courts and local decision-making – all these would help, but all of them require the occupants of Downing Street to accept that their word is no longer law – and that it would indeed be far better for the country if it isn't. It needs politicians brave enough to tell the public that it is just none of their business to comment on certain things, whatever views they might have. It needs leaders brave enough to admit they do not have instant solutions to every problem and need time to think through the right solution, and even to explain why it is often better for them to do nothing at all, however loud the calls for action.

Human nature being what it is, that seems a lot to expect. And yet, if any politician was indeed brave enough to take this stance, it would define a new age of how we preserve the rights and freedoms of individuals in a 24-hour-news democracy. This, far more than any amount of the tinkering we have seen during the last two decades, would be something for which a politician would be remembered.

Eamonn Butler is head of the Adam Smith Institute and author of The Rotten State of Britain, published by Gibson Square