Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Ian Dunt: No one in the House of Lords is elected. There is no democratic element to the House of Lords. And it is by far the most effective part of the British constitutional system, which troubles a lot of people. But you just have to go on the evidence that is in front of your eyes.

Why is it happening? There’s a couple of reasons. First one is, out of nowhere, almost by accident, we have expertise in the House of Lords. Tony Blair introduced these crossbench peers. They have to have accomplished extraordinary things in their professional life — often it’s been law, it’s been business, it’s been defence, it’s been charities. And they get brought in, and suddenly it’s just like someone actually knows what the f*** they’re talking about.

And it’s true, you see the way the government responds when legislation is in the House of Lords. It’s honestly like it’s the first time they’ve even looked at their own bill. When these guys come out to play, it is seriously impressive. Proper experts to tell you the consequences are to people’s lives in bone-dry detail, they will look at this stuff. And they have no party loyalty. The government has no majority in the House of Lords. And that’s basically why it works — because suddenly, when the government can’t just force through its agenda, it has to listen; it has to convince people.

How Ian got obsessed with Britain’s endless failings [00:01:05]

Rob Wiblin: Today I’m speaking with the British author and political journalist Ian Dunt. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Ian.

Ian Dunt: Thank you.

Rob Wiblin: So after a decade and a half of covering British politics, in 2023, you wrote this book, How Westminster Works… and Why It Doesn’t. It was based on over 100 conversations with senior people from all different parts of the British political system, from the press to Parliament to the Civil Service. What was your main goal with the book?

Ian Dunt: First of all, I think all books start with you thinking, “I need to know the answer to this question.” And by virtue of that, you think that hopefully other people will have that same question in their mind and will want an answer to it.

And I would have periods during these interminable Brexit parliamentary debates going on sort of late into the night. They were really quite complicated in terms of process. People would ask me questions like, “So who decided on the timetable for that bit? We’re suddenly saying all of this has to be done in three hours for basically no reason at all. Who makes that decision?” And I’d been working in Parliament for over 10 years as a journalist, and I just thought, “I don’t really know, actually, who does that.” And once you don’t, you’re like, “I do need to find out, actually, how this is operating.”

Britain has a really poor education system for its democracy. I think the Americans are much better at it, actually, and most European states as well. Most of them will have a point in school where they say, “This is how we pass legislation.” Britain really doesn’t have any of that. If you were to ask someone who reads the newspaper every day, “What are the stages of a bill?,” I suspect that most people in Britain would struggle to answer that question, which seems extremely rudimentary.

Rob Wiblin: I think maybe even many journalists who cover the area.

Ian Dunt: Yeah, exactly. Because journalists basically stop paying attention about a third of the way through, and then maybe a little bit at the end when it passes.

So that was a problem. And then you get the Liz Truss moment. I mean, there was stuff leading up to it as well — I’d say the Boris Johnson moment too — but Liz Truss really brought it into sharp focus. If you think, OK, so this has happened. We need to now just basically sort of stop, rewind: how did I get to this situation? Because there has to be a series of constitutional arrangements that result in someone with this complete absence of competence being in a position of such power and able to do so much damage.

So you think about all of the parts of that: Do you have personal curiosity? Do you think other people are curious? Is it socially useful to start explaining this stuff? And have we had a crisis moment where we really do need to understand this quickly? Because things seem to be going really very wrong indeed.

Should we blame individuals or incentives? [00:03:24]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. One of the core threads of the book for me is that when people are frustrated with how the UK is governed, or I guess how any country is governed, they tend to blame the individuals who are in positions of power — the prime minister or the ministers. You think that is often a mistake, or at least it’s a mistake in the case of the UK. Why is that? And how can you tell that it’s not just about a few individual people not being competent?

Ian Dunt: Yeah. Although you know what, I do think that one of the weaknesses of the book is that I leave no kind of role for the individual. Let me explain that properly. This book is about systems and incentives, and that is overwhelmingly the way that I look at the world. I think in any kind of political situation, in a political culture, in a constitutional one, in a business one, even in a sort of military one, you’d say, What are the systems? What are the institutions? What are the incentives that they’re creating? And how does that guide the way that people behave in them?

I think people’s behaviour will be more or less virtuous according to the incentives that they operate under. That seems obvious to me. And the institutions are the ones that create those incentives. That could be a newspaper as an institution, it could be Parliament, or it could be institutions within Parliament, like select committees or the House of Lords or something like that.

So that’s typically my way of assessing a situation. And most books I’ve done — I did the same with Brexit — was just break down into the systems, into the engine room: here are the incentives, here’s where we’re going to end up.

I think it would be helpful for people like me to think more of individuals or to have at least a dollop of that thinking. Because the truth is that the fundamental decency of people, the fundamental competence, their motivations do play a role. That role will often be hindered by incentives — it will often be completely negated by them or encouraged by them — but there is something there.

So if you get someone who’s deeply venal, malevolent, and incompetent, they’re going to have a worse time in a suboptimal system than someone who is actually extremely virtuous. So these things have to be in there. And I think if there is a criticism, I think that is quite a telling one for me — and one that I try to keep in my mind now when I do day-to-day political coverage for newspapers or podcasts or anything else.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I think that issue of individual agency shows up a lot. When you’re talking about solutions to some of the problems that you describe, very often you’re saying, “The incentives of the system say that this person should do X, but X is bad for governance. So I want to appeal to them to actually do Y. That will come at some cost to them, but it’ll be better for the world.”

I’m going to challenge some of those suggestions later, or say, can we come up with anything better, where it’s actually in the incentive of the person involved to do the right thing? Or how can we change their incentives?

I’m curious for you to elaborate a little bit more how you in general look at things in terms of incentives and systems and processes and so on. What is the virtue of that? And do you think that style of analysis is underdone, at least in the broader world?

Ian Dunt: I don’t know about the broader world, but I can certainly say in political journalism, we just don’t see it.

I mean, you open a newspaper and, especially in Britain, it’s pure colour. We love the colour. So we would talk about the temperament; we’ll talk about which ministers don’t get on with which ministers, and which are losing the confidence of the prime minister. You know, at the moment it would be Ed Miliband as the Energy Secretary. He seems much greener than the Treasury under Rachel Reeves. So there’s a clash there. Even if it’s not personal, it’s still individualised, you know?

We very rarely look at structure. I mean, even saying the word “structure” makes it sound like I’m about to say something tremendously boring — which obviously I am. And I’ve worked in enough newsrooms where you’re just like, “No one wants to hear that stuff. No one wants to hear it. No, no, don’t give me that. Give me Cabinet minister fighting with Cabinet minister, U-turn incoming, someone’s going to have to resign — basically it’s the soap opera drama, the EastEnders version of what politics looks like.

And you cannot extract the personalities: it is pertinent, and animosity and loyalty is all relevant to the things as they work out. But ultimately, structure is still the primary explanatory trait that you look for in a system.

So take something like just an opposition amendment: the first thing you want, if you want an effective country — if you want a country that is run according to good laws, that is well governed, that is decent towards its people — is you’re going to look for a really ferocious scrutiny system of law. That’s how we get better law. We don’t get it by having these godlike legislators who get them the first time — they need to write a law; other people need to challenge it.

And hopefully you’ll get a situation you get in many countries — good, viable countries — where they’ll say, “Look, I get that you want to do this. I don’t quite agree with process X. Could you do it Y? That would alleviate some of my concerns.” We had a piece of legislation in Scotland recently on incentives for hatred, and one of the complaints was like, “If you just put a caveat there for atheist bloggers, I’d feel much more comfortable with this, because I think they should be defended from anything that you’re doing.” That’s how you improve legislation.

In our system, if an opposition MP stands up to propose that there should be an amendment to legislation, nothing will change — because there is a huge government majority. It doesn’t matter what they do, nothing will change. That piece of legislation will stay exactly the same. They can stand up there and they can turn into Cicero, they can turn into George Washington, it makes no difference. That legislation will stay the same.

That’s an incentive right there: you have basically taken away from that opposition MP the incentive to participate and to try and improve the legislation in a cooperative, pragmatic, consensual way.

So what is their new incentive? Well, they might as well just stand up there and say, “You’re a shower of bastards!” — which is what they do in the Commons every day. It’s infantile, it’s useless. It’s full of colour, but it doesn’t get anyone anywhere. And yet the reason that they behave that way is because the incentives push them in that direction rather than a more constructive one. So ultimately, you do have to start paying attention to this stuff, because that is one of the chief determinants of how people behave.

The UK left its allies to be murdered in Afghanistan (to save cats and dogs) [00:09:02]

Rob Wiblin: I think only about 15% of the audience for this show is in the UK, so we’re going to not exclusively focus on the personalities and the issues that the UK has. I’m going to try to draw out lessons from the book that are more globally applicable, no matter what political system you’re in, or maybe even what organisation you’re in: good principles about how decisions can be made better and what systems and processes are more effective.

Before getting to that more abstract level, though, it is worth thinking about some concrete cases. And I thought a really colourful one that absolutely stuck in my mind when I first read the book was your description of how the UK evacuation from Afghanistan went in 2021 — when of course, the UK, among many other countries, had to evacuate its people and attempt to evacuate its supporters and allies from Kabul after it fell to the Taliban.

What went wrong with the UK’s evacuation from Afghanistan?

Ian Dunt: Jesus Christ, where would we even start? I mean, the quality of the ministerial ranks: the rank incompetence and ineptitude, and the demonstration of the fact that competence is, in fact, a moral characteristic, as could be shown at that moment.

Having a civil service bureaucracy with almost zero sense of specialist expertise or deep subject knowledge, which meant it couldn’t appraise the situation that it was being presented with.

Having a parliament that was unable to effectively scrutinise what government was doing.

Having a media that was unable to deal with the structural reality of the situation, and instead had to concentrate on individualised fairy tales, as it did in this case in the question of, “What will happen to the cats and dogs?” — which is, by some distance, the least pertinent element that one might take from the situation as it was being presented to us, but nevertheless the one that the media went for.

And then having a prime minister that was so deeply irresponsible that he decided that that media campaign on cats and dogs took priority over the people who’d risked their lives trying to work with Britain to create a liberal Afghanistan.

So a whole series of problems which collectively show you the structural issues that face Britain in terms of just being even a remotely serious country.

Rob Wiblin: Can you walk through a couple of the details of how the process played out?

Ian Dunt: I mean, look, the point that you would start preparing would have been in February 2020, when Donald Trump first said, “We’re going to pull out.”

I’m not saying you start operationalising it, because of course, there was uncertainty as to whether that really meant anything — as there is uncertainty as to whether anything that that man says means anything at all. But by the time you got to April 2021 and you heard Joe Biden saying the same thing, you should damn well be doing something about it then.

The French were. The French started their evacuation pullout the following month, in May of 2021. They said, “We’re going to be done by July 2021” — and that’s when they were done. They were working according to set preparations, and a moral sense of, “People have helped us — it could be cooks, it could be judges, it could be journalists, it could be women’s rights campaigners. They’re in danger if they stay there under the Taliban. We’ll make sure they pull out.”

In July 2021, when the French had already completed their evacuation, the Foreign Office was still coming out with advice for ministers saying that there was no reason to change even the travel advice to Afghanistan, that there was no likelihood the Taliban were going to take over.

Boris Johnson, who was pursuing a form of boosterism — which is essentially to say, “No matter what happens in the world, I must keep on claiming that everything’s fine” — was in front of the Commons saying, “There’s no way that Kabul will ever fall.” And of course, the next month, Kabul falls.

You have to split the people that were trying to be evacuated: this is not about Brits themselves; that was a different system. This is not about those who were directly employed by the British government; that was a different system. That’s ARAP [Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy] — and that actually was kind of a disaster, but at least it was prepared for ahead of evacuation.

The system for people who had helped the British cause without being actually directly employed — again, judges, women’s rights campaigners, et cetera — that was brought in five days after the fall of Kabul. That was the point that they even started coming up with the system. That’s the degree of amateurishness that we’re dealing with here. And it was finished basically at the time that the evacuation stopped — like we had to pull out.

The victims of that were those who’d been foolish enough to believe both that Britain’s values were worth fighting for, but also that Britain was a serious country — like somewhere that would actually stand by the things that it said. These things were not true — so therefore, we left them in Afghanistan due to our failure of preparation.

We have two reports by civil servants. One of them is called Raphael Marshall. These people, basically they sacrificed their entire career to tell us what was going on during that period.

Raphael Marshall basically just said, “I’m just going to go there and just start trying to help as much as I can on this system.” He arrived in what was supposed to be the team that was assessing people’s pleas, basically, to be taken away from Afghanistan — and found that there was no one else there. There was no one monitoring.

There were about 5,000 emails coming in at any given moment asking — pleading — for British help. They were titled things like, “Please help me” and “Please save my children.” There was no one on the other side of that computer. No one had been put there.

When he sat there, he found that when people were finally brought into the team, no one had any specialist knowledge of Afghanistan at all. Now, you’re not going to be able to get everyone out, right? So you’ve got to assess the level of vulnerability that someone is in and how likely they are to suffer oppression. And the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to look at the various ethnicities in Afghanistan. You’re going to look at the Taliban’s push to Pashtun. You know, there’s a particular danger to certain groups and less so to other groups, and that’s how you’re going to make that appraisal.

The person that he was working for didn’t even know what the group name for Afghans was. He kept on calling them “Afghanis.” He found no one there with any specialist expertise, knowledge over the subject. He himself, because he had read one book on Afghanistan — a very mainstream book by Rory Stewart, the kind of book you’d get on a high street — he himself was probably the lead thinker and had the most knowledge on that subject area, and was forced to start trying to tell people which way they should probably operate.

I mean, the things that happen at the end of that process are extraordinary. There is a point where the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab — a former solicitor who has no expertise on foreign affairs whatsoever, who has no understanding of Afghanistan, or indeed any other subject whatsoever — refuses to give up any kind of control over who gets the authorisation to leave, and then refuses to make any decisions.

So in the final hours — like, the final hours when people’s lives could have been saved — he was sat in his office, not responding to the requests that were being made, and then sending out his civil servants to say, “I will only look at this when you’ve put it in a formal table for me.” So the team ended up reformatting a table on Microsoft Word for the secretary of state to look at while people were being left to the mercy of the Taliban.

That’s how that process ended. It was about ineptitude at a ministerial level, a complete lack of specialist understanding at a civil service level, and a fundamental lack of seriousness from Britain as a whole.

Rob Wiblin: So the end result of the story is that the planes left not even at full capacity, with cats and dogs inside them, because there had been a stronger media campaign to protect an NGO that had been dealing with cats and dogs in Kabul in a war zone. And basically they were given priority over all of the people who had helped, because they just had a stronger press campaign: that’s what the PM cared about, that’s what the media was reporting, and that’s what they imagined the public would care about as well.

So like I mentioned, a lot of people ended up dying and their children ended up being killed as a result of this.

Ian Dunt: That’s exactly right. So there’s a man called Pen Farthing, and he ran a cats and dogs charity. I’m sure it was perfectly… But there was never any threat from the Taliban to cats and dogs.

The argument that these guys would make over and over is like, “Don’t worry, we’ve got our own plane.” The planes had nothing to do with it. The British government can have as many planes as it likes. It was about operational capacity. You’ve got the army at the airport. They have to go into this crowd of about 25,000 people around the airport, where the Taliban are operating, and they have to get people and take them to the plane. That was the lack of capacity.

And they decided to use that at the last minute for someone who’d managed to maintain a really effective media campaign. Why? Because look at him. He was former British Army, he was white, he was a British guy. It’s cats and dogs. There’s nothing the Brits like more than, “Oh, we’ve got to save the cats and dogs.” Rather than the rest of the Afghanistan situation, which was sort of portrayed in the press as a kind of natural disaster — akin to a tsunami or an earthquake. You know, this sort of generalised, “Lots of brown faces, all terribly complicated, don’t really know what’s going on over there.” So yeah, it all became about him. He was the hero.

And that final crucial moment of capacity, those two Civil Service whistleblowers made it very clear: they were like, “We had cases and people who’d spent years fighting for Britain, working for British values out there — and we left them there to use up capacity on someone who took a plane of cats and dogs.”

And that decision, by the way, even though they’ve denied it every single time, was taken by Boris Johnson. Or at least that was the finding of the Foreign Affairs Committee when it looked into it at length; it said it cannot find any other basis to think that it would not have been a decision made by him at a very particular point in time, which he has persistently claimed otherwise.

You look at that and you think, how could anyone possibly have any faith in the seriousness of Britain after hearing about that story?

The UK is governed from a tiny cramped house [00:17:54]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s push on and think about some concrete ways that the UK government is basically set up to fail rather than set up to succeed. One thing you point out in the book is that the physical heart of British government operates out of what’s essentially a badly converted Georgian townhouse, where teams working on critical national projects are often split across different floors and rooms because there’s no proper office space.

Why is it bad that the PM and the beating heart of British government is 10 Downing Street?

Ian Dunt: Well, it’s a house. It’s just a house. I mean, why the f***… You know, this is a government of a major industrial state. Why on Earth would you put its government in a house?

And the only answer to that question is because you suffer from a form of pathological national sentimentality. There’s no other reason to do it. I mean, everyone knows why it’s there: because it’s unthinkable that we wouldn’t have the door. We like the door, number 10. You know, everyone knows the door, and foreign leaders come and they want to be seen by the door. And that’s it.

But what they are describing is a museum. That is what that is useful for. You cannot just try and govern a proper major economy from a house. And not even a modern house — I’m talking like a 17th century townhouse. That’s what this is. It’s never been properly constructed to do any… I mean, you could maybe run a medium-sized city out of it. In somewhere like Germany, you’d probably use something like that for a medium-sized city. Certainly wouldn’t use it for the whole country.

So again, we see teams split over three floors, and they’re supposed to work together, but of course they can’t. Instead what ends up happening is it works according to a system of professionalised loitering. And again the system takes over. You know, you arrange it, but the system will take over.

You think, “I need to just be where the action’s happening” — so people just kind of hang around. That’s what they do in government: they hang around, hoping to be there where the conversation is taking place in sort of huddles, typically around the prime minister.

Their seating arrangements are based not on any kind of reasonable assessment of how you can get anything done, but just by thinking, “How do I get the most facetime with the prime minister, and how do I act as a barricade to stop other people getting facetime with the prime minister so I can control the information that person is getting?”

These are not rational ways of organising a major project of any type, let alone running a country. And yet we persist in doing it — because we are so deeply sentimental as a country.

Rob Wiblin: What are some of the negative effects that it has on how this office operates? I guess it doesn’t have enough rooms. Many of the rooms are really tiny. They’re not really set up to work in a coordinated way. You don’t have one branch where you have the deployment team, the operations team, working on something. Can you elaborate on the harmful effects that it has?

Ian Dunt: Firstly, if you can’t have a team operating together, it’s really hard for them to communicate in the pursuit of the project that they’re in.

By the way, the chief of staff in pretty much every administration since the 1960s has tried to change the situation. It doesn’t matter whether they’re left wing, they’re right wing, they’re liberal, they’re authoritarian: every single one of them gets into that house and goes, “No, we can’t. We can’t run it here. This is crazy.”

So starting with Harold Wilson in the ’60s and ending with Dominic Cummings, who was chief of staff for Boris Johnson, they’ve all tried to move it out. Dominic Cummings succeeded to a certain extent: he brought them into the Cabinet Office about five minutes away, and set up a whole team there. But then immediately you just don’t have the communication. It’s fine to say it’s five minutes, but at the time that decisions are being made on a day-to-day basis — very quickly, in a matter of seconds — five minutes turns out to be a really long time, and it completely shatters the sense of a team and its ability to communicate.

So over and over you find that it proves deeply suboptimal to trying to run any kind of professional organisation.

Rob Wiblin: Why hasn’t this been fixed? There’s a lot of things that you want to change about British democracy, about the systems, where you can understand why it doesn’t happen — because it’s not in the interest of the decision maker to make that change. But you describe the prime minister as having a lot of discretion in the UK. They’re actually quite a powerful leader of the country. You describe how they find it very frustrating working out of 10 Downing Street.

You’d think it would be in their interests to move out of 10 Downing Street to a modern office where people can engage in modern office practices, and they could have more staff who can assist them. Because you also described how there’s a lot of problems that the prime minister actually doesn’t have the help around them to pursue an agenda and to stay focused on delivering on their policy commitments. So why isn’t it fixed?

Ian Dunt: I think it is sentimentality. I really don’t think it’s much more than that.

Take Westminster in general, the Houses of Parliament: the classic image, Big Ben and all of that. We know that very soon there is going to be an atrocious fire in that building. It is operating according to standards that should have been changed in the Victorian times. It’s absolutely infested with rats; it’s got asbestos all over the place. It is basically not fit for human habitation in that building, and it is dangerous; it is going to burn down unless we do something about it.

We have known this for well over 10 years. We’ve had report, report, report — it comes out and they go, “You’ve got to get all the MPs out, maybe for five years, maybe for 10 years. It’s going to cost this much money in order to fix it.” We never do it. We never do it. The reason we don’t do it is because we think we can’t move out of the building. The building is so iconic. This is the building that we always work in, right?

This is our sentimentality. And it’s exactly the same for number 10.

Churchill had this saying of, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” You know, we are influenced by them. I don’t think he knew just how true that was, because now that those images of the buildings are so iconic, it’s almost like we can’t get over the psychological barrier of realising that we do have to decant for some time before we can go back in, in order to preserve them or in order to come up with better working arrangements.

There are plenty of options that we could have for government. There’s the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I mean, the Foreign Office isn’t doing anything with that building and it would be perfectly satisfactory to use it. There’s the Queen Elizabeth Centre. There’s loads of buildings immediately around it that you could have functioning government. We choose not to do it. And that primarily is nostalgia.

“It’s the stupidest conceivable system for how to run a country” [00:23:30]

Rob Wiblin: Can you explain the red box system of ministerial decision making?

Ian Dunt: It’s like exactly what you would do if you want a country to work really, really badly.

So you take an individual — and this individual may be in charge of home affairs or foreign affairs or they are the secretary of state — and they have a full day. I mean, you speak to some of these guys, some of these guys have 20 meetings in a day — which I wasn’t really aware even physically could be done, and certainly doesn’t feel like intellectually that could happen.

But that’s what they do. They absolutely churn their way through work. There are moments in the Commons. They obviously have foreign visits, et cetera.

And then all the other work has to be done. Some major decisions. It could be like who sits on the board of a museum. It could be where you’re going to get planning applications for. It could be, what’s the funding model for some kind of public sector reform that you’re going to operate.

That gets put into a red box, and it gets handed to the minister as they go home and go off. And invariably, that minister will open that box after they’ve had dinner. So they’ve had that day, let’s say 20 meetings, bit of time in Parliament, bit of foreign affairs. They have dinner, they have a couple of glasses of wine — and then they open the box with all of the really important decisions that they’re supposed to make.

Cognitively, that might be the stupidest conceivable system for how to run a country — and it’s entirely the one that we have and that we operate every single day.

Rob Wiblin: This might be an obvious question, but what should they do instead?

Ian Dunt: Just exactly the same s*** as everyone else does! Emails and meetings. You don’t have offices around the world thinking, “Wow, s***. We just had emails and meetings. We’ve discovered some glorious new way of organising!” We know how to do these things. It’s not hard.

There are other questions that I think are tougher about how you do them, basically about risk chokepoints — which I think private sector and public sector have exactly the same problem of basically people passing up decisions because they’re scared of taking responsibility for them, often for good reason. And you get these sort of decision-making chokepoints at the top.

That’s harder to fix. All sorts of people have really interesting ideas on how you do that, and that’s a broadly universal issue. Deciding that you work through projects through emails and meetings and phone calls isn’t that complicated — and yet we’re unable to fix it.

Rob Wiblin: I think you described that obviously many of the memos in this red book, when someone is just reading them individually, they can’t necessarily follow it. So it often ends up resulting in a meeting that they have to schedule in order to understand what is on the page anyway. It doesn’t even save time.

Ian Dunt: Yeah, because of course we all have that, right? As soon as something’s presented to you in that way, it’s actually quite hard. If you have someone who’s come up with, say, the three different funding models, and they can put together maybe a couple of visual aids and just talk you through it over five minutes: you can get that in five minutes in a way that a series of memos is actually a very bad way of trying to communicate that particular piece of information.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think some of the structural issues that you describe in the book are kind of complicated and they might be quite challenging to fix; there are difficult tradeoffs. I think these are two examples where — if it is, as you say, basically sentimentality that is driving this — the underlying error in thinking is relatively straightforward to see.

I think it actually matters to people’s lives whether the UK is governed well. And I think that is not being given sufficient weight, basically. Yes, it would be nice if we could operate out of this building that we’ve had for centuries — it warms our hearts to have the photo in front of the door and so on — but actually the quality of lives for tens of millions of people, I guess hundreds of millions of people around the world who were affected by the UK’s decisions, hangs in the balance here.

And we actually need to have a functional office in order to make this go well, and that should be given priority over sentimentality. I guess that’s the mistake that’s being made here, and could be made in many other organisations — where you just follow tradition, rather than thinking from scratch, “What would we actually do if we were following modern best practice?”

Ian Dunt: Yes, exactly. It’s odd, I think, when you live in London — because London is one of those cities that really has a foot in the past and the future at the same time. One of the things that makes it so majestic as a city is, on every street you’re in, you have thousands of years of history that are taking place. And every time you open a book, you’re like, “Wow, that’s the walk I take to the corner shop,” and, “This is where the king rested before he was killed” — that kind of stuff.

I love that part of it, and I love the way that London, despite that history, is always utterly full of enthusiasm for the new — whether it’s technology or the systems, whether it’s people — and is very open to it, has a foot in both sides.

Britain as a whole does not necessarily have that quality. That’s more of a London quality than a Britain one. And Britain can tend to be a bit lost in the opium dreams of its own past.

Whenever you hear a prime minister talk about Downing Street, the thing they always talk about is the staircase with all of the portraits of the various prime ministers. And I get it: some of those prime ministers were people that were crucial in the history of liberal democracy, or some of them fought off Nazism.

I get that that is obviously like a powerful thing, but you cannot be the prisoner of those ghosts, you know? That has to be something that inspires rather than constrains you. And I think in terms of our emotional, psychological space as a country, when it comes to our political system, we’re mostly constrained rather than emancipated by it.

The problems that never get solved in the UK [00:28:14]

Rob Wiblin: Before we go on, it might be worth itemising some of the long-term failures of governance in the UK that you identify. What are the things that are not getting solved because of these structural problems? It seems to me to be the thorny, difficult tradeoff questions that just go unresolved year after year after year.

Ian Dunt: Yeah, exactly. So take something like social care. At the moment we have a system of social care, which I suppose the kindest thing you could say about it is that it’s sort of oddly progressive in that anyone that owns a home is ultimately going to be in the situation where they’re going to think, “I’m probably going to have to sell that house to pay for my care at the end of my life.”

And we sort of realise this is a problem, and it’s a problem in very many ways, not least of which the degree of insecurity that it gives you. If you become very poor, if you’ve lost all of anything that you’ve managed to accumulate over your life, then the state will step in and help with social care. But until that point, absolutely not.

And of course that’s a really pernicious thing as well, when it comes to the relationship between generations. They will often sit there looking at the value of the assets, thinking, “Well, that’s it. That’s my inheritance. Now it’s going to go on social care.”

We know that we’ve wanted this fixed. The outgoing Labour government, when it came in in the late noughties, came up with a plan with the Conservatives. And the Conservatives pulled out at the last minute, and went, “It’s a death tax.”

Because it’s so attractive, right? The thing is, any plan you come up with over social care is going to cost loads of money. So of course the other party is going to pull out and be like, “Hang on a minute. They’re going to raise your taxes in a really extraordinary way. And you know what? They’ll do it on the money you’re going to give your kids.” Kind of ironic given the way that it actually works out in reality, but that’s what they go for.

A few years later, Theresa May for the Conservatives decided she was going to come up with a social care policy — and in fact Labour pulled out and launched a stinging attack on that, calling it “dementia tax.” So it’s the same technique really. That pretty much cost her her majority in 2017 in the election.

So over and over, there’s no buy-in from the parties, let alone they obviously can’t work together. It’s pathologically adversarial, the constitutional system in Britain. But there’s no project in which they can all buy in. So instead we just see it perennially unresolved.

You could also look at something like housing. Housing is way too expensive. We’ve got a whole generation — a generation that is now actually starting to enter middle age, people in their 40s — who basically cannot afford to own a house or own a flat.

And what have we had in terms of addressing it? We’ve had 25 housing ministers since the turn of the millennium. We’ve had a new housing minister basically every single year. There has been no consistency of policy in this area.

And this area just mangles people’s lives. You think about the core part — they don’t have an asset, with all that comes with that — but you also think about the kind of tiny humiliations. When you rent property, generally speaking, your landlord can tell you whether you can have a pet or not, whether you can have a dog or a cat. If you’re 42, having someone be like, “I’m telling you you can’t have a dog,” how dare they say that to you?

These tiny notions and these very grand things about being able to plan your life and arrange your finances have been removed from a whole generation of people.

And in the political scene, we’ve demonstrated zero consistency, zero persistence of focus on this issue. So that seems to me like a really long-term structural problem with your political system.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. One of our most recent interviews was with Sam Bowman about how catastrophically damaging the planning permission system in the UK has been, preventing construction of housing and basically anything.

Why UK ministers have no expertise in the areas they govern [00:31:32]

Rob Wiblin: There’s a number of big themes that recur through the book, but maybe one of the most important ones that I want us to dwell on is: you describe a system in which almost nobody has any deep understanding of what it is that they’re working on or is meant to be talking about.

Ian Dunt: Yes.

Rob Wiblin: How can that be the case?

Ian Dunt: Because of the incentives. So let’s just take the ministers: the prime minister can decide who has each ministerial position, and they can move them whenever they like. In any other position in the economy, in society, the first question you’re going to ask of someone when they go for a job interview is: “What experience do you have in this area, and what do you know about it?” Obviously that’s questions one and two.

These are exactly the questions that are never asked in the British system. Because when the prime minister decides who’s going to be a minister — who’s going to be in charge of defence, who’s going to be in charge of health — what they’re really concerned with is shoring up their own defences against political challenge. So they pick loyalists, essentially, and they punish those who’ve been disloyal.

Sometimes, very occasionally — like Brexit with Theresa May — you have to balance leavers and remainers, and there’s some other thing. But even then, you’re not dealing with who has the most expertise; you’re dealing with, “How do I shore up my support in Parliament?”

Which they do. The cabinet secretary, who’s the most senior position in the Civil Service, will be there during a reshuffle and they will say things like it’s fine — but they’re not a details person. So if you’re going to have them there, make sure that you have at least this junior minister to find out what’s actually going on.

But even then, when I’ve done interviews with these guys talking about their process, they’re like, “Well, I can say all of this, but then the whip” — the whip is the person who’s in charge of discipline in the party system in Parliament — “will come in like, ‘Can’t do that. They’re not sufficiently loyal. We’ve got to reward this person over here. If you want me to keep on delivering the votes for you in Parliament, that’s how we do it.'”

So the series of incentives, the series of things that you are trying to achieve by those appointments, has nothing to do with understanding of the subject area.

Then occasionally you get someone who’s actually quite competent. Let’s say six months, they know nothing. One year, they’re kind of getting somewhere. Two years, they’re actually kind of up and running. A competent person. These are big areas of policy — something like pensions — it’s really hard to get your head around it. You need two years, and then really, a competent person can probably master it to a certain extent. And that’s typically when they’re moved; that’s generally about how long a ministerial position lasts for, and then they’ll shift you over.

Why? Because the prime minister’s best way of shoring up support when things get weird is a reshuffle. Keeps everyone on their toes, shows that you can punish those who haven’t been loyal, shows you can reward those who have been. So you start moving them around again. It’s almost like the whole ministerial system is designed to make sure that no one who ever did understand what they were talking about is able to achieve any degree of executive power.

And that system, that constant churn of personnel, operates similarly at the Civil Service level, just like it does with ministers. And by the way, in a slightly different way, in journalism as well. So what you have is a bunch of people who are doing things that no one understands, who are being scrutinised by people who don’t understand it, and who are then receiving coverage by people who don’t know what they’re talking about either.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, for people who are used to the Westminster system of government… I grew up in Australia. I have this distinct memory of when I was 13 or 14, watching the news with my parents, and at some point I was like, “Wait, the minister for health, they’re not an expert in health policy? Like, they weren’t a doctor or they haven’t studied this area for a long time?” And my parents were like, “No, it’s just an MP who’s put into that role.” I was like, “What the hell? This is a crazy system.”

But of course, I’ve been used to this system for decades now, so now it doesn’t strike me as so odd that the prime minister just puts people into a portfolio that they don’t necessarily have any understanding of — and can just remove them at any point in time based on their whims, to shore up their political support.

What are some other systems around the world that give people more stability and are more likely to choose someone who is a domain expert? Is there another way of making this work?

Ian Dunt: Well, to be honest, one of the weird things is that the most effective way of changing it is actually to do with the electoral system. So Britain, Canada, the US, we all use first-past-the-post — winner takes all, big government majorities. That’s what we go for.

Europe doesn’t. There’s not a single country in Europe that is operating according to this system. They use proportional representation of one form or another. What that ends up doing, when you start representing the votes proportionately, is you always end up with governments that are coalitions. And coalitions, weirdly enough, stop the ministerial churn. They basically stop there. It’s just like, it actually takes a lot of really difficult, contorted negotiations to find out who goes where. So once you’re there, you kind of stick with them for a long time.

That has a negative effect, by the way. Sometimes for the public, if you keep on voting out someone, you find that actually the same guy is in charge of the treasury, no matter which party happens to be the majority party in government. That can be a little bit disenchanting for people. But you stop the ministerial churn.

Britain had a coalition, kind of almost by accident, 2010 to 2015. Our system’s not designed for it, but we ended up with one. And in that period, the churn just stopped, because David Cameron, when he was prime minister, couldn’t just get rid of people. It was all part of an arrangement with the Liberal Democrats.

Rob Wiblin: You have to renegotiate everything.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. It was like this vase that was incredibly expensive that you couldn’t touch too much, so then you leave it. And so suddenly, actually that system addresses itself not by virtue of addressing it directly, but by fixing the electoral system.

Rob Wiblin: OK, we’ll come back to the pros and cons of trying to shift the system so ministers can have more longevity later.

Let’s talk a little bit about the Civil Service, though. You might think ministers come in, they’re political appointees, they’re representatives of the people in some sense. But at least the senior civil servants that they’re working with on health policy or pensions or whatever, they would be the experts who would stick around. The permanent secretary of the department might be permanent in some sense.

But you describe that’s not the case yet. To what extent do civil servants not understand their own portfolio? And why would that be the case?

Ian Dunt: I’m so sorry for just using the word “incentive” over and over again. I’m boring myself with it. But that’s ultimately the answer to the question.

Civil servants get more money by changing position. That’s it. And it became especially the case after the financial crisis, where there was a freeze on the head count and there was a freeze on the amount of money that you pay people for staying in a particular role.

So civil servants aren’t paid a lot. You start there in your late 20s. By the time you’re 30s, maybe you’ve got a family, you’ve got kids; you’re living in London, a really expensive place to be. Suddenly you’re like, “I really do need to think about how I’m going to make more money.” And the only way to really get an increase on your salary is to change positions.

Changing positions typically takes you away from the area that you’ve understood. So you’ll get people that have suddenly become experts in, like, rail franchise negotiation, IT system implementation — the kind of the boiler room, engine room jobs that countries need to be adequately done. You know, that’s not glamorous, no one gives a s***, but it needs to be done properly.

They get that expertise and then they find, “So as long as I am fine just having a salary of like £27,000, £32,000” — that’s what we’re talking about here in London, not a cheap city — “then I have to stay in this job. But if I want to get more money, I’m going to have to change.” So they keep on moving around.

And this is partly cultural as well as anything else: you’ll find in the Civil Service, its idea of a high flyer is, “I did a little bit of time on universal credit; I did a little bit of time negotiating with the Europeans; I did a little bit of time on this defence contract work.” You did what? Eighteen months, two years? They don’t know what the f*** they’re talking about. They don’t really understand any particular area. What they have is this kind of rotation through the subjects.

And that’s considered in this almost Victorian way, this kind of gentleman philosopher way, the kind of career that you should have in the Civil Service. You know, Theresa May had an unusually long period as home secretary: she had five years. She was basically the institutional memory in the department. You look at the treasury: there are people there who are cycling through jobs every nine months. You look at permanent secretaries at the very top of a department, they stay just a little bit longer than a Premier League football manager. Basically around the two-year, three-year mark, they’re just churning through the ranks.

So again, when we want the civil servant to sit down with the minister, to go, “I understand that you want to do this, Minister, but actually if you do that, there’s going to be this consequence over here or there’s a legal problem over here” — well, actually, they have even less institutional knowledge than the minister does, who themselves have almost nothing.

Rob Wiblin: You mentioned a couple of stats around this in the book. I think treasury staff turnover can reach about 25% annually, similar to a McDonald’s restaurant. Permanent secretaries now average just two years and nine months in post, only one year longer than football managers. And in the treasury spending team, in 2018, staff had been in their current post for a median time of just 11 months.

Ian Dunt: Yeah.

Rob Wiblin: Why have we ended up with a system like that? It’s not obvious that things need to be arranged that way, that the only way to get promoted is to move to another department or another area. Why can’t people wait around and replace their own manager when they leave, or just get promoted because they have more experience?

Ian Dunt: There is no good answer to the question that you have just asked, and it has been recognised for a tremendous amount of time.

We had the Fulton report in the ’60s that was saying we don’t have enough specialist knowledge, especially not the hard sciences, in Civil Service.

Then we’ve got amateur generalists — gentlemen, basically — and we need something better than that. And partly that is this view that the cautious selection of words as a skill is massively overrepresented in the Civil Service. They’re really bright; they went to Oxford and Cambridge, and they studied humanities, and they can come up with just the right series of words that gets you over any kind of tensions or disagreements you might have in a certain area — but they don’t actually know anything or the engine room of a country.

So again, over and over, people have tried to fix it. We must have had over 10 initiatives just to reward people for skills. You stay on the job, you’ve got a skill, you demonstrate that you’ve got the skill, we can give you increased payment on the basis of it — and each time it just comes across as too weird, too countercultural, rejected by the system.

Rob Wiblin: So it’s rejected by civil servants or rejected by the executive?

Ian Dunt: One of the most effective attempts that we saw on that was by the deputy permanent secretary at the treasury — so you’re talking at pretty senior levels at that point, and even then it doesn’t seem to last. When you see interviews with them, they’re just like, “No, it just didn’t fit. There’s a struggle against it. I’m not really given the powers to do it.”

By the way, at the senior level, it’s not a benchmark that they’re told to achieve. One of the quickest ways to start fixing this is just to say that a permanent secretary has to demonstrate: A, that you found what you think is empirically a sensible rate of turnover in your department — which is the kind of thing you would expect from a CEO in most cases, and that’s what they are, a CEO — and B, that you’ve achieved that level.

If you were just to give those two tasks to a permanent secretary, you’d at least start to create the incentives that we require. But we never do. We have these sort of small initiative projects, usually as the result of a single individual thinking in a particular way. Even when they’re in a senior position, we don’t have the structural approach to the reform that secures long-lasting change.

Rob Wiblin: You mentioned that Civil Service salaries are surprisingly low in the UK; people can be earning sometimes a quarter of what they might earn in the private sector if they went into something more remunerative like investment banking. That’s not a huge focus of the book, but how large a factor do you think that is? Is it just an important thing that people need to remember that if you want to have great people who will do top work, then you actually need to pay for it?

Ian Dunt: Yes. It’s an extremely radical idea you’re proposing here right now.

Rob Wiblin: I studied economics. Can you tell?

Ian Dunt: I mean, it’s more of a problem in the hard sciences areas. The reason that we always do the comparison with, ultimately tech and banking is the areas that we look at, is because that’s where we’re at its weakest.

I don’t want to be disparaging. I am a humanities student, some of my best friends are humanities students. But you’re always going to have humanities students who are willing to work — often quite middle class, and often would have been helped getting a property by their parents — and they’re willing to take a relatively modest salary in order to have a really interesting job. And working in a private office for a minister, being part of the political machine, can often be a really interesting job. So you will have enough of those.

What we don’t have and what we can’t afford to pay for — or at least are not willing to pay for — are people who can go toe to toe, especially with private sector contractors when it comes to government contracts. A lot of the time you’re just getting outplayed by people who are the same as you. Even take the way that consultants have been brought in: consultancies are taking from exactly the same talent pool that the Civil Service is; it’s just that it’s turning these guys into specialists and then using them basically to railroad over the government.

So over and over again, in those particular areas you find ultimately you just need to pay them more. You’re never going to be able to pay them as much as they’re going to get in Big Tech, we accept that. But lots of them will want to do the work, and you just need to make it possible for them by giving them a respectable salary, if not necessarily one that is entirely equivalent to what they would get in the private sector.

Why MPs are chosen to have no idea about legislation [00:44:08]

Rob Wiblin: In the book, you investigate on what grounds MPs are preselected to run for a constituency, to run for a seat in Parliament. And I think you find not very much weight is given to their ability to understand or scrutinise legislation, which is seemingly the constitutional role that an MP would have. What are they selected for instead?

Ian Dunt: It’s two things. You either get the support at a local level, or you get it at a central level from the party.

When it’s the local level — these are local councillors or someone like that — it’s typically because they’re good campaigners with local roots. People are obsessed with MPs having local roots — “Oh, they grew up here; they were born in the hospital” — none of it is of the slightest pertinence. I mean, who cares? It’s not hard to just move to an area and then care about that area too. But local people really care about local roots to an extraordinary degree. And they care about campaigning.

Why? Because the people that vote for them are party members. These are the guys who decide who gets to stand as an MP. This is the selection process of who can be a candidate for the party.

And who are they? They’re not sitting there thinking about constitutional arrangements and scrutinising the executive. They are party people, they are partisans. They spend their Sundays in the rain stuffing leaflets through people’s mailboxes. So they think, “You know who I like? I like people who spend their Sundays in the rain stuffing leaflets in people’s mailboxes.” And that’s what they do. If there’s someone that ran the local council for the party, that is the person that is going to win in that contest. 100% local roots, campaigner.

Sometimes the central party takes over. When the central party takes over, they like the people that they’ve worked with — and that’s typically special advisors, SpAds. It could be other people in the party infrastructure, but basically people that they know.

And it’s like, “Don’t worry, I’ll have a chat with the local party. We’ll put you on the list.” And once you’re on the list with the prime minister or the leader of the opposition saying “I think this one’s really good, and they’ve worked with me closely,” that person is going to get the candidacy. That’s who it’s going to be.

So you have these two different routes into it: one of them through greasy pol stuff and one of them through local campaigning stuff. But either way, what they’re not about is scrutinising legislation — which after all is the actual job that this person’s going to do after this process is over.

Is any country doing things better? [00:46:14]

Rob Wiblin: So we’ve gone through: ministers aren’t really selected for being experts in the very complex portfolio that they suddenly have to manage, civil servants don’t stick around long enough to really gain expertise in their area, and MPs are not experts in legislation either. And we could talk about other ways in which the system doesn’t really reward talent and expertise in particular.

This is one of the core themes of the book: to solve these complex problems, we need people who understand the complex problems and actually have technical expertise and understanding. That’s extremely common sense. You’re not saying that we need no generalists at all; you’re just saying 100% of generalists is inappropriate. We need a bit of a balance here.

Are there any countries, though, in your view, that maybe err too far on the side of privileging expertise and people who’ve been around a long time, and they might have their own problems as well? If you’ve been in a system for a very long time, it can be hard to see how things could be radically different. You might have lost the broader perspective, you might only know your area, if all of the weight has been given to people in their 60s who maybe did engineering and now are working in some engineering-related area.

Is it possible to swing too far in the other direction, or does anyone do that?

Ian Dunt: I don’t think I know of a country. And if you look at the world around you right now, it doesn’t feel like expertise is something that we have too much of, or too much respect for.

So I don’t know of a country as a whole that’s got it wrong. I do think that you can look at certain areas where we’ve reached a difficult moment. There’s several European countries where civil servants will stay in positions maybe a little too long.

But you know this from almost any job that any of us have had: once you stay in the same job for more than like eight years, you start to kind of calcify a little bit in the job. Sometimes you stop questioning people with new ideas that are coming up with it. And it’s good for you to move around a bit: just because two years is too short doesn’t mean that eight years isn’t necessarily a bit too long. So of course there can be movement there.

And I think the same as I mentioned earlier with ministerial posts, there’s a danger with proportional systems: when you can’t shove someone out on the basis of a vote, the public start asking, “Hang on, how does voting change anything?” So there are some dangers there as well.

I suppose you could argue that in systems where the president can pick whoever they like — the American system is one example: you know, it doesn’t need to be an MP; you can pick this general over here, or Elon Musk if you want to be really exciting about the whole thing — and in that case you think, actually, what exactly is the mandate that the individual has to be running that place? Sure, the president has some kind of mandate, but the individual themselves doesn’t necessarily have a mandate. I’m not personally too concerned about that, but some people do worry about the democratic deficit in that process.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. When I bring up this issue of expertise with people, one of the first things that they tend to bring up is that it can be extremely difficult to fire people in the Civil Service. I know some civil servants myself, and they almost all have some horror story of some completely useless colleague: you want to edge them out, but there actually isn’t a practical way to do that.

I think that’s not something you really mentioned in the book. To what extent do you think that is an issue as well?

Ian Dunt: Yeah, a couple of civil servants will mention that. And I agree, you want the ability to do it. You also have the worst scenario of all: essentially that really promising, talented people, if they find themselves in this scenario — especially where they want to get better at the thing that they’re good at, but instead find that they have to go off somewhere else — can go off somewhere else. Whereas someone who’s just sitting there waiting for their final salary pension is actually quite hard to shift.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, adverse selection.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. On both sides of the issue.

Rob Wiblin: Another objection that people raise to the broad thesis of the book is: is the UK actually that bad? Sure, we’ve got a lot of problems in social care, housing. But if you look globally, we might still be in the top 5% or 10% of governance around the world. There’s lots of countries that have it much worse, even though there are countries that have it much better. Is it possible that you’re focusing on the failures and perhaps missing that in the broader picture with governance in the UK, there’s far further to fall than there is to improve?

Ian Dunt: That’s interesting. There are certain areas that we can be proud of. Institutionally, that’s the case with certain parts of the system. Select committees, the House of Lords, a few others.

The really positive thing about the UK is the sense of frustrated expectation. Which isn’t fun to live through, because anyone that has it, it’s a bit like their attitude towards the England football team: there is no rational reason to think that you should have a lot of hope for the England football team, but people keep on feeling that way. Every two years we think that way.

It’s sort of the same with Britain’s political structure: there’s sort of this expectation of like, “We’re supposed to be very good at this, and this matters that we’re failing at this stuff. We’re supposed to be demonstrating to other countries how this stuff is done, not constantly falling over our own shoelaces and being this bumbling laughingstock for everybody else.”

And I think that emotional frustration is actually a very healthy thing. I’ve lived in countries and had close relations with countries where you kind of have the opposite: you just have this sense of, “No, we’ve always been screwed up. This has always been a disaster. Things will never get better.” That’s when you’re in real trouble right there. Because that’s the death of all hope, really. And suffocating. So that part is positive.

I have to say, when it comes to quality of governance, it’s really hard, because obviously we’re talking at our level. You know what I mean? I’m talking about first world, advanced, capitalist, democratic countries. I’m not talking about, you know, the south. Not really talking about anything like that.

Rob Wiblin: We’re better than Belarus, but we don’t have to crow about that.

Ian Dunt: I think that that’s correct. If that’s our benchmark, then I think we’re doing really quite well. Exactly. But that is where we’re at. And on that basis, no, I think you would want to be quite concerned.

Again, it’s not like other countries are always perfect. With almost any country you look at, you will find things that they get terribly wrong and things that they get terribly right. I’m unaware of any country that I’ve looked at and just think, “OK, just adopt this s*** wholesale.” You absolutely wouldn’t. You try to find the bits that work.

What I find concerning is that it’s actually becoming really increasingly quite difficult to find the bits that work here, and that you see the effects all the time. You look at it in terms of business investment, in terms of productivity, in terms of growth, in terms of trust in democratic institutions, in terms of public faith that actually the life of the next generation will be better than the one it is now or the one before: all of these arrows are going downwards; all of the red warning lights are flashing.

And I think that the way to fix this stuff, no one ever thinks that it’s constitutional, but ultimately it is about thinking, how is the decision-making process working? If we fix that, maybe we’re going to get better outcomes than the ones that we have right now.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Sometimes when I was reading the book, and you were castigating the UK for being so completely useless, I did sometimes think that running a country is hard; solving healthcare for an entire nation of 70 million people is actually quite challenging. And I think that often explains why things are going poorly: humans are frail, we are weak, we are not that capable — and often, that is the simple explanation for why things are going badly.

But what are some countries in your view that we should be learning from that overall do a significantly better job, and we should be viewing as the star pupils in the class?

Ian Dunt: Can I just pick up on one thing? I mean, look, it’s hard; I totally get that it’s really hard. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t try to do the best job that you can. That’s an argument for trying to do better rather than being too forgiving of those who do badly.

When we talk about, as you say, fixing health services: you just take the number of inputs — whether it comes to pay for health service staff, for the resource allocation, for the kinds of tests that you want to use on a health service that will be indicative of a broader health in the overall institution.

For instance, like if you put a test for 98% of people to be seen within four hours at accident and emergency, it’s a really good test to have — because once they’re through accident and emergency, it means that they’re getting them onto the wards. And if they’re getting them onto the wards, it means that they’re getting them off the wards, and in the other part of the system and into social care. You want to come up with sensible tests to make sure that you have overall institutional health.

All of this stuff is possible. The decision making is doable. As you say, it’s very difficult. It takes a long time. From the point that you implement, you need years afterwards — let’s say at least four or five years to do it. But we have to hold political leaders to the highest standard.

And also right now, more than ever: when populism is kind of nipping at our heels, where in any single country you’re in, populism is at the door and it wants in — with disastrous outcomes for people’s livelihoods, for their sense of freedom, for the sense of tolerance in their country, for their sense of fundamental moral decency — we have to show that our way works. That liberal democracy, that reason, that meritocracy, that scrutiny of ideas, that these core concepts in liberalism, that they function — that they can improve people’s lives, that they’re not just pretty poetic words that we use.

So no, I want the highest f***ing standards on these guys. And I do think that when you get the right people in working to the right incentives, we can achieve it. But we need first of all to have those high standards.

I have no idea what the rest of the question was.

Rob Wiblin: [laughs] What are the countries that we can learn from that in general do better?

Ian Dunt: Well, no country is perfect, but let’s say that you can find bits.

Take the Netherlands. It’s such a strange thing to praise, but an important one: cultural assumptions. The cultural assumption is that no one’s ever going to be really happy in politics. It’s like an optimal political outcome is that everyone’s just a little bit disappointed.

I love that. That’s not winner takes all, it’s not macho, it’s not tribalistic as we have in the UK. It’s not about, “I win and you guys can go off.” It’s basically saying that everyone’s going to be disappointed, and we need to come up with a solution that everyone accepts. It’s a great cultural attribute, and we should have it.

The Netherlands also has one constituency — and that constituency is the Netherlands. Now, that is a terrible way to run your electoral system: it means that there’s no local link whatsoever between people voting and the politician. In that case, you just think that looks awful. You speak to Dutch constitutional experts — as I obviously, because I have such a wonderful, exciting life, spend a lot of my time doing — and they’ll say, “We really envy the MP link that you have.” We should keep that as it is. On their side, we could use their culture.

The same if you look at the US: the US’s Congressional Budget Office is a set cadre of officials that are there to basically help politicians understand financial legislation. That is what they are there to do.

You look at the British system, where MPs are completely outgunned by the government with access to the Civil Service: they’ve got nothing. They’ve got no one to help them out apart from pressure groups who have their own agenda. Imagine giving them a set cadre of civil servants to explain financial legislation, with its own controlling intelligence to go, “Hang on a minute” — you don’t wait to be asked by a politician; you go, “No, hang on. This bit of financial legislation over here, there’s a consequence to this clause 2.2.5.9. You need to look at that a little bit closer, and I can explain it to you in plain language.” That’s a really useful attribute that you want to have there.

But then also, needless to say, I could point out several parts of the American system — like the Supreme Court, say — that is not something that we would want to replicate over here.

And that’s how it is with almost any country that you look at. I’m unaware of any in the Western world that I wouldn’t have any criticism of.

Is rushing inevitable or artificial? [00:57:20]

Rob Wiblin: A common theme in the book is that everything in the UK feels very rushed — that the writing of bills feels rushed, any policy discussion, anything going through Parliament. In your mind, there’s these constant arbitrary deadlines that are forcing people to do mediocre work.

I think that could be right. But then I do also wonder, you know, I feel rushed in my life. I think most people feel rushed in their lives. And I think that that’s not necessarily because we’re creating artificial deadlines for ourselves. It can be because there’s a lot of things to deal with, and if you provide a lot of sustained attention on one thing, that can mean that other things are just going completely unaddressed.

So maybe the need to rush just comes from the fact that there’s a lot of stuff going on in a country. There’s only so much throughput in Parliament, so they have to always rush from one topic to the next. And maybe this is the best we can do. Maybe you need a second Parliament or something. What do you make of that?

Ian Dunt: You’re very kind to them. And thank you for your close reading of the book, by the way; these are really good questions. You’re right that certain times deadlines really help. I did a lot of work with trade negotiators during the Brexit period, trying to explain how all of this works and operates. And one of their core things was like, you need to give the trade negotiation time to breathe.

But if you don’t have a deadline there, nothing will ever come to a head. There will always be a sort of crunch process in the last month of staying up until 3:00am, desperately scribbling down proposals for the other side in a toilet in a conference centre somewhere, that you pass on that quickly gets phoned up to the leader back home and they sign off — and suddenly, you know, it’s 15% tariffs on this.

That process will always take place. You must have a deadline. So you’re right: sometimes you have to impose it, even though it’s always going to be arbitrary to a certain extent.

We need to course correct on that. We are way off the scale in the other direction in the UK. Now, you are always going to have the ability to have emergency legislation if you need to. But our standard system for passing laws is basically that it gets, we say, a day for each of its parliamentary stages. But a day really means about five hours, because the time starts after 1:00pm, that’s after all the other stuff is done, and it has to end at a certain point

And I mean, we have bills, they’re pages long. Sometimes, especially Home Office legislation, it’s just crammed full of disparate stuff.

You know, we’ve got this policy over here and we’re going to ban this kind of knife. Good. Pretty much everyone agrees with it. We’ve got a policy over here that the home secretary now gets to define the phrase “serious disruption” that’s used by the police to decide when a protest is or is not legal. Well, actually, that’s some pretty weird stuff you’ve got over there. We’ve got this over here that means we want access to the back end of a WhatsApp system or an encrypted communication device. OK, well, there could be consequences of that, and we should talk about that. We got this on upskirting photos and we want to turn that into a sex crime. This on extremism. All crammed into one bill.

And then they’re like, for report stage, you’ve got five hours. Five hours?! What are you talking about? Why would you…? There is no disaster that’s coming right now that means that you need to just do that in five hours’ time. We should have proper time for people to look at it. When it comes to, for instance, report stage: we know the approximate amount of time is like three days. Three days is not crazy. This is not a ridiculous thing.

I had a series of proposals at the end of that book. What it would ultimately do in terms of time is double it for pretty much every stage of legislation. And where that would end you up really, is that between elections, a five-year period, you’d have the chance to pass about 100 pieces of legislation. That to me is fine; that’s 20 bills a year.

If you want to write legislation properly, 20 bills a year, that’s fine. That’s more than enough for you guys to be getting on with. Government doesn’t need to just keep on passing law just so it looks like it can be responding to whatever happens to be in the news right now, or look like it has a sense of vitality and potency to it. Sometimes you just need to legislate much less, but legislate sensibly. And that is just not something that we’ve been doing.

How unelected septuagenarians are the heroes of UK governance [01:02:42]

Rob Wiblin: We’ve been a bit all doom and gloom so far, but —

Ian Dunt: That’s my whole thing. I really have nothing else to offer. I apologise.

Rob Wiblin: Well, you do have something else to offer, because there’s two things that you say really stand out as functioning well in the British system of government — and that is, oddly, the House of Lords and the parliamentary select committees.

Let’s maybe focus on the House of Lords a little bit more, because I think that’s a little bit more counterintuitive and strange to people. Because it’s not a very democratic chamber in a sense. You might expect it to be the most dysfunctional if you just took a cursory look at it.

Firstly, for all of the non-Brits here, and I suppose some of the Brits as well, can you explain what the House of Lords is? Because it’s this quite odd institution that doesn’t really have analogue in many other countries.

Ian Dunt: Yeah, it’s the second chamber. In that sense it does have analogue: most places have a second chamber. Most other countries think that they should vote for the people in the second chamber. We’ve decided that’s not really necessary for our requirements.

So for years it has just been this strange, anomalous, very conservative institution. Some of the people there are hereditary peers, so they’re basically there by bloodline. A sort of remnant of the feudal age. Others are life peers, where they’re made a peer early on and then they stay there for the rest of their life. But they never have to pass an election. No one in the House of Lords is elected. There is no democratic element to the House of Lords.

And it is by far the most effective part of the British constitutional system, which troubles a lot of people. And for my own kind of liberal North London friendship group, it’s disgusting that I keep on saying that it’s very effective — because this is not a popular view, as you can imagine.

But you just have to go on the evidence that is in front of your eyes. And when it comes to the evidence in front of our eyes, it is a profoundly effective revision chamber. It is where legislation is changed, amendments are proposed. Governments sometimes accept them, sometimes they’re forced to take them on board, and we start chiselling away these small daily changes to legislation — tiny, innocuous things, not very colourful, not the kinds of things you man the barricades for, but that actually come up with effective, functioning law.

Why is it happening? There’s a couple of reasons. First one is, out of nowhere, almost by accident, we have expertise in the House of Lords. Tony Blair introduced these crossbench peers. They’re not a member of any party; they’re not Labour, they’re not Conservative. They have to have accomplished extraordinary things in their professional life — often it’s been law, it’s been business, it’s been defence, it’s been charities. And they get brought in, and suddenly it’s just like someone actually knows what the f*** they’re talking about.

And it’s true, you see the way the government responds when legislation is in the House of Lords. It’s honestly like it’s the first time they’ve even looked at their own bill. When these guys come out to play, it is seriously impressive. When you’re talking about changes on welfare, on benefits, you have proper experts in social security there who will tell you what the consequences are — to people’s lives, to the legal ramifications of what you’re trying to do, the chances of you ending up in court, what the moral consequences are — in detail. In bone-curdling, bone-dry detail, they will look at this stuff clause by clause, sentence by sentence.

Rob Wiblin: And they’ll stick with it. They won’t just end it after a couple of hours because they run out of time, I think. Because they decide their own agenda, right?

Ian Dunt: Exactly. They control the time. Unlike the Commons, where the government just tells you how long you’ve got to do it, they say, “We’re going to spend six days. You see how you like it. We’re going to take as long as we damn well please. We will look at it in proper detail.”

And they have no party loyalty. No one can just come and go, “You have to vote this way because you’re Labour” — this sort of insane way that we operate in the elected chamber, where we think we really want MPs of conscience and independent judgement, and then as soon as they get in there, it’s like, “You better vote the way you’re told or else you can kiss goodbye to your career.” No, these guys will just vote however they damn well please.

And importantly, if they don’t want to turn up, if they don’t know anything about something, they don’t have to. So they only come for the stuff that they understand, which is basically what we want.

The second thing is that the government has no majority in the House of Lords. And that’s basically why it works — because suddenly, when the government can’t just force through its agenda, it has to listen; it has to convince people. There’s a cultural trait that takes over in the House of Lords where if anyone starts just shouting party political slogans, they’re basically just made to sit down — because it is not a house for dogma; it is a house for expertise and for detail and for independent judgement on legislation. And for those reasons, it functions depressingly well.

Rob Wiblin: A few things that will be useful for especially people overseas to know about the House of Lords: there’s 700 people in the House of Lords, and about 10% of them are hereditary peers. So they’re in the chamber because their great, great, great grandfather was a baron, or fought in some war for some king or other.

Weirdly enough, the hereditary peers are the ones who are elected in some more direct sense — because they are elected, though only by a broader aristocracy, I believe. Was it 1,000 or 2,000 people who previously were in the House of Lords who now elect 80 or something of them to be in the chamber?

Ian Dunt: Technically, there is an element of democracy. [laughs] And it’s that — which is not very impressive.

Rob Wiblin: But you’re not going to like it. Yeah, yeah.

Ian Dunt: And we should mention that they’re on their way out. Labour has just passed a bill getting rid of the hereditary peers. So within I think six months, nine months from now, those guys will be gone.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. You actually support getting rid of them. Though presumably some of them take their job seriously, they must accumulate some experience. I guess they’ve been selected from a broader group of people who maybe are on average probably very educated. Are they actually so useless? Obviously it’s galling to imagine that you’d have an aristocracy electing a group of people for Parliament, but…

Ian Dunt: Well, it’s how do you do the selection? I’m not too fussed about the fact that it’s non-democratic. I think it’s very helpful that it’s non-democratic, that we’re not using democratic functions for this area.

But you want the function to be on expertise: someone that has experience of some part of life that can bring something to it. We can’t evaluate expertise by bloodline. That’s just utter nonsense, obviously. Even 200 years ago, that would not have been a radical thing to say. It’s absurd that it’s still happening now. Of course we need to get rid of them.

We also have bishops in the House of Lords, it should be mentioned — that is one of the many attributes we share with the state of Iran — and I think probably we could get rid of that one as well. I think we should get rid of that. Or at the very least you bring in representatives of other religions. If you really want to have a religious element there — which, frankly, I’m not too keen on — then bring in the other religions. But you can’t just have just one set.

Rob Wiblin: Just the Church of England. Yeah.

As far as the other members of the House of Lords, there are a whole lot of people who are appointed. The prime minister has appointed almost all of the others. Each prime minister, I think on their way out, appoints a bunch of new people to the House of Lords. These are life appointments, I believe; they’re never forced to leave the chamber. They can choose to resign.

There are a bunch of people who are there because they are Lib Dems or Labour or Conservatives, but none of them have a majority in itself. They need these experts who have been appointed because they’ve achieved something excellent in their lives in order to get a majority and pass the legislation.

One thing I’m confused by is why doesn’t the prime minister at some point just pack the House of Lords with loyalists who will make their life easier, and render the House of Lords kind of useless so they can just pass things through it with the majority that they have?

Ian Dunt: Well, they try, but the numbers are kind of off for you. You’d really have to just start putting extraordinary numbers of people in there — because as you say, we’ve already got so many people there. I think the only legislature with more is in China. I’ve red flagged that, but I’m pretty certain.

Rob Wiblin: Seven hundred people is a big meeting.

Ian Dunt: Yeah, it’s pretty large. But the thing is that most of them don’t turn up. I mean, half of them are kind of half dead.

Rob Wiblin: The average age is 71.

Ian Dunt: Yeah, exactly. So there’s that as a sort of restraint. The other is that, like I said, those crossbenchers, loads of the time they just don’t know something about something, and they just don’t turn up.

The other is that the party political appointments — the Labour guys, the Tory guys — if they don’t like the look of something, they don’t really want to vote for it, they just don’t turn up either. They don’t rebel. They hardly ever rebel; they just don’t go in — basically just sit at home. These guys don’t have a salary really; they’re paid for each time they go in. It’s kind of like a private club. You know, get a bit of money, do a bit of scrutinising legislation, and off you go for dinner.

So on that basis, no. We have an issue with the prime minister selecting these people, especially we had it under Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson basically had no moral floor to his behaviour at all, was deeply self-interested, and just started… I mean, he chucked in a person that’s basically a Russian. Essentially there were warnings from the security services saying, “You cannot put this guy in.” He put the guy in anyway. He put in someone that was a donor to the Tory Party. It’s just the muckiest, most appalling behaviour.

Then we had Liz Truss. Liz Truss was just selecting people when she left that were basically the looniest fringes of the hyper neoliberal think tank right. Basically bloggers, you know. It’s really quite appalling, just the standards of the people that she was putting in there.

So I think you should remove this power from the prime minister completely, hand it to the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Let them do it. Stop them from being able to use it as a reward, a sort of incentive system.

But you do want those party political people there, partly because they need to just go in every day and vote according to their party. And that allows the crossbenchers, the independent experts, to only come in when they know about something. That’s it. I think we want more of them. Let’s say we want about 50/50 independent experts to party political appointments. But what you want is a system where the party political stuff is just the base level of activity.

Rob Wiblin: That just chugs on in the background.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. And then the experts can come in and they get the deciding vote. That’s the crucial part: let them have the deciding vote. And make sure that the experts are not incentivised to come in when it’s something that they do not understand, that it’s only for when it’s something they have experience of.

So we’ve kind of already accidentally ended up with this good system. There are ways to tinker, to just get it working at absolute peak efficiency.

But I’m in a minority of one in supporting this system. On the one hand, you have conservative traditionists who are just like, “Don’t touch it. We don’t like that, because we don’t like change.” And on the other hand, you have any kind of rational progressive who’s like, “Obviously it should be an elected chamber.” I think either of those positions are unsound.

It’s kind of this bizarre centrist accident, what happened there, and it actually works tremendously well.

How Thatcher unintentionally made one part of parliament work [01:01:02]

Rob Wiblin: I’m going to look for some broader lessons in a minute, but before we do that, let’s talk about the other part of the British government that you think works well, which is the parliamentary select committees, which have something in common with the House of Lords. What is distinctive about how the parliamentary select committees are set up that allows them to provide a function that otherwise just wouldn’t be happening?

Ian Dunt: Again, it was just almost by accident. They were set up by Margaret Thatcher, basically by [leader of the House of Commons] St John-Stevas when she was not paying attention — because if she had been paying attention, she would have killed that s*** stone dead.

People will be aware of it from TV or the films even: it’s a committee of politicians from various parties. They interview witnesses on a particular topic that they’re looking at — it could be grooming gangs, or it could be cannabis regulations, or it could be banking procedures — and they will independently listen to experts as well, behind closed doors, and then they’ll come up with a report.

It breaks pretty much every rule of Westminster. Firstly, the chair is appointed to try and find a consensus. That’s never what we get in the House of Commons. In the House of Commons, the chair is there as a referee and the two sides are just supposed to try and kill each other until the Government overrides it with its majority. Here, no; you’re looking for consensus. You’re trying to find a way to get people to work together and to find an issue that makes sense.

They’re interviewing people who have actual specialist expertise. It’s again, one of these sudden moments where you just find this diamond in the rough — you know, people care about especially skills and evidence all of a sudden, and that’s how they base their decisions.

And I should mention one other thing: because the committee is standing — it’s there for years on end — the members of it actually do develop quite a lot of their own expertise. They’ve had five years looking at a particular country, at a particular region, at a particular industry — and they get it after a while.

And in fact, they become dangerously close to each other. If you notice the way that people in different parties who work on select committees talk to each other in the chamber, where they’re supposed to be screaming abuse at each other, suddenly they’re on, “My Right Honourable friend over here.” They talk to each other in these glowing terms, because I think their sense of identity starts to shift. They start to think of themselves as fellow select committee members.

Rob Wiblin: As colleagues.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. Suddenly the mania, the pathology of the adversariality in the chamber starts to fade a little bit.

Generally, the reports are of extremely high quality. And they look at really contentious stuff — you know, issues like trans rights and things like that. And it’s like, apparently, we can actually find consensus views on this sort of stuff when we start looking at the evidence, and when people are incentivised to work with each other and see how they can address their problems, rather than the opposite.

The thing that strikes you is when you speak to the chairs, they always say the same thing. They’re always like, “You know, it’s actually not that hard. Once you’re presented with evidence and expertise on something, you do find that people will naturally start to go to a place.”

And I think that’s partly because you change the music, you know? Often you take something like trans, or you take something like the limits of protest or something, and you kind of know which side you’re on — because you look around at people who think like you, and you see which way they’re going, and you’re like, “OK, I know my fighting tribe. Here I go.” And off we go to the barricades room.

Well, what if you go to a room where actually that’s not the way that we arrange the music? That’s not the atmosphere. It’s actually like, everyone just listens to people who actually know what they’re talking about. Let’s look at what the actual data tells us here, and let’s see what the rational… Suddenly, when you change the music, you start to get very different actions, very different outcomes.

Select committees are absolutely glorious. I don’t want to exaggerate it. Some of their reports are bad, some terrible people sit on them, and blah, blah. But generally speaking, it’s a really good little institution we’ve accidentally developed.

Maybe secrecy is the best disinfectant for incompetence [01:14:17]

Rob Wiblin: One of the broad lessons I think one might take away from the experience with the House of Lords and the parliamentary select committees is that… In the chapter of the book about the press, which we’re not going to talk about so much, you kind of lament the fact that the press isn’t properly resourced to be scrutinising the government, to be looking into things a lot, to be following up all of the leads. There just isn’t the money to do it.

But it seems like the House of Lords and the parliamentary select committees flourish and do a great job in private — where the press isn’t really looking, where the public can’t really quote what people are saying. The more privacy they have, the more their better angels actually come out, rather than corruption or any inappropriate actions. It’s actually the privacy to say what you really think to other people in the privacy of a committee hearing, where maybe your own party members won’t even realise that you’re reaching out to people on another party to find some common ground.

Maybe we actually need less scrutiny of at least some parts of the government in order to make it function better and bring out people’s better angels?

Ian Dunt: This is spot on. You’re the first person to mention this aspect of the book, and I’ve been talking about this book for like two years now.

I mean, look at these two cases. Number one, no journalist gives a s*** about the House of Lords. No one covers it. So what happens? Something happens to the machismo of the government. Loads of the changes that happen in the House of Lords, it’s kind of because the government knows it wrote the legislation really badly. It’s almost like at this point they’re relying on it as part of the legislative process.

So it gets there, and it’s like, “Fine. So fing change it.” They tend not to accept the amendment that someone put forward — you know, an actual individual lord — but they just go off and basically just rewrite that amendment under their own name, like, “We chose to change it.” You didn’t. But no one gives a s. Who cares? You improved the legislation. Great. Off we go.

Why do they not care? Because no one sees what the hell is going on in that place. No one cares.

Select committees, it’s incredible: basically the conversation they have over that report is behind closed doors. And most importantly, it’s not just [away from] general public scrutiny; it’s away from the whips, the party whips — the disciplinary and surveillance function of the parties. Suddenly, without that incentive, their behaviour changes. They can actually say, “Let’s work together and let’s see what we can do here.”

Again, you’re right, there are certain areas where we might want less. I think this is the same way of looking at things as the House of Lords, right? We think to ourselves, “Democracy is a good thing. It is the answer to the problems that we see constitutionally wherever we find it.” Now, democracy is a really good thing. There are areas where we can harness it to really useful effect, and there are areas where it can be quite unhelpful.

And we talked earlier about electoral reform. Proportional representation systems are more democratic: you count every vote, unlike first-past-the-post. But quite apart from that argument, what’s really useful is because it creates these coalitions, it increases this productive adversariality between parties, making them work together — rather than the kind of pathological one that we find in our own system.

What is democracy useful for? What kind of behaviour can it encourage in certain areas that improves the kind of legislation that we get? But then you have to be open to the fact that we look at something like the House of Lords and we go, “OK, so there are some areas where democracy is actually not that helpful.”

And maybe the revision chamber — not the chamber that proposes legislation, not the one that can kill it, just one that scrutinises legislation — maybe there we actually want expertise. And we probably won’t get it, let’s be honest, if we swing the doors open to the public to vote — because what are they going to do? They’re going to vote for Labour or they’re going to vote for the Tories or they’re going to vote for Nigel Farage or whatever — but they’re not going to be thinking, “Can I get someone there who’s an expert in social security?”

So it’s useful to us to think some things are good, but we don’t necessarily want it in every part of the system. And I think the same thing applies with transparency, and that public sense of scrutiny — that actually there are certain areas where we think that it’s quite useful to have these little hidden away, collegiate, informal areas where people can have a different set of incentives precisely because they can’t be seen. We shouldn’t be afraid of saying that, just because we think that in general transparency is a good thing.

Rob Wiblin: I mean, on the transparency point, I think if there’d been less transparency about the evacuation from Kabul, maybe people would have been on that plane rather than cats and dogs.

Ian Dunt: Well, yes. I would say the problem there is we’ve had almost no transparency of what went down.

Rob Wiblin: There’s no accountability after the fact even.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. And you’re relying on two whistleblowers. There’s just two individuals, and if they were not incredibly decent, conscientious people who sacrificed their entire career for our public understanding of what happened, we still wouldn’t know what had gone down there.

So we should not take from this that we’re going to look at every situation and go, “Less transparency is what we need.” It just means that you want to have a case-by-case appraisal as to where your values may actually be in conflict with the evidence, or where they may be quite conducive towards an improvement in the situation.

Rob Wiblin: What are some other things that maybe should be done more in private and less in public? You say the parliamentary select committees do a great job and they write these reports that think about ideas for ways that we could improve really complex, difficult policy areas.

I think you want there to be something similar to that, basically, for the writing of legislation — for the drafting and the revision of bills. And basically, currently there is nothing like that. I suppose the House of Lords partially provides that function, but a lot more could be done to improve that. Maybe those should also be in private basically, so that it’s possible for people to form more of a consensus, to speak their frank views without worrying about it being quoted on social media. What do you think?

Ian Dunt: You know, that would be fine. I mean, to be honest, it kind of already happens in private, just because no one’s interested.

Rob Wiblin: [laughs] Right.

Ian Dunt: So like the committee stage of a bill, literally no one watches it. It’s pretty much already private.

The people you really want to keep it private from are the party whips. The party whips are the people that select the MPs to sit on the committee stage of a bill. This is the clause-by-clause forensic section of a bill scrutiny, where you look at every single sentence in it.

In pretty much every country, that’s done away from plenary — you know, in a small room with select MPs, select politicians. And in the UK, the whips pick those people, which is the worst way to do it. What you want is obviously MPs selecting themselves. They can vote for people they think should sit on that committee, and you would have that committee sit permanently for five years, or in between elections, so they develop a sense of expertise as to what they’re talking about. Basically you have a select committee, but for looking at legislation rather than a general policy area.

That would be the way that you would do it. And I think honestly, you don’t need to worry too much about public scrutiny because people just don’t give a s*** anyway. What you need to worry about is making sure that the whips — who have pretty much the opposite view of what they require relative to what the national interest is — should be extracted from that situation wholesale.

Rob Wiblin: To what extent is it key to the success of the House of Lords that these crossbench members are… I don’t know how many exactly there are, I think 150 or 200 or so, who were selected basically because they’ve accomplished something extraordinary in their life — whether it be in science or in business or in community service or research or whatever. They’re appointed basically because they’re regarded as some of the best and brightest people in the country, after a lifetime of contribution.

Is that the reason why the House of Lords is able to provide useful, thoughtful scrutiny on these topics where other groups are not?

Ian Dunt: Oh yeah, 100%. It’s exactly because of these guys. And they didn’t even need to be the best of the best of the best. It’s just useful to have specialists. Bog standard specialists would be fine. It’s really great that some of them are proper class.

Sometimes when these guys go out to fight — especially on environmental bills and things — you look at the people that have been selected, like in science, it’s like, “OK, so it’s this guy that’s got like three pivotal scientific accomplishments to his name, and this person who’s probably one of the leading legal experts in the entire world, especially in this particular area” — and then they team up. Watching these guys team up, it’s like watching The Avengers for the first time, you know what I mean? It’s absolute peak-level elitism.

Also maybe that helps us think a bit more deeply about words that we consider, especially in our current context, fundamentally negative words — like “elitism.” We don’t want the kind of elitism that’s about how they went to the right school, therefore they get to legislate. No, that’s exactly the kind of thing that gets us bad outcomes.

But maybe it’s OK to remember that actually a form of elitism — intellectual elitism, on the basis of someone’s accomplishments and the extent of their experience — is something that we can harness for the good of all. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a binary opposition against egalitarianism. Maybe we can improve the status of most people by bringing to bear some of the weaponry that actual elite capacity — especially in specialist areas — brings to us. And the crossbench peers are a very good example of that.

The House of Commons may as well be in a coma [01:22:34]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s push on to another huge theme of the book, which is that the primary democratic legislative chamber in the UK, the House of Commons, in your view is kind of asleep. It’s dormant, and it’s kind of failing to perform the constitutional function that you need from a legislature.

And the reason for that is that there’s a linkage between the legislature and the executive in the UK that doesn’t exist in all kinds of governments, but which gives the executive enormous control over how the House of Commons operates. What is unusual and distinctive and important about the relationship between the executive and the House of Commons in the UK?

Ian Dunt: That we have no separation of power — which is a problem, really. You look at writings of John Locke — it’s not just like Montesquieu in terms of liberal philosophy — John Locke was coming up with the idea of separation of power really early on in the story of liberal democracy. It’s basically this idea that if we’re critical of the state, if we’re critical of power, we have to start separating it out.

That’s why we have a legislature, an executive, a judiciary. But we want to start thinking maybe about how we split up the legislature. That’s the idea of having two chambers rather than one. You’re constantly trying to balance power out against itself. The classic example of that is obviously the US Constitution, which is this extremely elaborate exercise in precisely that.

And yet, although Britain talks about those values, it never really enacted them, because you have a government that sits in the Commons. Under the first-past-the-post system, it will almost always have a majority. Sometimes it fails: 2010 was an example of that, 2017, and in the ’70s you had the same under inflation. But generally speaking, that’s what it’s going to do.

So in a self-respecting legislative chamber, the elected members — after all, that’s where all of this power is coming from: the legitimacy is coming from the election — are going to sit there, and they’re going to decide their own timetable; they’re going to decide what they want to discuss and for how long.

And that is not what happens in the Commons. In the Commons, you get the leader of the Commons, who is a member of the government — they are literally the leader of the Commons — will come to the chamber on a Thursday morning at 10:30am and tell MPs how long they’re going to have and what they’re going to look at.

That kind of dominion by the executive goes against even the most basic concept of how liberal democracy is supposed to operate, and how we’ve understood — since the very dawn of liberalism, from hundreds of years back — that it should operate.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I want to take a slight detour, that there is some advantage to having a linkage between the legislature and the executive, and the legislature being able to remove the PM if they don’t like it, so that to some extent, the prime minister and the legislature have to be in sync.

In systems of government where you have a full separation between the executive and the legislature — like you basically have in the United States, where the president isn’t chosen by the House of Representatives and they can just end up at loggerheads with one another, not passing anything — firstly, you can end up just not being able to pursue an agenda basically, because the legislature and the executive simply don’t agree on anything.

I think also in the Americas, you find that where you have presidential systems like that, it is very conducive to coups — because you end up with two different democratically elected bodies that disagree with one another, that both feel like they’re the rightful ruler of the country. And then the military will end up choosing one, or the military will take over because the government is viewed as dysfunctional.

At least among my friends, there is a certain fondness for the parliamentary system that we have, even though it has this weakness that perhaps you don’t have enough separation of powers here. At least you do usually end up with a government that can do something. What do you think?

Ian Dunt: I don’t know about the military. I’m not so keen on the military argument. The first point is really sound. If you take the Liz Truss problem, they dealt with the Liz Truss problem very quickly: you get rid of her, right?

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. She lasted a month or two I think, before being removed by her own party?

Ian Dunt: Just over 40 days or something. So you can get rid pretty quickly. And of course, just before that, they’d gotten rid of Boris Johnson in pretty much the same way.

Now, you look at the early stages of things around Trump, you could easily have Trump creating a Liz Truss kind of situation with his economy, where you can’t really get rid very easily. It’s a very difficult procedure to try and get rid of someone in that circumstance.

However, I don’t fret too much about these arrangements, because I think that they ultimately depend on the same principle: popular support. When MPs got rid of Boris Johnson, they didn’t do it because they’re great representations of moral decency; they did it because they just thought, “He’s lost his popular support over Partygate. So we’re going to move on it.”

And what you have not found in the American system is Donald Trump, for instance, losing his popular support. Most of this stuff, even though we have these separate constitutional arrangements, it comes down to the real basics of it: Have they kept their base? Have they kept their support? If they keep their support, no one moves against them.

If you look at impeachment in the US, that situation was dependent on the fact that Donald Trump kept his support. If that was not the case, you would have seen a greater turn in the legislature against the president.

In the same way, in the UK, because Liz Truss lost that support, because Boris Johnson lost that support, Tory MPs move in and they’re like, “F***, we gotta get rid of this. We need someone who can win the next election.”

So ultimately, even though the constitutional systems are different, I tend to find that most of the time it’s just the actual popular support that dictates what happens. And the rest of it, you find your way around whatever constitutional mechanism is available to you there.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. OK, let’s come back to how does the executive in the UK dominate the House of Commons? I guess there’s lots of different things. You mentioned that, to begin with, they just set the agenda. To what extent can the prime minister decide what it is that the House of Commons is allowed to discuss and not allowed to discuss?

Ian Dunt: They have almost complete control. There are some tiny bits that are preserved by the Parliament. One of them is urgent questions, for instance, and urgent debates by the speaker. The speaker is the person that’s in charge of procedure in the House of Commons.

Let’s say Donald Trump has threatened Greenland, and we think there should be a debate in Parliament about it, and the Government refuses to send the minister to do it. Then the speaker can say, “Fine, I’m going to grant an urgent question. And the minister comes to the chamber and they have to answer questions about it.” I mean, technically, nothing could stop him if he decided he didn’t want to do Prime Minister’s Questions — but by convention, he really has to.

So he will come to the chamber once a week for half an hour and he will sit in the f***ing bear pit. And that’s what that place is. It is a bear pit. If you’ve ever been in the room — not in the public bit, where there’s this sheet of security glass that hides the noise — if you’ve been there, when you can feel the noise, when you can see this bank of all these seats in front of you who are all screaming absolute blue murder at you, it is a hard place to hold your own. It’s a real test for your ability to withstand that kind of pressure. There they’re going to have to answer questions.

So most of the time that you see the prime minister, they seem quite hedged in. But there is an arrangement called the usual channels, where they negotiate with the other parties and they’re going to decide which bits of legislation Parliament is going to talk about, they’re going to decide how long ultimately it has to talk about that scenario. And at the end of that process, they are going to win. And that’s the only bit that really matters: that they have the majority, this huge majority, and with that majority, they are going to overrule any criticism or caveat or wavering support.

Now, most of the time it’s not because they have a majority in the country. You know, when I say this stuff, it almost seems like, fair enough, they won the election. Most of the time these guys have like 35% support in the country.

The current Labour government has a majority that is frankly eye watering. You know, they have more people on the payroll vote who are in the ministerial class than are in the entirety of the Conservative Party. They can do whatever they want. They have public support in the country that’s way below 50%. Even when parties do better than Keir Starmer did at the election, they’re still way below 50%, and yet they have absolute executive control.

So basically the question is: What can’t they do? It’s quite hard to find anywhere in the Western world where you see a government that has more power than they have in the UK.

Rob Wiblin: I think that’s something that might surprise people. Watching the House of Commons, it might seem like a very difficult environment for the government, because I guess you’re typically watching it during Prime Minister’s Questions, and they’re being battered by very challenging questions that the opposition has come up with.

Do you want to just reiterate why it is that, despite looking very challenging and feeling like a bear pit, in fact it’s not very threatening to the Government at all, most of the time?

Ian Dunt: Right. Well, look at it this way: almost any other country in the world has some kind of split in power that we do not possess. First of all, they have it at a local level: you take somewhere like Germany or like the US, these have really strong local democracies.

Rob Wiblin: State governments.

Ian Dunt: State government, exactly. A federal structure. Or in other countries you just have really strong local democracy. You have certain areas where the central government doesn’t get to legislate, like France. We do not have that. We are deeply, deeply centralised.

Then you look at the electoral system. Most other countries, when they have proportional representation, they force parties to work together. You can’t just have one bloke who leads one party who can do whatever he likes without consulting any of the others. We have first-past-the-post, so actually we do have that.

Then you look at the constitutional arrangements you have at the centre. Look at the US: that careful way that you start cutting off the executive from the legislature, start creating the judiciary. We don’t have that; we put the executive inside of the legislature. So pretty much any way there is to constitutionally limit power, either spatially or in the centre, we do not have that. It is just full, 100% protean right there: you get to do whatever the hell you damn well please. That’s pretty much how they behave.

Then I’d say, by the way, that that translates into a psychological attitude. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Margaret Thatcher comes up through that system. Margaret Thatcher, this kind of encapsulation, paradoxically, of machismo — you know, of executive as strength, the thwack of strong government — that is then emulated by countless conservatives, usually less effectively afterwards than she ever did.

So not only is it a problem in the way that it operates, but I think it creates a series of psychological ideals which are not particularly helpful towards good government, that Britain has fallen for in a pretty big way.

Why it’s in the PM’s interest to ban electronic voting [01:33:13]

Rob Wiblin: Some other more minor ways that the executive controls the House of Commons here is that, for example, almost all modern legislatures vote electronically. It would be a very natural way to vote yay or nay on a piece of legislation or an amendment. But the UK does not. It has a different process. Can you explain the process, and how that helps control the chamber?

Ian Dunt: It’s completely insane. I’m almost embarrassed to say it. I mean, they walk through a lobby. It takes about 20 minutes, but for each vote, everyone has to get up — 650 people in that chamber — and they walk out and they go either left or right on the aye or the nay.

And by the way, that scene will often be a scene of just the most frightful misbehaviour. There’s plenty of cases where the whips, the disciplinary system, are literally just picking up wavering MPs from their own party who are not going to go through the right lobby, and just pushing them over the line — because once they’re over the line, they’re not allowed to come out.

Rob Wiblin: Feels very 18th century to me.

Ian Dunt: Yes. I mean, you might say that’s an irrational way to organise a political society. I don’t know.

So it takes a very long time. During COVID we got rid of it. We had electronic voting just like any other advanced country. And they got rid of it as soon as fing possible. Why? Because it hands power to the MPs. Once you have electronic voting, you can vote on all sorts of s.

You know, the report stage of a bill is towards the end of a bill’s progress, where you get line-by-line scrutiny. But for the whole Commons chamber — not what we were talking about earlier, where it’s just committee stage — the whole of the Commons chamber. So if you can just have electronic voting, and it takes 20 seconds for each thing, you can have MPs that will sit there and go, “You know what? This MP actually does know about social security. They’ve got amendment 1, 2, 3, 4, and it’s all quite subtle. And who knows, maybe they can get support somewhere else.” That’s how it would work.

We don’t want that. We want to have very few amendments, very few votes. That’s what the Government likes. It doesn’t like a lot of debate. So instead we keep this system. There’s about five amendments. They almost all go to the leader of the opposition, who will basically come up with the same thing over and over. They can’t change anything. So it’s like, “The Government are bastards. Everything they do is hellish, satanic, terror. Vote for us and get rid of them.” And off we go. Nothing useful or practical or pragmatic or consensual at all. And off they go.

So there’s a reason that we don’t have the electronic voting: electronic voting empowers MPs, and it depowers not just the government, but the leader of the opposition as well. The leadership of the opposition party likes having things the way they are. They don’t want to have their individual MPs putting forward all of these amendments. They want this big elemental clash of good and evil, the light side and the dark, battering away at each other — rather than the more conducive conversation as to the practical way that you might arrange these things.

MPs are deliberately kept ignorant of parliamentary procedure [01:35:53]

Rob Wiblin: Another remarkable thing about the setup of the House of Commons is that you say that most members of parliament, most MPs, don’t understand the rules of parliamentary procedure, even if they remain in the chamber for decades. How can that be the case? And why does it remain the case?

Ian Dunt: Because it’s just such a mad, tangled web of nonsense. I mean, it’s just mad. The parliamentary procedure rules come from various different sources. Some of them are acts of Parliament themselves. It’s quite rare, but there’s some areas where we have actual legislation that says how it’s supposed to work in the Commons chamber.

We have other things that are called standing orders. These were government proposals for how it would control the Commons that have been passed over the last 200 years, that have been accepted by the Commons — primarily in the Victorian period, when the government gradually took control of the House of Commons. And they’re written down in a book. There’s about 200 pages of them.

Then we have rulings from the chair, and these can be soft or hard, and it’s basically just things the speaker said in the hundreds of years of British history that we sometimes pay attention to and we sometimes don’t. They’re all written down in something called Hansard, which is a huge book, absolutely massive book just full of arcane, impenetrable terminology. Just a web of rules, which even then might not be a rule, because it might just be something that we don’t care about, or maybe it is a rule that we stick to.

You know, one of those rules is that we have three readings of a bill. If someone tried to change that, it would be considered constitutional murder. That’s just one of the ones we follow; other ones say other stuff that we couldn’t care less about.

Then we also just have elements that people just think, “Well, we just do it this way, so we’re going to keep on doing it that way.” And no one’s ever bothered to write it down. It’s essentially just a sort of oral tradition.

And on that basis, if an MP sits there, they don’t know what the f*** they can actually do in that chamber. They could sit there with Hansard. It’ll be like trying to answer all questions about Christianity to a two-minute timetable with a copy of the Bible in front of you. You know, where are you going to find the bit that tells you whether you’re allowed to eat on the Sabbath or something like that? It’s just madness.

So really, no one can go in there and understand it. What they invariably do is they have to go to the whip, and the whip goes, “Yeah, sure. Walk in that lobby, do it your f***ing self.” That’s it. The impenetrability of the procedure and the information control are part of a system the whips use to make sure that the individual MPs do what the parties want them to do — that they’re obedient. That is what’s in their interests, and therefore that is how it remains.

Rob Wiblin: Another thing along these lines is that when you’re voting on amendments to a piece of existing legislation, you might think that you would be able to see what the legislation that would result is, but you cannot. Can you explain how things work here?

Ian Dunt: Yeah, everyone else has a solution to this. It’s just called Keeling schedules. You have a bill, the bill says, “This is the Policing Act 2025. We are going to amend the Public Order Act 1983. And where it said this, on the definition of ‘severe disruption,’ we are now going to introduce this new definition.” A Keeling schedule would just be like you would print everything out, you join those two bits of legislation so that you could just read that paragraph. So instead of saying, “Where it says ‘or’ delete this and add this” — so you don’t have to sit there with all these bits of paper — it says, “Here it is; here’s the paragraph.”

Rob Wiblin: “Here’s what it will be after we pass this.”

Ian Dunt: Exactly. And this is what parliaments do. This is what almost everyone does. It’s not what we do in Britain. In Britain we say basically, no, you just have to try and sit there…

You know, part of the thing is, I’m not going to pretend that we’re ever going to have the majority of people watching debates in Parliament and paying attention — but you do want a parliamentary debate to be something that could be followed by someone of even just high intelligence and a lot of patience. Even that. But even someone who was extraordinarily intelligent and had all the time in the world and no job to go to would find it almost impossible to follow what was going on.

For almost any bill, on average, five or six pieces of legislation is usually being amended at a given time. You’d need to have all of them open in front of you. You’d need to have the order paper in front of you to make sure that you understand which bit of debate is taking place right now. And you would need to have a full list of all the constituencies and the MP — all 650 of them. Because when people talk to each other in the chamber, they’re not allowed to use the name of the individual; they have to use just the name of the constituency. So to even know who is talking to who —

Rob Wiblin: You’d have to be an expert in all of the members of parliament and their constituencies.

Ian Dunt: Yes! Or have the list and be able to… Exactly. So you’d have like seven, eight documents in front of you just to be able to try and follow along to something. That just seems to me like an unrealistic prospect. And if you’re not facilitating someone of decent intelligence and patience to be able to participate and listen to what is going on, you’re not really functioning as a proper democracy.

“Whole areas of law have fallen almost completely into the vortex” [01:40:37]

Rob Wiblin: Something more remarkable and extreme in itself is that over the years, Parliament has passed legislation that basically gives permission to the executive to write its own legislation independently —

Ian Dunt: Oh, god.

Rob Wiblin: — and sometimes run this past the legislature, and sometimes to barely even do that. I think this is called “delegated legislation.”

Can you explain how that works, and how it allows the executive to kind of bypass consulting with Parliament?

Ian Dunt: Yeah. This is a profoundly dangerous development that’s taken place — to the point that you have people that write laws, called Parliamentary Counsel, just saying, like, “We’re kind of getting to the point where we’re acting like writing law is an unnecessary inconvenience, and we should just allow ministerial fiat to decide how we’re going to do this stuff.”

Delegated legislation literally means what it says on the tin. So you write a law that says, in certain circumstances, we’re going to delegate the power to create legislation from the parliament to the minister. Essentially, they become their own little mini tinpot dictatorship, and they just get to do what they like.

We had it for a bill in 2018 on healthcare. It was during Brexit. It was intended to take the current reciprocal arrangements we have on healthcare with European countries and allow us to paste them over to provide continuity in the case of a no-deal Brexit. That was what it was supposed to do.

But instead of bothering to write the legislation, they just said, “You know what? We’re just going to write a few lines that says the minister’s got the power to come up with any healthcare arrangement with any country, anywhere in the world at any time.” So it’s a bill. It’s technically legislation. What the legislation says is the minister now has complete power over international…

And he can just do it as he wants. No checking with Parliament, no scrutiny, no ability for the Commons to really stand up to him in any realistic way. He could just do whatever he damn well pleases.

When one of the Lords committees looked at that, they went, “You realise that this bill allows the secretary of state for health to fund the entirety of mental health spending in Arizona?” There is no limit to what they could decide to do on the base of it, because there is no restraint in what has been allowed in terms of executive power to the minister.

We have whole areas of law that have fallen almost completely into the vortex.

And now, to be honest, the secondary effect of this is it’s gotten even worse. We have something called tertiary legislation — which is where they just hand over executive powers to other bodies. The tax revenue body, HMRC, for instance, is one of them. And it just says they can just start producing legislation whenever they damn well please as well.

No democratic input into that whatsoever, no scrutiny whatsoever, just churning out new bits of law — which, by the way, you can go to prison under these laws, and yet no one’s bothered to put it in an actual Act of Parliament.

Our definition of when a protest is legal or not under “serious disruption” is currently held by statutory instruments. There is complete control over that. Our definition as to the standards that pornography must reach online to be legal is currently held under statutory instruments. There’s whole realms of areas.

In fact, at one point they had to stop themselves. At one point, an education bill was going to hand almost complete control over the school syllabus — from the working day to the subjects that pupils would be studying to examinations. It was just going to hand it to the minister. No more democratic input whatsoever. Just the minister just gets to decide it by statutory instrument.

This kind of lawmaking is almost completely out of control, and there is almost no appetite whatsoever to do anything about it.

What’s the seed of all this going wrong? [01:44:00]

Rob Wiblin: What is the broader lesson from all of this that people in other organisations or other countries can take away? Because you could say that this is just a peculiarity of government in Britain, that the executive has managed to control the legislature.

But I think maybe the broader lesson that I take away is: you want to have a division of powers. If one part of government or one part of an organisation ever gets sufficiently powerful that it can just dictate things to others, or it has the ability to change the rules of how the other bodies operate, then it will almost always choose to just make its life easier in the short run. It will choose to shut down people’s avenues to challenge it, to scrutinise it, to stand up to it.

Ian Dunt: Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: And that’s happened over a century or two, that the executive in the UK became so powerful and had so much discretion that it just began suffocating the life and the freedom of action out of the House of Commons — to the point where people and MPs kind of even forgot that there was a time when this wasn’t the case, when they might set their own agenda, and that backbenchers from multiple different parties might get together and challenge the executive, and that it was really their job to be scrutinising it.

So the thing you need to guard against is that any one body in this broader system becomes so powerful that it can basically set itself up as dominant over all of the others.

I guess that’s one lesson that you might agree with. Are there any others?

Ian Dunt: I think you’re 100% spot on. But it’s not just the institution; it’s also the people. That thing I just said about the healthcare bill: what happened there? You had a minister and someone writing the bill, going, “You know what would make our lives easier? If we just word this really open.”

You know, you’ve given them the power; they can do it constitutionally. So what do they always do? They always do the same thing. It’s not even really that pernicious or malevolent. They just think, “How do I make my life easier? How do I reduce limitations on my future actions? How do I discourage potential legal challenges?”

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, it’s like, “I’m not sure exactly what I might want to do a year or two or three from now, and I don’t really want to have to come back and consult. So I’ll just say I can fund anything, anywhere, to do anything for no reason.”

Ian Dunt: Yeah, exactly. I can enter into contractual obligations with anyone. It doesn’t specify who. You just make the language as open as possible. That’s what you do.

And what lesson can we conclude from that? Old liberal lessons. You know, it’s not like this is like some new problem that we’ve just found. Our entire societies are based on coming up against executive power. They’re based on liberal philosophy. Whether it’s from the English Civil War or the American War of Independence or the French Revolution: over and over, the lesson was the same: this is how power acts when it is not controlled, when it is not restrained.

Democracy was part of that, to restrain power by popular will. But the separation of power was another way of doing it, saying even where there’s popular will: A, you don’t get to overrule the rights of minorities, and B, we’re going to make sure that we start separating this out so that no one location can absorb too much power and become tyrannical.

What are we seeing now? Look at British constitutional arrangements. The thing to take from it, if you’re from another country — lucky you — is this is what happens when you allow power to centralise, when you give up on these liberal values. Like when we thought about ideas are improved by scrutiny: the whole principle of that is that people will be better governed, they’ll have better ideas, better philosophy, better ways of living their life, better law, better judges by virtue of us challenging ideas.

And to challenge ideas, we need a free society. The whole British way of organising yourself is about a closed society. We sell ourselves as being open: you know, we created it, it’s the mother of parliament. Well, then why have we arranged all of our legislative arrangements so they look much more like China than they do like France? This is not the way to arrange your stuff.

And we suffer the ill consequences of this all the time. When people talk about those liberal values, they are not just dreamy airhead philosophy. They are practical, granular issues that will churn up your f***ing life unless you make sure that your government, that your political system is actually paying proper respect towards them.

Rob Wiblin: I think another instance of this general phenomenon that you describe in the book is how there’s many different government departments. Treasury, the group that controls the money, is maybe the most powerful among them — because it’s the one that basically has an oversight role over almost all of the other departments when they suggest spending money in some way or another. So they can come in and say, “You haven’t justified that the benefits of this spending, that this programme is going to be enough. We think the costs will be greater. So no.”

So they have this oversight role. I think your view is that maybe many of the civil servants, many of the people in the treasury are very bright. They do quite a good job of their oversight role, and many of them are probably extremely well meaning. Probably they’re generally very well meaning.

But the problem for the treasury is that it has no treasury of its own: they provide this open oversight, scrutiny role, this review role over all of the other government departments — but there is nobody who provides that role over treasury. So they’re able to make mistakes of all different kinds around the design of the tax system, around how they do cost-benefit analysis, and there’s no one else who holds them to account in the same way. And the treasury would actually benefit from having an external group that was tough on them, because they would produce better work, basically.

And this is the same issue — where the executive, in fact, in the long run, would do better if they cultivated a legislature that was able to help them.

Ian Dunt: Exactly that. You would just come up with more effective law. Like, I don’t know if you’ve ever read Karl Popper. Karl Popper is the person to read on all of this stuff. He understood that the fundamental idea of a free society, the beauty of it is that it’s more efficient.

This is the reason that authoritarian societies always fail in the end, no matter how much it might seem at the moment like they’re successful: it’s because you want people out there to tell you what’s going wrong with the system. That could be the way that you’ve organised your electricity system, it could be a road system, it could be a judicial system. But you want someone to go, “S***, man — this bit’s not working.”

In authoritarian societies, they kill that person, therefore they never find out why this isn’t working. When the USSR fell, that was part of the problem that was taking place. You’ve got no information, no feedback about the flaws in your design. And this is exactly the same thing that you see there.

So you look at the treasury. The treasury is fantastic at taking someone else’s ideas and s***ting all over it — as they should do. You need to have someone in all governments going, “Show me the money, thank you very much.” And then what happens when it’s open? We’ve been freezing fuel duty in this country for years. Year after year they come up with the same decision: “We’re going to freeze fuel duty. We’re not going to do it because it’s unpopular with motorists.”

Rob Wiblin: This is not increasing the tax on fuel, on oil.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. And it’s supposed to be going up every year, and in fact they always freeze it.

Let’s say someone comes up with an idea to build a bridge. They’re going to go to the treasury: “It’s going to cost this much money, but we’re going to get this much increased productivity, we’re going to get this much increased connectivity — so there’ll be more jobs, there’ll be more taxes, and we’ll make more money.” And the treasury will go, “I think that’s all bollocks because I don’t really believe in your long-term sums.”

Well, deciding to freeze fuel duty is exactly the same: that is a cost that you are putting forward there, and there is absolutely no one coming up with an evaluation of what happens on the basis of that cost.

The same is true when they give bonds to entrepreneurs, when they give film tax relief. Some of this stuff works; some of it absolutely doesn’t — and when it doesn’t, it goes on for a very long time.

The tax system in this country is, I’ll put it simplest: no one would rationally design a marginal tax structure that looks this way. It doesn’t work upwards like stairs. It’s like a wave, it just goes up and down, typically around the £50,000 and the £100,000 mark. £50,000, if you’re married and with kids, your marginal tax rate basically spikes into infinity.

If you are unlucky enough to earn between £100,000 and £125,000 — I know I’m really dealing with first world problems here, but nevertheless, you still want a tax system that is rational and progressive — in fact you are going to be taxed into absolute oblivion at that point. It’s only when you get above £125,000 really that actually things start to repair for you.

No one organises a tax system that way. And the only reason you can is because there’s no scrutiny on the treasury. And by the way, that’s not just about not having the treasury; it’s that through some constitutional madness we’ve decided that it’s not morally acceptable for the House of Lords to look at what the treasury does. And what happens when you remove the House of Lords from scrutiny? Legislation is an absolute godforsaken s*** show. And that is what has happened to our own financial legislation.

Rob Wiblin: Just to clarify what you were saying there: you pay a much higher marginal tax rate if you’re earning £100,001 than you do if you’re earning £500,001. So it’s this very odd system where you basically have to make sure that you’re not falling into this death zone of 100,000 to 125,000 pounds of earnings. You have to make sure that you’re either above or below.

Ian Dunt: But by the way, I mean, we will never have a popular campaign to protect the people that earn £101,000. However, what it creates is a tax system where all of the incentives are just deranged — because people are obviously super aware of this stuff, so they make sure they’re not paid beyond the certain points. So, oh, can we do it through dividends, or can we do it through some other kind of structured arrangement? People are bouncing around it.

What that kind of system encourages, because it’s so complex and so irrational, is tax dodging — which pretty much everyone is involved in in this country. They have extremely convoluted ways of, “OK, we’ll put it over here and we’ll move the ISA.” And we do this basically to avoid a system that everyone knows makes no sense. And the reason it makes no sense is because there is no effective scrutiny of the legislative process that created it.

Why won’t the Commons challenge the executive when it can? [01:53:10]

Rob Wiblin: So a bit of a mystery here is: Why has the House of Commons accepted this incredibly subordinate role? You might expect that they would push back quite a lot, that backbenchers from both parties, or almost everyone who’s not in the executive has lost a whole lot of power. They’re not able to hold even people in their own party to account for whether they’re accomplishing their goals. But there isn’t much pushback.

I guess you point out that there has been a bit of a switch in the last 15 years, that there have been various changes that have given backbenchers more power. They almost never exercise that actual power. Can you explain why it is that they’ve gone willingly into their own subjugation?

Ian Dunt: Because they have no sense of institutional identity with Parliament. Their sense of institutional identity is with the party. Look at how they were picked: as we were saying right at the beginning, they’re picked by partisans to be partisans. These are very partisan people. So they sit there, they’re a Labour MP, Conservative MP and they sit in Parliament.

And you say, “What is the group that you are a member of?” Sure, they’ll say parliamentarian, but really they’re party people. We have anonymous quotes, loads of them, from people that go, “No matter what my conscience tells me, I can’t vote for the other side because I can’t vote against party people. I can’t vote with the enemy.” These are highly, highly partisan people.

So then when you say to them, “Why don’t you represent the Commons? Your constitutional role is you’re supposed to push for having more time to look at things, to independent mindedness” — but that’s just not how they see themselves or their role. They see themselves as the sort of stormtroopers of their political party, the frontline guys. And that’s what they do, that’s how they behave.

Let me give you an example. Boris Johnson got rid of something called the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. What he gave himself was the power to call an election at any time. Fine. I mean, we’ve had something similar in the UK for a long time. Most constitutional advisors said there’s a bit of a danger here, because he can just say, “I want an election.” And he can use it to threaten his own MPs: if he becomes unpopular with his own side, he can just say, “You keep on messing around with me and I’ll just call an election, and that will shut you up.”

So constitutional experts said to Tory MPs, “All you’ve got to do is do one thing: you’ve got to say, yes, you can call the election, but there should be a parliamentary vote to authorise that the election will take place.” It’s a really minor thing to ask. The House of Commons — literally the place where the elected representatives of the British public are — should have the power to say, “Yes, we believe there should be an election right now.”

They rejected it out of hand. No one voted. No one would support that idea on the Conservative benches. Not one of them would get behind it, even though it was in their own interests. Then when Boris Johnson did eventually fall, one of the very last things he did before he was taken out by his own backbenchers was to try to threaten them in exactly the way that was warned — with an election — unless they stopped trying to come for him.

Every time that we go to MPs like, “Stand up for yourself! For god’s sake, get off your knees. This is supposed to be a functioning legislature representing the democratic will of the British people,” they utterly fail to do it, because their leadership tells them, “That is not your role; get back into your subordinate position” — and like good little meek politicians, that is precisely what they do.

Rob Wiblin: So it could be that they’re loyal party people and so then they don’t view it as their role to be standing up to the executive, as long as it comes from their own party.

I think another possible explanation is: you mentioned these various reforms that I think occurred early in the Cameron government, around 2011, where MPs as a whole were given a larger number of days over which they could choose to hold votes that they wanted to and discuss the topics that they wanted to. But you say this control has almost never been used, even though I guess we’ve had some very contentious issues, it’d be fair to say, in the 14 years since.

So it could be that maybe just the backbenchers in the government — that is, people who are not members of the formal executive; they’re not ministers and so on — just don’t want to challenge their own party. But it could also be maybe that they’re cowed by their own party, that the whips basically threaten them all the time with, “If you stand up to us in any way, if you ask difficult questions, then we won’t preselect you to run in your seat again. You’ll have to run as an independent. You won’t get elected, and your career will be over.”

Can you tell the difference between these two theories? Could it just be that they could do this, but — unless there’s a critical mass that are all willing to do it at once, and they coordinate somehow — it’s just too threatening for any individual to use the discretion they’ve been given to perform their constitutional role of challenging the executive?

Ian Dunt: You’re right. But the thing is that we do have some ways of testing, right? Because they do rebel over some other issues sometimes. It’s not a lot, I’m not going to pretend, but they do rebel.

During that Johnson period I was talking about with the electoral power, Tory MPs were rebelling quite often over COVID regulations. Pretty much the dumbest thing they could possibly rebel over, just really rudimentary science of how to stop a virus spreading. But that’s what they rebelled over.

So we do have some kind of data for that. We see they’re willing to rebel on this stuff — bizarre conspiracy theories spreading on Facebook — but they’re not so keen on rebelling over standing up for the constitutional principles that they’re there for.

You know, I accept it is hard. They are browbeaten, of course, 100%, by the whips. But nevertheless we can see indications where they have bravery, and we can see the areas where they choose not to.

Better ways to choose MPs [01:58:33]

Rob Wiblin: You talked about earlier that one of the fundamental problems here is that MPs are preselected to run primarily because they are loyal party people.

What would be a better preselection process? There’s different options that people use around the world. It seems like in the UK we have one where it’s quite a small number of extreme, very heavily involved party people who make the decision about who will run in their seat.

You could have a broader vote where a much larger number of people who are sympathetic to the party can vote in a preselection battle. That’s something more like in the US. I think in Australia and some other countries, the central party allocates people to seats and will say, “We want to run this person because we think they’re particularly compelling, or particularly talented, or they agree with the central party’s views.”

What do you think is the best system overall, or should we have a mixture perhaps?

Ian Dunt: Ideally as open as possible.

Rob Wiblin: So would you say everyone in the seat can vote for who will run for the Conservatives or Labour?

Ian Dunt: We tried that once. The Conservatives tried it actually.

Rob Wiblin: You didn’t even have to say that you supported them? Anyone could?

Ian Dunt: Exactly, yeah. Which sort of makes sense if you think about it, because as the party —

Rob Wiblin: You want a popular person.

Ian Dunt: Right. It’s like a really good test of your product: “If loads of people like this person, then maybe that would work for us.” They didn’t get a huge turnout, got about 25%. But the people that came out of it, one of them was Sarah Williston.

Rob Wiblin: I actually don’t know Sarah Williston.

Ian Dunt: Oh my god. When she was there, I mean, I’m really quite left wing and very liberal. I am not a Conservative. She was my favourite politician in Parliament, bar none.

She came from a medical background. She’d been a doctor. During that campaign, the exact opposite happened to what usually happens. Usually in those selection processes of just party members, they keep on saying what a proud party member they are, how much they hate the other side and how rubbish the Lib Dems are and how rubbish Labour is.

She just came in, “I just really want to work cross-party. I want to bring my previous expertise and specialist knowledge to bear. I’m pragmatic.”

Rob Wiblin: You’re not going to make it in this town.

Ian Dunt: Yeah, exactly! It was just f***ing crazy. It was a completely alien invention. She won it. Not huge turnout, 25% turnout, but she won it. I mean, 25% turnout is much better than having 12 people sat in a room, which is what most selection processes look like.

And she went on to just be tremendously impressive, independent minded, details led, pragmatic — just a really, really impressive politician. It’s a pretty good system to take on. We could at least experiment with it first, before we go for other options.

Rob Wiblin: You can see why that wouldn’t be so appealing to the people who run the party and choose the system though, right?

Ian Dunt: They cancelled it immediately.

Rob Wiblin: I see. And I think you could have an issue where if just anyone can come along and vote for the candidate for a given party, that you could have entryism, I think is the term — where people who actually disagree with the party will come in basically and all decide to vote and elect someone who doesn’t even share the broad ideals of the party.

I feel like you need something that’s a bit more intermediate here, where you get a broader class of people, but nonetheless it’s not open to absolutely everyone to vote, because I think that will just never be sustainable.

Ian Dunt: But remember that you have control over who the candidates are.

Rob Wiblin: So you could reject someone after the fact? Oh, the candidates in the election.

Ian Dunt: No, sorry. The part has the longlist and the shortlist. We’re only talking about the last stage of the selection process — so you would always have a three-stage process. If the party authorises candidates, usually it’s a kind of internal market. You’re authorised as a candidate, see if you can find a local area where they’ll take you. That’s how it is for the Conservatives and The Lib Dems, anyway.

Then you have a secondary process where the local party — that sort of authority structure, a committee of the local party — looks at you and they whittle down the names again.

And then you get to the end, let’s say it’s like six names or so, and then you get party members voting on it.

So it’s that final bit. So at this point, both the central party and the local party have said, “You’re fine with us. You’re an OK person.” The final choice then goes out to the sort of general constituency.

You know, it’s perfectly possible that we get better people coming from the centre. I would prefer the centre to the local area. I don’t really trust local party activists to make those decisions.

But generally speaking, we’re not in the business of trying to get the party leaderships more power than they already have under our system. They already have way too much. Better to just spread it out. And if we find that there are problems, fine, we can try something else. But it would certainly be interesting to try and find a more impressive talent pool than the one we have now.

Because the thing that keeps on getting to people — when they see MPs come up on TV, when they see them become ministers — it’s just like this is a very low-quality person. Really, it’s quite striking that this person should be so successful in the political system when they look like they would really struggle to be a success in any other part of the economy.

Rob Wiblin: And that’s because they’ve basically been selected for being loyal party people in the local area, rather than…?

Ian Dunt: Imagine that you would like to give people senior management positions at a train company or at Apple. If you were just to base it on partisanship and stuffing leaflets on a Sunday, well, apparently all of our management is s*** now because we haven’t been selecting them for the things that we need them to do — for expertise and for experience.

Again, we are not reinventing the wheel. We’re just talking about using the same kind of methodology that we find in any other part of society and applying it towards politics.

Rob Wiblin: It can be a little bit delicate and a bit difficult to predict exactly how these things will play out.

So in the US, I think their standard system for choosing candidates for the House of Representatives is you have these semi-open primaries — where anyone who says that they are a supporter of a party, which I guess maybe like half of people on the electoral roll say that they are supportive of either the Democrats or the Republicans — they have an open primary where any of those people can vote to select the person. And I guess anyone can run in that election.

Then it’s again a first-past-the-post system where those folks vote, and I think something like 10% of the constituency might show up in a competitive race to decide who’s going to run for that party. But it tends to be a quite extreme 10%. So if you’re a really strong supporter of Democrats or Republicans, you care more about who’s running for that party, so that pulls the candidates apart. You get someone who’s reasonably extremist on the left and right in either case.

I think that has been one phenomenon that over time has caused people in the House of Representatives… There’s very few centrists. They’re almost all quite strongly Democratic or quite strongly Republican, which doesn’t match at all: most Americans actually are centrists, but most people in the House of Representatives are radical to some extent in support of their party.

I think in Australia it’s more often the central party that allocates people to districts, and I think that has something going for it because the central party really wants to win the election and I guess they’re also thinking ahead about who they are going to have in their ministry. So they often look at people who are going to attract a majority of support in the constituency, at least the competitive ones that they want to win, and also talented people who will be useful to them later on. So I don’t know.

Ian Dunt: We see this struggle in all sorts of areas. Let’s take the way that we have it with open and closed lists under proportional representation, where you get the same kind of dynamic. Open list is, in any of these things, you’re basically getting a long list of names under a particular party banner. And in a closed list, that list of names exists, but you don’t get to see it because it’s all kept away from you. You just tick Labour and they organise their list in whatever order they want — and that’s how the MPs are allocated at the end of it, depending on the vote.

There’s a negativity on both sides and a positivity on both sides. If you keep the list open, there’s a real encouragement for the individual politician to rebel against their party. They can actually have more independent mindedness because suddenly they’re like, “I want to create my own personal support. It matters that people can see my name on a list; they can make me at the top of the list rather than at the bottom.” So it encourages independent mindedness.

On the downside, it kind of encourages showboating, this kind of barrel-scraping attitude. When you close the list, you just handed the party complete control. It can basically just decide, “If you rebel against us, you go to the bottom of the list. No one’s ever going to see you again. We have complete authority here.”

So you get in each case these really difficult balancing acts that you have to do. Generally speaking, my tendency is always, if you’re confused about it on any given issue, to think, what can we do to devolve as much power as possible and to take as much power away from the centre as possible? Because that is your classic liberal way to proceed.

It doesn’t mean you always have it. Like when we’ve spoken about what happens with the House of Lords, that is not what we’re doing here. We found something that works. That goes against my instincts. So we defend it, we see why it’s worked, what we can replicate. But as a general principle, where I find myself uncertain on a way to proceed, let’s revert back to our values and see what’s at least the initial experiment that you would have.

Citizens’ juries [02:07:16]

Rob Wiblin: I guess there’s obvious reasons why not having democracy causes struggles, and that those countries fail.

But a key structural problem with democratic countries is that a random voter has very little chance of influencing the actual policy outcome. And because they know rationally that the probability that their vote or their views will affect the outcome, at the end of the day, they have very little reason to impose a lot of epistemic discipline on themselves, to form rational views, to do a whole lot of research. Also, they don’t have time to do that across a whole lot of policy issues.

So sometimes I can be sceptical about the idea of just ensuring that more people are able to vote in this. Because if you shrink the number of people, firstly, you can choose people who have more expertise and more interest in the topic, who are going to spend more time thinking about it.

But also in a smaller group of people, each one of them has more reason to focus in on it, and really think deeply, and ensure that they’re not just giving in to blind partisanship or just thinking about things in a really cursory way based on very broad ideological priors. Because they’re more likely to affect the outcome, they have more reason to care.

Ian Dunt: I find that compelling — but it’s not what we see. Well, certainly it’s not what we see in the British system according to MP selection. A citizens’ jury could correspond to the ideas that you’ve just expounded. It’s smaller.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, exactly. I think a citizens’ jury is probably much better than just having everyone vote if they feel like showing up. So a citizens’ jury is when you have a smaller number of people, like 100, and you get them to spend weeks maybe looking into an issue, hearing from lots of experts, and then they form a view. I think this is really underutilised, and I would love to see more of them.

Ian Dunt: It’s a very good system. I’ve never seen anyone suggest that we would have it for individual candidates, and that would be quite eccentric. But it’s quite interesting. Generally what we find with citizens’ juries is that they’re terrible for forensic proposals, but they’re very good for the initial stages of policymaking.

Rob Wiblin: So figuring out what people’s goals are?

Ian Dunt: Well, any sort of balance. Say on social care: at the moment we have this kind of lottery, and it really creates lots of insecurity in the end of life, and it’s difficult in an asset-led society to arrange Europe and things that way. But on the flip side, we’re all going to have to pay a lot more tax if we decide that we’re going to have a national service for this thing. So get a citizens’ jury look at it.

Have it on drug law, have it on the appropriate limits of protest, have it on actually what would you like your tax system to look like in general? Britain has this kind of infantile debate, where it wants to have Scandinavian levels of public services and American levels of taxation. You know what, you can’t have both of those things. You have to have one or the other. So citizens’ juries are great for that kind of large-scale tradeoff.

Rob Wiblin: Thinking about the high-level tradeoffs.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. When you start saying, “Here’s the legislation, line by line: what do you think clause B would say?,” citizens’ juries completely fall apart.

The way that Ireland used them over abortion was a really inspiring thing for a lot of constitutional reformers. I think this really works well, and there’s a real role for that.

There’s something about the machismo process in legislation: once the bill is published, the government’s sense of potency is attached to it, and it becomes quite reticent to give in. So before you write a bill, what we call the “green paper” stage, ahead of writing — essentially when you just start scribbling on a notepad — that’s a really good time to go to citizens’ juries, and we could even formalise that as part of the legislative process. Those are the areas I think that kind of innovation can be really effective.

Do more independent-minded legislatures actually lead to better outcomes? [02:10:42]

Rob Wiblin: So overall you want a more rambunctious, independent-minded legislature that can challenge the executive. I could see someone saying that we see more of that in some other countries, and it doesn’t necessarily always lead to much better outcomes. I mean, clearly the House of Representatives in the US is far more rambunctious and is much more likely to challenge their own party’s president than the House of Commons is here.

I guess there’s lots of reasons why that might not work out well. You’ve been pointing out that MPs are not qualified for their role of scrutinising legislation. So maybe we’ll just think — at least if the selection criteria for MPs remains the same, and possibly it would change if they got more opportunity to do this — but if they don’t know how to do the job, then giving them the opportunity to do the job might not be that helpful.

I think a challenge when MPs have more ability to buck their own party is that they can hold out and say, “I’m not going to support this legislation unless you spend a whole lot of money in my district, unless you do this favour for me.” I think in Australia that’s called pork barrelling; in the US it might be called logrolling.

What do you think of that downside, that you could see basically backbenchers just asking for special favours? I think you can also end up with a sort of gridlock risk — where basically everyone is holding out to get these special favours, to have the legislation be more extreme in whatever direction that they like — and that makes it very hard to get a majority in favour of any particular proposal.

Ian Dunt: Let’s be clear at the start: no one in this portrait of British politics comes out of it well. If we have ineffective MPs, we also have ineffective people writing their legislation at a government level. So whichever way you start finding that legislation being influenced, at the moment, we’re going to have people who don’t have a very deep understanding of the scenario that they’re looking at involved in the legislation. So yes, it’s a problem that MPs are the way they are.

We start to think about, if we give them more responsibility, what are the changes that we might see? Like with select committees, once select committees got created, really quite extraordinary things started to happen. We had a system where it was like, we’re not encouraging you to fight with the other side all the time; we’re encouraging you to use your independent mind to look at the evidence.

We found that MPs who were more likely to want to work collegiately were more likely to apply for a select committee. They’re attracted by that institution rather than the rah-rah, fighty-fighty stuff in the main chamber. And that once they entered the select committee system, they started to be more prepared to vote against the government overall. They started to be even more independent minded. So first of all, you’re attracted to the institution, then the institution encourages you in certain aspects.

Then if we just at least take the punt of equipping MPs with the information and the powers they need to give it, as I was referring to in that American example, civil service support, so that you can actually understand the legislation in front of you — rather than the current whip system, which is designed to obscure the legislation in front of you — if we start giving them the organisational support to rebel, then we start giving them the incentives to just think independently for themselves, then we are likely to see an improvement in behaviour.

I can’t demonstrate this, because obviously it’s a counterfactual. As soon as you propose something for the future, you’re always going to have that difficulty if it’s not happening now. Therefore, you can only say, from the basis of what we’ve seen in other areas, we think we would see that change here.

But generally speaking, in life in general — whether it’s about how you arrange an office or whether it’s about how you parent your children — I think most of the time you just think that the more respect and support you give someone, generally, the more impressive you will find the behaviour that you have incentivised in them. Whereas if you control and suffocate and incentivise them for ignorance rather than enlightenment, you will tend to get very different outcomes.

So, look, it is not cast in stone. That stuff can flip up on its head. And politics is the business of unintended consequences. But I think you’d have pretty good reasons to feel confident about pursuing that course of action.

Rob Wiblin: I think the independent legislature in the US, maybe it’s good overall, but it’s a mixed blessing. Are there any examples of rambunctious independent legislatures that you would point to as really where you’d like us to head?

Ian Dunt: To be honest, I don’t think the US is a tremendously… The US has lots of flaws. One of them is that it has a very specific political climate that is hugely binary. One of the extraordinary things is looking at the polling in the US: from a British or European perspective, it’s big news if it’s moved like 0.8 — whereas here we’re seeing huge swings, because you don’t have that same sense of partisan fury in the public itself.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, it’s actually incredible and almost destabilising how little commitment most people have to any particular political party.

Ian Dunt: And part of this distinction is the US’s history of religion and race in particular as these kind of guiding lines to how you interpret any number of issues — whether it’s guns or abortion or anything else — is just very different to how it is particularly in the UK, but even in broader European countries.

So what we find over and over again when we look at European states — I’m thinking of places like Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany — is again, in that legislative process, away from plenary, away from the main legislative hall: when you go into rooms together as MPs, those MPs have to work together. Obviously, they’re not called MPs in those countries.

So what you’ll find with the legislation over and over is collegiate approaches and pragmatic approaches: “We appreciate you want to do X. We would prefer it if you approached it in Y or B, or A rather than C — because we’ve got these issues with C, and you could alleviate our concerns.” And because you don’t have that huge majority in those legislatures, the government kind of has to listen, it has to start making those compromises.

These countries, you look at them right now, they’re s***shows at the moment. I’m not going to claim that any of these places are utopias. Germany right now is facing an election that is almost existential in what is taking place. It turns out that the Netherlands is just as vulnerable to populist takeover as anywhere else, and Denmark has similar problems.

So like the rest of the Western world, they are facing these issues. But the quality of the legislation — and to be honest, the quality in many cases materially, and in terms of public services, of people’s lives — is vastly better than it is either in the UK or the US.

“There’s no time for this bourgeois constitutional reform bulls***” [02:16:50]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s push on and talk about solutions to some of the problems that we’ve been talking about. Maybe my favourite chapter in the book was the final one, the epilogue, about different ways that we might try to solve these things. I think I’ve been over it five times preparing for this interview.

There’s a whole lot of both large reforms and small reforms. Some that seem more incremental, some that seem extremely challenging and are very hard to imagine being implemented now. I think you say it’s important to think about the stuff that we can’t really see happening in the intermediate term, because we can’t have our imagination completely limited by imagining what is politically feasible today. We also need to think about what would be the ideal that we might be able to get to decades or even centuries from now.

The reason that many of the ideas you’re putting forward are not likely to get implemented is that the person who would have to make the decision to do them, it’s not in their interests. That’s why the problem exists, and that’s why the problem persists.

But I was curious about some of the things that are crazy about the setup that are not even in the interests of the person who might be able to change it.

We talked at the beginning about the fact that the prime minister is hemmed in by the fact that they’re in this completely inappropriate office setup; they don’t even have their own staff who can help them to pursue their agenda. That seems more fruitful in the immediate term to try to fix — because if it’s really only tradition, really only convention that is causing things to be that way, maybe the prime minister could just decide to buck convention in this case and make the government function properly.

Ian Dunt: Yes.

Rob Wiblin: Are there any other things that stand out to you as you’re surprised that the reform hasn’t happened already, because in fact it would be in the interests of the people who could change it to change it?

Ian Dunt: Look, Keir Starmer, the current prime minister of Britain, is a former civil servant. He is surrounded by other civil servants. Even the husband of the chancellor is a civil servant. It is basically a civil servant kind of government. It should not be hard to convince these people of the case for Civil Service reform, because they’ve seen it.

And these are not dumb people. Keir Starmer is a really smart man. They’re not venal either. They’re decent minded.

Also, it wouldn’t trigger anyone’s outrage. The papers wouldn’t care. No one’s going to give a s*** about your skills process for the Civil Service. In fact, most people, if they could even understand it, would support it. You’re going to get better quality legislation; you’re going to be more informed.

Sure, the civil servants will be in a better position to challenge the minister, but they can’t stop them. It’s not as if you’re even building up obstacles to getting your will through. You’re just increasing the expertise that would be applied to the proposals that you want to put forward that would make them more viable in the first place.

So then you think, why doesn’t this stuff happen? Part of it is just the absolute firestorm s***show that is politics. You come in and you’re on the back foot almost immediately. What happens? You know, Keir Starmer comes in, it’s like killings in a town. Now Elon Musk is tweeting about it, and saying that this other fascist in jail actually was right. So you’ve got these far-right riots that are taking place, and now they’re trying to burn down a detention centre.

You’ve gotten rid of that, but now look: Trump’s in. There’s going to be tariffs over here and then there’s this. And every day some European conference, some bilateral meeting over here, this has happened with the gilts. Now the yields have gone up, we’ve suddenly lost all of our room that we had, if we’re going to stand by our fiscal rule.

Every day a new challenge, a new attack, a new thing to put you on the back foot. That’s one of the main difficulties in politics: being able to just fight your way past the distraction.

So what do you do if you’re a prime minister? You’ve got that day in, day out, the fury of it. You think, “How do I win the next election? What do I have to do? I need to have good growth, a decent health service, improvements in education. And we’ve got to fix the potholes so that the road system works. If I can say that in five years’ time, I’m going to win the election.” If you can just get past all the confusions, you focus on these things, and off we go.

And that process is how constitutional reform doesn’t happen even when it’s in their interest. Because most of the time you just think, “That’s the last f***ing thing I’ve got time for right now. I’ve got to fix the potholes!” So it’s not even just about, is it in your interest to do it; it’s how much bandwidth do you have? How much space to even think about it do you have, let alone implement it?

And by the way, to implement it would be complicated and laborious. It’s a system-level reform; it would be tough to do. It would come with entrenched opposition. So that is another reason that you sort of get pushed off to one side of it.

Rob Wiblin: So if you want to improve the NHS, fix the potholes, you might think that the way to do that is to improve the Civil Service in a bunch of different ways. But is the problem that the payoff just takes too long to eventuate? It would take years to reform the Civil Service. That would take years to influence then who was working in it, who was getting promoted, who was in positions of influence. And by then you’ve been voted out, so it kind of falls outside the five-year window.

Ian Dunt: Look, obviously this is not my opinion. My opinion is you can do this stuff, and you will see pretty quick improvements. And anyway, we don’t work according to a five-year window. We’ve just had announcements this week on expanding airport capacity in the UK. Government’s not going to benefit from that s***. At its bleeding-edge speed that would be happening in 10 years’ time — where they’re going to be having a difficult time of it anyway if they’re still around. We cannot make decisions according to the electoral cycle anyway.

And if you can have something that you can sit there at the end of your time in power and look back on with pride, it’ll be fixing the way that the engine works. I think it should be done. I just do understand that even when it is in your interest, on a day-to-day basis, very often the conversations that would be taking place in Downing Street with special advisors, with chiefs of staff, would be this kind of scoffing, like, “Do you honestly think we have time for your bourgeois constitutional reform bulls*** when we’re supposed to be doing this stuff over here?”

How to keep expert civil servants [02:22:35]

Rob Wiblin: Maybe it would be hard to tell Keir Starmer about failings in the Civil Service that he’s not already aware of, but could you elaborate a little bit on what would be the most important things to change about the incentive structure for civil servants pursuing a career, and shifting the kinds of skills that are rewarded, the career strategy that’s rewarded?

Ian Dunt: As we were alluding to before, you basically just need to be able to reward people for picking up skills and picking up knowledge and deep subject expertise. Like a financial reward for sticking to where you are, for trying to get good people doing the things that they do.

So anytime you talk to a minister, and actually a lot of people in the Civil Service, they will have stories of the person who’s paid almost nothing and is the linchpin. And they’re just not rewarded. They’re not even socially rewarded.

The ministers that find them are very often the ones that choose to do walkarounds, rather than just sitting in their office. It’s quite easy to just sit there and let the Civil Service take over. They do walkarounds and they’re like, “Oh, so all the interesting bits in those reports that I see comes from this bloke over here, and this bloke hasn’t had a pay rise in 15 years.”

And those guys are often extremely principled as well. They’re just like, “I know that I’m suffocating my career” — and it’s kind of too late after 15 years; they think there must be something wrong with you. But on that basis, they’re the ones that succeed.

So we know the solutions to these problems: you just have to be able to reward people for doing the things that we need them to do, rather than things that we find superfluous or actively unhelpful to what we’re doing.

And the best way of ensuring that that takes place is to provide the resources and the structure, and then to hand the responsibility to the decision maker — to basically the person at the top of the department, which is the permanent secretary — and say each year, “You have to account for why have you got a turnover at 25%. This is not McDonald’s, so why the f*** is that happening in your department?” That has to be the situation, the culture and the systems that you put in place.

It’s not that hard. And I have to tell you, it is embarrassing to say it, because we have had for 50 years — no, my god, it’s more — 1968 was the first time there was a report that suggested these proposals. We’ve still not f***ing done it.

Rob Wiblin: You mentioned that it’s not only specialist skills that aren’t rewarded, but — and I think this is a very common phenomenon in the private sector as well — to get promoted you usually have to become a manager. And sometimes the best way that someone can contribute is not to become a manager; it’s to remain an individual contributor who really knows what they’re individually contributing.

I think you see that across many organisations. But that’s another reform that you’d like to change: that you can get promoted within a non-management track.

Ian Dunt: Yeah. To be honest, for public sector and for private sector the same: trying to decouple this idea of management and reward is absolutely crucial. There’s so many areas where it’s like, no, they don’t need to manage more people — they’re just doing a really good job. So sometimes they’re not even needing to get any further skills. You just want to f***ing keep them, you know what I mean? Just keep on doing what you’re doing.

Rob Wiblin: Retention matters.

Ian Dunt: Right, exactly. So it’s this idea of reward, and making reward fast and making it meaningful for people when they go the extra bit for your organisation — again, whether you’re private or public. Something that you can do for them, ideally that week. Not the promise of “Stay on, and in two years’ time…” No, what can you do for them that week that will make sure that it’s there?

Our instinct so often with managing people is punishment. Which is partly why I’m not that interested in firing civil servants. Yes, of course you should have the capacity to do that.

But that natural intuition we have towards firing and punishment, rather than instant reward people that are doing good work: if you’re running an organisation and you’re not thinking about this s***, then something is going badly wrong. And I can assure you something’s going badly wrong in the Civil Service, but we should not think that the private sector is some paragon of efficiency, because I see disastrous approaches to this over there as well.

Rob Wiblin: One thing that’s distinctive about how the Civil Service in the UK operates — and I think many other countries; I think I saw this in the public service in Australia — is that everything is highly standardised and systematised, and there’s an attempt to remove discretion from individuals as much as possible.

I think the reason for that is mostly a benevolent one: you’re trying to remove opportunities for favouritism and corruption. But in so doing, a manager who realises that some staff member is essential for them, and they want to reward them and retain them… In the private sector, they probably would just give them a bonus. But there’s not an opportunity to do that usually in the public sector. Basically, you can only reward them in these very specific ways when they meet these very particular criteria — which might not even include expertise in the job that they’re doing, because that for some reason didn’t make it into the rules in this particular department.

The UK doesn’t have a big problem with corruption per se. I wonder whether we could loosen the restraints somewhat and give civil servants more discretion to try to make the part of the Civil Service that they’re a part of function well, accepting that that will sometimes lead to blunders. But overall, many of these people are well meaning, they’re reasonably capable, and we should allow them to make their own decisions to some extent.

Ian Dunt: That’s right. And you find in any organisation, how far can you devolve the ability to reward to the level that someone is actually in a pretty good position to make that call. Over and over, we’ll find that that will produce better results.

You do have to have tolerance for failure. And that is something that, especially when politicians talk about the Civil Service, they always say that they want it, but they don’t. Because there’s a distinction that you don’t get in the private sector, which is that when a civil servant fails, the minister has to be the face of the failure.

The one advantage civil servants have: they’re blamed in the abstract for everything, but they are fundamentally anonymous. No one’s going to come for that individual civil servant and hold them up, whereas the minister is going to have to get up in front of the TV cameras and say, “I’m a complete incompetent. We’ve completely screwed up the data transfer,” or, “Someone left a folder on a train somewhere, and this is all up to me.”

Rob Wiblin: So I guess it’s very hard for a minister to get up and say, “Yeah, this person screwed up. But look, if we tried to control everyone to this extent to prevent that failure, it would be worse in the broader picture, because then people wouldn’t have the discretion to make good decisions either.” I guess that just doesn’t wash for some reason.

Ian Dunt: There’s also a scale problem with organisations. We often see that small startups in any sector are very good at understanding the value of failure, but once you get bigger, that becomes a much harder thing for you to do, because the failure has a much higher degree of consequence.

Rob Wiblin: I think it’s also a loss of transparency: as the management layers become larger, it’s harder for the CEO to tell whether the failure was a reasonable one because you took a reasonable risk or whether it was a stupid one. I think there’s a knowledge issue. It is just in general hard to make big organisations function well. I think we should expect them to often run quite poorly, but they can still do better.

Ian Dunt: Yeah. Part of this as well has to be about bringing in the institutional expertise to the Civil Service in a way that’s currently been farmed out. So you are, to a certain extent, in competition with consultancies. That’s what your problem is right there: they’re going for the same people, they’re going for them early.

And once you lose that knowledge… We especially get it with contracts — the contracts is really where we’re getting our asses handed to us, because you’re just thinking, “Fine, so we don’t do that stuff anymore. We’re just going to bring in consultants, and they can do all of that part.”

But they cost s***loads on their daily rate, and sometimes we keep these people for years; it’s not even cost effective to not train our own civil servants in it. But then when they leave, you’ve lost the institutional knowledge. You can’t even really be an intelligent customer when it comes to the way that the government negotiates with the private sector.

So trying to address that inequality of arms — which is partly a financial thing, but it’s also partly about bringing back specialist knowledge. When the private sector brings these people in, it turns a bunch of consultants into specialists in certain key areas. That’s something that we’re not doing, and that we need to be able to go toe to toe with these guys on.

Rob Wiblin: You mentioned earlier that the prime minister finds it extremely difficult to avoid just firefighting constantly whatever happens to be in the news that day, and to focus on longer-term structural reforms, or even just implementing their basic direct policy agenda, like fixing the potholes.

I don’t understand why more prime ministers haven’t taken the reins and said, “I need a bigger department.” You’ve mentioned that over the years the prime ministers had often a strategy unit, a policy unit, and a delivery unit — but these have kind of flickered in and out of relevance and actual usefulness and having proper staffing and talent in them.

Why can’t Keir Starmer say, “It’s very hard for me to keep on top of all of the different things that are going on. I need proper staffing. I need people who are thinking five years ahead, I need people who are thinking one year ahead. I need people delivering the policies that we’re trying to focus on now.” How is that not in his interest? Can’t they get the budget for it? We say Parliament is subjugated, so why wouldn’t they just approve it?

Ian Dunt: Yeah, yeah. You have to understand there’s definitely going to be a hit to you from the right-wing press of, “Several more civil servants brought in as Starmer’s underlings.”

However, we have enough resources there for the prime minister to work effectively if they come up with effective working arrangements. We have, as you’ve just said, policy unit, delivery unit, strategy unit. We know how to deploy these units effectively, which are essentially one of them for communication; one of them for short-term delivery on objectives over the next year; and one of them thinking, blue skies over a five-year horizon, what can we do now?

We have a pretty good idea of how to set them up. We can conjoin them with the private office in Downing Street, which is the civil servant kind of skeletal systems, whereas those others are much more political, like the muscles. In the private office to keep the coordination working between the departments in the centre.

And then we bring the massive bureaucracy which is in the Cabinet Office, where you’ve got about 2,000 staff. They’ve always been more the prime minister’s people than they have been for cabinet, because cabinet government doesn’t really exist and hasn’t existed for decades in this country. You can deploy that resource. And in fact, prime ministers do.

It’s about how do you organise it? And partly, again, that is cultural machismo. We have had for so long, people around Downing Street, they walk around, they’re always just so macho. Keir Summer is not a macho guy, but the people around him, people like [Chief of Staff] Morgan McSweeney, they are. They’re part of that culture.

Rob Wiblin: Macho in what way?

Ian Dunt: I’m not saying this particularly about Morgan McSweeney. If any of your listeners have seen The Thick of It or In the Loop — these kind of comedies about how British politics operates — one of the key characters there is the director of communications, in this case, who just walks around just basically screaming at people. It’s like, “I’m gonna kill your mother and wear her skin as a mask to your f***ing political funeral.”

And that’s basically the language that British politics is conducted in. Just very brutal, sweary, nasty, aggressive. And I’m not gonna lie: I love that s***. I was brought up in it, and I find it very amusing indeed. Nevertheless, it’s not a particularly effective way of operating.

When at one point someone with a different mentality went into Downing Street, things improved. That person was Michael Barber, who was running the delivery unit in Blair’s second term. And he said in an interview with me, “I talked to all the other people that had this kind of job, and I just did the opposite of what they’d done.” They just did the shouty-shouty. And he was like, “You think that you’re doing s***. You’re not. You’re using up prime ministerial power. I want to amass more prime ministerial power.”

So how did he do it? He had two rules on conversations with his team and ministers where he thought they were failing. Rule #1: you will use plain language and be honest, which often means a very difficult conversation where there’s proper failure going on. Rule #2: you will leave that room with the relationship in a better place than it was when you went in.

And these two things can happen at the same time. We will not ask these departments to do research unless we genuinely think it’s useful to them. We will operate with a degree of academic curiosity that is far greater than any of our macho desire for dominance and humiliation of our rivals.

And that cultural change meant that they were getting huge improvements in A&E waiting times, in rail performance in autumn, in literacy and numeracy skills for kids. They started getting real results during that four-year period. It was by having a completely different cultural approach, a completely different management approach — and by grounding themselves fundamentally in evidence and in realistic targets that reflected broader institutional health, rather than the kind of posturing that we’re used to in Downing Street.

Improving legislation like you’d improve Netflix dramas [02:34:34]

Rob Wiblin: You think we have a general problem with legislation being written poorly, being written overly broadly, not actually solving the problems: you pass some legislation, then you realise you have to pass some other legislation to try to fix the problems years later.

One of the defences that we have against that is the House of Lords review, where they do go line by line through it suggesting improvements. The government often accepts these amendments. Maybe it will decide to pretend that it’s their own amendments rather than ones that have been suggested externally, but I guess it hasn’t tried to stop the House of Lords from scrutinising legislation and suggesting amendments and improvements — because you think they realise that this is absolutely necessary and it would be a major problem for them if that review weren’t happening.

But you want to set up a process in the House of Commons, something like the parliamentary select committees, that would review legislation. That just seems like it would also be in the interest of the executive, of the government, to have better review at an earlier stage of the legislation that they’re proposing — maybe before it’s even been revealed to the public — where you do go line by line and try to make it better.

Why don’t they create some sort of committees that would do that, or get people in from the House of Lords or whatever experts they need at the drafting stage, to make it actually more likely to accomplish their goals? It’s not obvious to me who’s benefiting from the lack of review and scrutiny at the early stages of legislative proposals.

Ian Dunt: We should be clear that the main bit is halfway through a bill’s life: the committee stage. And we have a committee stage already. It’s just s*** and completely useless. Ideally we would want to reform that to make it more meaningful.

To do so is basically the classic question you always get in politics, which is basically to do it gives up power.

You give up your power through the whips to decide who is on those committees: at the moment, political parties decide who’s on those committees. You give up your power to override criticism — because at the moment, people can complain as much as they like in the committee, but you’re going to win because you have a majority. You just use it, you stamp it, on we go.

People don’t give up power. Governments do not give up power. You have to f***ing fight them for every single inch that you take. And it can be done — we’ve done it lots of times before — but they won’t really do it willingly, and that tends to be why they resist doing it now.

Rob Wiblin: In a sense, it is giving up power. It is opening themselves up to criticism. But couldn’t they create more avenues for constructive suggestions for how to improve things out of the public limelight? You talk about this Office of the Parliamentary Counsel which drafts the legislation. I think they’re not hostile — usually they’re trying to help, but often they’re very rushed and I think that they don’t get the necessary assistance from the department.

Why can’t you have more people at that early stage, before the legislation has seen the light of day? That seems like it could be in the interest of the prime minister. They’ll create less problems for themselves later. I don’t know.

Ian Dunt: I agree. That is exactly where to put the pressure. Because of that macho, weird process we talked about earlier, before the legislation’s written, no one feels like their sense of status is on the line. You can influence them much more easily in that way.

Like you say, the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, they’re really impressive. I mean, these are proper silk, they’re proper barristers. There are absolute extraordinary levels of skill and legal literacy on these people. The thing is, they’re just really rushed.

Rob Wiblin: Often on these very complex bills, there’s only two people writing it. It seems like not enough staffing to me.

Ian Dunt: You know what, that’s not too bad — because generally speaking, it’s called the four-eyes process, and it comes from normal barrister process. They used to call them a devil — it’s kind of classic liberalism, actually — anything you write, you should have a devil on your shoulder, being like, “That’s s***. I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that.” It’s that kind of fight. That you’ll get a better product by having someone sit there, almost like you’re mimicking the courtroom. It’s that adversarial structure.

So that’s quite common. And most of these guys, it’s a very, very specialised skill that they’re involved in, writing legislation. No one ever talks about this process because it’s extremely esoteric, but I find it quite charming.

You will have someone in the department that’s basically like, “We want to pass a law that stops people getting too close to military facilities.” And that sounds like it makes complete sense in your head as you conceive of it. Then you give it to them and they’re like, “So let’s talk about what ‘close’ is. Do you mean five metres? What if someone has a drone and they’re flying it over?” You know, we’ve got all these different versions of what the word “close” means that we need to tidy up and clear up.

They know exactly what they’re doing. It has to be this kind of elite cadre of legislative writers, and it will be in any country. If you force them to move quickly, all they’ll do is they’ll just write it in a really open way. Essentially they’ll say, “The definition of ‘open’ will be left to the minister to decide by statutory instrument at a later date.” And you’ve taken away a lot of freedom from the individual, from the citizens.

If you give them more time, they’ll write it tighter and they’ll be written in a precise way that you’ll know if you’re breaking the law or not. You’ll respect the citizen more. Really, with most of it, it’s just giving them the time.

But governments don’t want to f***ing hear it. They hate hearing that. “Give them the time, back off, be patient”: these are not instructions that government appreciates. They appreciate, “Let’s move quickly, let’s break things, let’s be dynamic. Let’s show everyone what we’ve accomplished.”

Rob Wiblin: Your solution to this is to pass half as much legislation, but make it good so you don’t have to keep repairing the problems that you introduced last time.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. It’s basically my same solution for how you would improve drama on Netflix: make it half as f***ing long and better.

MPs waste much of their time helping constituents with random complaints [02:39:59]

Rob Wiblin: A problem with the system that we haven’t talked about yet is about how MPs spend about half of their time doing constituency work, which is talking to people who live in their seats who have some or other problem.

Sometimes these could be very significant, like immigration problems with the Home Office; other times it’s problems that they have with a business that didn’t deliver the correct thing to their house. Or something to do with housing that really should be dealt with at the local council level. We have local councils in the UK that would normally be handling that stuff; it shouldn’t really be going to the national level.

So they spend about half of their time on this. You describe how this means that they don’t have time to do their actual job, which is having systems nationally that prevent these problems from occurring in the first place. Instead they’re just firefighting the results of the failings at a fundamental level.

You describe an alternative system for this that exists in Denmark. You do kind of want to have a stopgap where people can complain to someone who will listen to them and try to intervene on their behalf if there is a real legitimate grievance there. There’s an ombudsman in Denmark who is able to hear any complaint from any resident or citizen, and is able to basically intercede with any government authority at any level — so they have full discretion to basically perform this role that currently we’re requiring MPs to spend half their time doing.

Why isn’t it in the interest of MPs to create such a body? Aren’t they annoyed by having to hear about how… You describe an extreme case of someone saying the wrong toilet seat was delivered to them. Presumably they have grander visions for what they might accomplish at a national level —

Ian Dunt: Don’t bet on that.

Rob Wiblin: [laughs] Well, perhaps that’s the issue. But this is one where I was like, wouldn’t MPs appreciate getting support from a group that would specialise in doing this job well, so that they could then focus on their constitutional role?

Ian Dunt: I think so. I also think it would be profoundly countercultural to them to think about this idea. They’re very used to it working this way. And to be fair, for good reason: that has been historically the case for a long time. When we think of the rooms in Parliament, like places that are called lobby, central lobby — it’s because that’s where people went to lobby their MP to get them to act for them.

You know, you look at the Levellers during the English Civil War: that’s where they went to lobby their MP. You look at the suffragettes, during the fight for the female franchise: that’s where they went to lobby their MP. So this idea of you go to your MP, that is deeply imbued in the English psyche. So this is profoundly weird, I think, to suggest.

And yet there has to be a breaking point, where you can’t do your f***ing job if you’re spending the whole time answering someone who’s in an intractable payments dispute or something to do with property where there really isn’t a solution to this thing. And you certainly shouldn’t be demeaning your office by being part of it.

However, I have to say, I think MPs do kind of like it.

Rob Wiblin: It allows them to actually sometimes accomplish something, where perhaps they can’t in Parliament, because they’re so disempowered.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. That’s it. It’s such a sick feedback loop. But their job in Parliament is robbed of all meaning because the whips just tell them what to do. They have no role. They’re totally infantilised, humiliated constitutionally and professionally there. Then they go off and you do the constituency work and it’s like, “S***, I can help. This person didn’t get their welfare payments and they deserve it. This person’s held in an immigration detention centre. Maybe I can get them out.”

I would feel pretty good about myself if I’d spent today getting someone out of an immigration detention centre. If I try and do that work on legislation, A, I’m going to destroy my career because the party’s never going to give me a more senior role because I’ve thought independently, and B, I anyway won’t make any difference.

So on that basis, it’s not hard to see why they’re more pulled towards the constituency work, and that’s probably the bit they less want to reform. If you were to say to them, “We’ll get rid of any pretence that you have to evaluate legislation,” I suspect they’ll be more likely to take that reform than the one that I’m proposing.

Party culture prevents independent thinking [02:43:52]

Rob Wiblin: Another change that I was wondering about why it hasn’t occurred already: backbenchers are very weak against their party; the whips, the central party is strongly able to control their behaviour. The way that it does that is partly through social influences — shame, bullying people, basically — but the ultimate sanction is removing preselection, so that you’re not able to run for that party in that seat the next time. You’ll almost certainly lose your job.

Why can’t backbenchers or members of the party get together and say, “We want to change the rule by which people are preselected, so that the whips cannot just remove me from the party if I think independently and if I stand up to them”?

Is that really in the interests of most people in the party to be so controlled, to be on their knees all the time? It’s not obvious to me that a majority would support that. So there must be somewhere in the party constitution through which this power is being exercised — and couldn’t it be changed?

Ian Dunt: Have you ever been a member of a political party?

Rob Wiblin: Yes, though I haven’t been a very active member.

Ian Dunt: OK. I think that there’s real types in this. I presumed your answer would be no. So you’ve destroyed my whole gambit.

Rob Wiblin: Well, more nominal membership. So you can proceed as if I’d said no.

Ian Dunt: Great, that’s good. Excellent. That makes it much more convenient for me. And neither have I. I think that everything you just said makes complete sense to me. I don’t want to be a member of anything and I pride myself on being independent minded,, and I don’t like the idea of being humiliated and subjugated in my professional or my social life.

But I’m not a party person, and party people have really different… Their whole worldview is different. You have to bear in mind it’s not just work. Most of these people met their partner at the local party. That’s where their social arrangements are. You speak to some of the people that are in a party, it’s kind of more of a religious thing with a political element built in. For a lot of them it encompasses the entirety of their active life, whether it’s work or play or romance even.

So on that basis, you’re not really someone that’s going to sit there challenging the decisions and the constitutional functions of the Labour Party, you know what I mean? You just want to be a good soldier. And the second you’re not, the second you vote into the other lobby, it’s like a trauma experience for these guys, you know? They’re saying, “My own mates, these are people I’ve drunk with every night for seven years, they’re sat there shouting at me, like screaming at me, and I’m ruining my career, and I’m going to go back and have everyone in the party membership tell me, ‘What the hell are you doing?'”

That’s what happens when you question, when you think independently in these organisations. So to do the kind of thing that you’re suggesting, they would have to be very independent minded, and they would have to organise in a really constructive way — not just in Parliament, but with the National Executive Committee, for instance, in Labour — to try and change the rules around how this stuff operates.

It’d be hard. It would require a huge amount of coordination on a very large scale. It is completely inimical to the ways that these guys think and the way that they behave.

Rob Wiblin: That’s a real shame.

Ian Dunt: Sorry about that.

Rob Wiblin: I guess it’s a real shame because it means that there’s this enormous inertia behind the existing culture — because if people are just party people, they don’t tend to think independently, then they’re going to ensure that the rules make that continue, and they’re going to keep choosing people on the basis that they’re similar to that. If they were independent minded to start with, then they could create a culture that self-reinforced it, and that would continue. But it seems very hard to shift, I suppose.

Ian Dunt: You can get a bit more space with MPs if you tell them, “You will have to mostly do what you’re told. But just pick one thing, one subject area.” If you tell them this at the beginning of their careers, it’s what works for them, the ones that are independent minded: “Just pick one thing, and you’re going to find out about it. It’s something you care about, it almost certainly exists.”

They’re going to instantly know what it is. It might be the way we treat asylum seekers or maybe sewage in the water or whatever. “You’re going to find out about it, you’re going to have expertise, and you will say quite early on to the whips, ‘This is the one that I vote the way that I want to vote on, and I’ll back you if I do.'”

But if you front up to that really early on and just say, “This is the one area that I’m blocking off from you guys,” they kind of understand, you know what I mean? And you can develop that as a mutually respectful relationship where they don’t try and detonate your career on the basis of a vote. It’s not just coming out of nowhere.

So, typically speaking, that’s the avenue that I find works with MPs: Just find the one thing. That’s where you find your pride, your principles, and that’s the thing that you’re going to try and accomplish as an individual, not as a member of your party.

Rob Wiblin: It’s interesting that that works. I suppose it helps if you declare that up front, because it means that they know that if you voted over this sewage issue, that isn’t necessarily you just beginning to rebel across all kinds of issues. You’ve said at the beginning, “This is my passion. I might rebel on this one topic.” But that’s not setting a negative precedent from their point of view.

Ian Dunt: Exactly. And of course, the whips don’t really want you to lose the whip — because once you lose the whip, they can’t control you at all.

Rob Wiblin: So if they kick you out of the party, then maybe you’ll just vote against them on everything now.

Ian Dunt: You probably will. You’ll become pretty independent, and they don’t really want that. So to a certain extent, you can find that nice middle ground.

Would a written constitution help or hurt? [02:48:37]

Rob Wiblin: You said all of these changes — you know, good government legislation that would have better scrutiny of legislation, better processes so that the government or the Civil Service would function better — often it’s not in the interests of the ruling executive to do that. It makes their life harder in the immediate term.

But why don’t governments pass these reforms that would apply only in the following Parliament? Rishi Sunak, a year or two ago, was almost certainly going to not be prime minister beyond the next election. It would have been more and more of a miracle for him to actually remain in office. Why not pass some legislation that would bind the next Parliament, that would ensure that there is better review of legislation? That would benefiting his party, I suppose, once they’re out of power.

Ian Dunt: You just can’t, because the thing is, you really can’t bind… It’s so hard, especially when you don’t have a constitution.

Rob Wiblin: I suppose you’re imposing some shame on them to remove these reforms that people will have said in general are good.

Ian Dunt: You can try. But to give you an example of how hard it is to bind them: Rishi Sunak got rid of a high-speed rail project that had had billions pumped into it on the basis of cross-party cooperation for the previous decade, with buy-in from god knows how many communities and how many private companies. He just scrapped it.

And to show you just how hard it is to bind any successor, he didn’t feel the need to give a s*** about it, even though there was over decades’ worth of work and money and political agreement on it. Just thought, “F*** it, I’ll just get rid of it.” He wanted to have a good headline for like two days, and then it was gone.

In the British system — it’s obviously different elsewhere: if you’ve got a constitution, you can find a way of doing that, or even if your courts are a bit more powerful — but in our system you really can’t bind your successors.

Rob Wiblin: To what extent is it a fundamental problem with British democracy that we don’t have a written constitution? That we can’t pass things that will bind the executive? And that is one of the reasons why the executive has run amok and just accumulated more and more power and removed all of the checks and balances against it?

Ian Dunt: I just don’t think that the constitution thing matters. Lots of fellow liberals love it — and I say this with that kind of hazy look in my eye of having way too many nights with other liberals talking about constitutional matters — but I just don’t think it’s very pertinent.

A friend of mine, a really sort of impressive figure in the US, said when Boris Johnson fell, “It was fascinating how quickly they managed to get rid of their populist nightmare compared to the American populist nightmare. Maybe it’s to do with the constitutional thing. Maybe it’s useful not to have a constitution.”

No, it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s just to do with the fact that once you lose your popular support, you’re kind of f***ed. And on that basis I sort of think it’s the same elsewhere. The actual constitutional mechanisms don’t have as much meaning as the extent to which people believe in maintaining the norms around usage. Honestly, the British prime minister could do so much more in terms of their executive power than they do — but they don’t, because of the social norms, you know?

So on that basis I often think it’s just a bit of a cul-de-sac, the constitutional issue: I think it doesn’t really matter which way you have it. What matters is how are your social norms around decent moral government holding up? You look at somewhere like Hungary, not very well at all. You look at somewhere like Britain, actually pretty well. You look at America… to be confirmed over the next four years.

Can we give the PM room to appoint ministers based on expertise and competence? [02:51:51]

Rob Wiblin: A tougher reform to make stick would be: it would be really great if the norm was that the prime minister would appoint ministers — at least to important ministries — who were existing experts, who had substantial understanding of the areas that they were going into.

Very difficult to make that happen, because the prime minister is always at risk of being ousted by their party, of having a leadership challenge. And one of the tools that they have to ensure that they remain in their position is to award important, influential people in the House of Commons to powerful ministries, which is basically what they want. So you’re constantly having these reshuffles that the prime minister is using to balance off different interest groups and to remain in office.

A very upstanding prime minister could say, “No, I’m just going to appoint a whole bunch of external experts to the House of Lords, and then I’m going to make them ministers and not give any of my MPs ministries.” But they would be very quickly removed because the MPs would not like to lose the opportunity to exercise power that way.

What can we do to make it more politically practical and sustainable for a prime minister to appoint people based on expertise and capability primarily, and not just political usefulness? Do you have any ideas?

Ian Dunt: They’re not strong ideas, but you do the best you can. The first one is that you just put it in the Ministerial Code. Ministerial Code is not law; it’s just a series of ways that you should behave. But again, it starts to form those social norms around this use.

If you say ministers are meant to have expertise in their area, the prime minister then has to explain to a bunch of journalists after they pick someone who clearly doesn’t on what basis did they make that decision. We should never underestimate the extent to which avoiding embarrassment, on a day-to-day basis, is one of the primary motivations of political actors. So you’re just trying to build up these moments of potential embarrassment for them by going for these guys.

The easy answer is let’s put it in legislation and send the prime minister to prison if they don’t. It’s just bollocks. Obviously it’s not going to be that way. All you can do is try to encourage those social norms, and that would be a pretty good start for how we do it.

Rob Wiblin: I think a political scientist would say that, if you want to solve this problem, the thing you need to do is make it harder for the parliamentary party to remove the prime minister.

So at the moment, I think within the Conservatives, you need a majority of MPs to create a leadership bill. I think that there’s some specific rules about that. They could require a larger number of MPs to sign onto a leadership challenge before that gets approved. That would weaken the power of the MPs relative to the prime minister, and would give the Prime Minister more discretion to make their own choices, even ones that their MPs would disagree with.

That would create other problems, of course: when you can’t move a leader, then maybe if they’re doing a bad job, they’ll stay in office.

Ian Dunt: But the thing is, it never comes down to that, right? Like the Tory Party has all these, as you say, extremely convoluted, highly mathematical rules for the point of challenge and when you trigger it.

But that’s never how they get rid of them. It’s not how Margaret Thatcher was gotten rid of. They had a leadership challenge with Margaret Thatcher, she survived it. And then eventually, she goes to the cabinet and like, do you have support? And she looks at how many eyes waver and how many people look embarrassed and shy and how many… And then she has to quit. The same with Boris Johnson. It’s like a bunch of people go into the room.

And this is a very British answer, because this is just the kind of mercurial, primordial sludge of our constitutional arrangements. It never really comes down to the rules.

Ultimately, the point that a leader and prime minister goes, outside of elections, is because people from their own party just went in and visited and went, “You know what, mate, I think time’s up on this one. You’ll have to f*** off now.”

Rob Wiblin: But do they leave because they know that ultimately that will result in a leadership challenge and they will lose a vote at some point? And this is just kind of leading up to that?

Ian Dunt: Honestly, loads of the time they have like a one-year protection mechanism for themselves. Mostly I think they think, you know what the honest truth is. At some point you’re probably going to have someone that’s been loyal to you and sat there for a long time who will say, “I think you’d better go for your own dignity.” And you don’t want to be left with your fingernails there.

Think of the Geoffrey Howe speech against Thatcher: they would have seen their authority sink in the Commons, with someone who’d been loyal standing up in the Commons and going, “It’s time for everyone to think for themselves.” It’s usually about this much more informal draining of authority and loyalty than it is about any kind of formal mechanism.

And as much as you try and tinker with those rules, and people do, it never really seems to ever come down to those rules. It comes down to a conversation with five, six, seven, eight people in a room in Downing Street, where they just decide, “That’s it now. I think that’s time to go.”

Would proportional representation help? [02:56:20]

Rob Wiblin: The enormous, nuclear, improbable reform that you suggest is switching from our first-past-the-post electoral system — which is just where whoever gets the most votes on a first preference basis becomes the MP in a given small local area — to proportional representation, where basically parties would get seats in the parliament in proportion to the number of votes that they got nationally.

A completely different system. I think that would definitely upend the political culture in the country. Why is proportional representation better, in your view?

Ian Dunt: Because it forces parties to work together, really. I should say that the obvious argument is the most important one, but the one that I find least interesting, which is that it actually counts the f***ing votes. So generally speaking, in the UK we don’t count between two-thirds to three-quarters of the votes. We just ignore them.

Rob Wiblin: What do you mean by ignore them?

Ian Dunt: If you vote for someone who didn’t win, we ignore that. That’s usually about 45% of the votes.

Rob Wiblin: You’re saying it has no effect on the composition of Parliament?

Ian Dunt: Exactly, exactly. Of course we count the votes. They’re counted, but you have no representation. It has no impact on what happens in Parliament.

If you vote for the person that did win, after the point that they’ve won, those votes also just tumble into the void of nothing. This is actually no longer the case: after the last election, Labour has a much more efficient vote distribution. But one of the things that used to punish Labour is you’d get in all these tiny constituencies in places like Manchester and London, huge votes for Labour, but it doesn’t matter once they’ve won. Let’s say you’ve got the 21,000 votes that you need: every vote after 21,001 is wasted. You get surplus votes just piling up, enough to get an extra five MPs for each city.

So in each case, you think we’re not counting the votes. And that, in a democracy, seems like a significant problem.

Rob Wiblin: Well, it means that many… Like, there’s no point in me voting in the seat that I’m in, because it’s an extremely safe seat. It doesn’t matter for which party, it’s a very safe seat. I may as well basically pay no attention to politics because my vote is always going to be irrelevant so long as I live where I live. I think that is quite demoralising and an unfortunate consequence of the electoral system. And that is actually the case for the majority of people in the country.

Ian Dunt: I have never had a vote that counted in my entire life. I’ve lived in really safe Tory seats; I currently live in a very safe Labour seat. I’ve never, ever had a vote that meant anything at all.

So I think you can basically consider yourself disenfranchised. I mean, I live in one of the safest Labour seats in the entire country. There is nothing that can happen. Which is fine for me right now, because I thought Labour was a better party for government in the last election. I might change my mind on that in five years’ time, but it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t really matter at all, because there’s nothing I can do that will ever have any impact.

Proportional representation encourages collaboration but does have weaknesses [02:58:51]

Ian Dunt: However, the thing that really interests me for this is just that idea of getting parties to work together.

We always break down roughly the same way. I mean, Labour support can go up and up, but let’s say Labour support will always be somewhere between 25% and 40%. At its best, it’s going to be 40%, and its lowest can be around 25%. That’s about the floor. And the Tories are about the same. You know, Lib Dems at a slightly lower level. Reform are currently a sort of quite extreme right party, under Nigel Farage are currently at about 25%. Probably their floor is about 10%; I don’t think you’d ever see it below 10%.

So you suddenly force them to work together. Labour and the Lib Dems are the obvious parties that you could see would work together quite well. Sometimes you’ll find a grand coalition.

Whenever you introduce proportional representation, the same thing happens in every country. You basically split into about seven groups. You get far right, you get a communist party, you get a green party, you get probably two or three centrist parties, you get a centre-left party and a centre-right party — because that is how political thought breaks down in a modern industrial society.

And those parties have to work together. Sometimes there’s a grand coalition in the middle, sometimes it’s bits of the left working with the far left or whatever.

The important thing is: imagine what happens now with social care. Imagine that they come up with a proposal for social care that has defeated parties in Britain for decades now. Suddenly we’ve got three parties that have bought into this. So next time Labour falls down, but the Greens and maybe some socialist party that signed in on it, they have to be part of the coalition next time.

So because you’ve got that continuity of the parties that buy in across the range, you’ve got a much better chance of having structural long-term reforms that can work. On that basis I think it’s a far more attractive system than the one that we have right now.

Rob Wiblin: The UK electoral system is particularly insane, and especially so at the moment. People think of Labour as having swept into power, and they have an enormous majority in the Parliament (I can’t remember the exact percentage) — but I think they only got about 35% of the vote.

Ian Dunt: That’s right.

Rob Wiblin: And you have this crazy ramp-up now, where if you get about 25% of the vote, you get very few seats in Parliament; if you get 35%, you have a massive majority.

This is just no way to really represent the public well. It also massively matters how broadly distributed versus concentrated the vote is. I can’t remember what fraction of the total votes nationally Reform got last time, but they received basically no representation in Parliament despite having 10% or 15% of the total vote, just because it’s horribly distributed for them, it’s not concentrated.

Anyway, I think there’s no way that anyone could really defend this as being a great way of representing the views of the general public.

But I’m not completely sure whether proportional representation is a system that you’d want to move to. Perhaps unsurprisingly, being an Australian, I have some fondness for the Australian system. You have individual constituencies, but you also have preferential voting. So there actually are quite a lot of independents, and you can have more parties represented, certainly in the upper house.

Proportional representation makes sense in theory because the parliament will reflect the range of views that you have in the population. But you get rid of this arbitrariness — the one vote that puts you into either a 50% majority or having a plurality at the constituency level — the arbitrariness of that vote mattering so much, and you replace that with whichever party allows you to get to 50% of the seats in the parliament and allows you to form a government: that becomes then incredibly valuable.

And you have a certain arbitrariness as to which minor parties can plausibly help to form a coalition that has 50% of seats in the parliament, and they gain enormous influence potentially over the coalition that they’re a part of. Whereas if they have one fewer seat or the composition of parties is slightly different, then they could just become completely irrelevant.

So that’s a structural weakness that I see with proportional representation: that the importance of small- to medium-sized parties can fluctuate enormously just depending on fairly random changes in vote distribution. What evidence is there that proportional representation is the solution versus other alternative electoral systems that we could contemplate implementing?

Ian Dunt: I think that’s absolutely right, by the way, what you’ve just said: it’s a genuine flaw. And you find especially people that spend a lot of time looking at Israeli history become really critical of proportional representation — because particularly in Israel, it’s an absolute f***ing nightmare, and has held up peace prospects in various ways. You get these tiny parties just kind of with a stranglehold over stuff. Although I think Israel is a very qualitatively specific example that we don’t necessarily use elsewhere.

There’s also a bigger danger with proportional representation, which is the sense of a back room stitchup. You know, you will go out to vote, and then after vote there’s like a f***ing two-month process where all the parties go — you’re not really invited to that meeting — and they figure out how they’re going to work together. And in a time where we’re all dealing with the danger of populism, and you want everything to look as unstitched-up as possible, that process can be kind of difficult.

Rob Wiblin: You want voters to feel like they’ve had some direct control, rather than that their influence was obviated at some later stage when a bunch of people got into a back room and changed it all.

Ian Dunt: Yeah. I mean the answer to that is that their strength relies on the extent to which you offered it, like their strength is entirely on the basis of the vote that they were given. Quite literally, not in the first-past-the-post way — literally representing the amount of votes that they got. That’s the amount of chips that they have on the table, the amount of strength that you can give them. If you want more strength for your guys, you have to convince more people to vote for your guys, and off we go. So it is justifiable.

But these are genuinely flaws. There is no system on Earth that doesn’t have those flaws within it. So usually you start thinking about how many flaws can we resist?

One of the things I like about particularly models of proportional representation — I’m not going to bore you with every kind, because as you know, there are dozens of these things, and I’ve been trapped in very tedious conversations where they’re gone through in granular detail — is that there are systems where you can maintain constituency link as well.

And they’re quite simple to operate: all you’ve got to really do is just expand the constituency so you’ve got more MPs in it, so you’ve got greater opportunity for a representation of a proper vote, and then allow people to work together on the back end. There are of course flaws to that, but I think that the potential things that you gain from it in terms of policy, in terms of people feeling like their vote actually counts, that it actually matters…

And in terms of the way that you can address some of the really dangerous things that happen to policymaking — in terms of the directing of resources towards marginal seats, the reduction in that contortion of the policymaking machine that you get on the first-past-the-post — all of that means that on balance I think it looks like a much stronger system than the one we have now.

Rob Wiblin: Setting aside theory, the countries that have the clearest proportional representation systems, you’ve got Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, and maybe you can name some others: would you say, just looking at the results there, at how well they’re governed, that in general they are governed better than — maybe first-past-the-post is setting the bar low — but would you say they have the best functioning legislatures? That this really feeds into having world-class governance?

Ian Dunt: Yeah. I mean, there’s counterexamples. We’ve just mentioned one of them with Israel. I think you could do another with Italy. But then you look at places like Denmark, like Germany: really impressive.

We also have to be clear about something: you’re dealing with a lot of variables, right? Even if we were just to take the variable of state power versus central power, which is obviously a very chief one that you would find in the Germany example. And you also then have that weird stuff around culture. For its own very specific reasons, Germany is very suspicious of charisma in political leadership. You know, for good reason.

Rob Wiblin: So they don’t get it.

Ian Dunt: So actually that leads you to having a much more sensible process a lot of the time, where you’re like, “We don’t care about the showboater. We’re not so keen on that. That’s not the image that we find attractive. We’re looking for someone else that demonstrates other kinds of qualities.”

That notion is really hard to put in a spreadsheet. So of course it would be foolish of me to just start pointing at electoral systems and go like, “You see what happened? That’s what fixed it!”

We can, however, say that there is a reason that no country on Earth that didn’t have it has adopted first-past-the-post as the system that we have. And the loads of countries that, when they stopped being dictatorships — like Ukraine for instance — adopted first-past-the-post, pretty quickly went, “No, hang on a minute. We need a proportional system. This is not a very effective system.”

Australia first made that decision, I think, in 1919. Certainly the early 20th century.

Rob Wiblin: I think it might have been even earlier. We’ll look that up. [It was 1918!]

Ian Dunt: Yeah, that’s something quite progressive. New Zealand made it about 100 years later. It’s just like, “No, we don’t like this.” Over and over again you find countries that when they do find this system, this full-fat protean system, think, “You know what? We need something a little bit more nuanced than this.”

Alternative electoral systems [03:07:44]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Are there any systems other than proportional representation that you have a fondness for, that you think would at least certainly be a step up on what we have?

Ian Dunt: I’m a bit wary when they start becoming too complicated. In my drearier times… There are times that I really like the funny tinkering around that Roy Jenkins did in the early ’90s for various sort of top-up lists that you attach to a vote. But if you sit down with a voter and it’s going to take you 20 minutes to explain how the system works, you’ve got a f***ing problem.

So what tempts me the most is just expanding the constituency. I like how easy it is. I like the fact that per capita you’ve got the same number of MPs, that you have a more intuitive link with your MP — because you think, who am I going to go to if I have a problem? Probably the one of the party that I voted for. I probably won’t go to the one of the party that I hate.

I like the way that it’s all quite easy to explain using normal language, without having to bring in any mathematics. You know, that’s the real problem: once the maths comes in, you think, I don’t think this is going to be an easy sell for us.

Rob Wiblin: Isn’t it quite a risk that you often do end up with grand coalitions in a country like Germany, and then voters feel like their will hasn’t really been represented and it’s all just elites running things behind the scenes? That seems particularly worrying right now.

Ian Dunt: And yet, where is that kind of view just as strong? Britain, the US. You know, if we have a thing about suspicion of the elites and back room stitchups, the US is f***ing prime example of that kind of narrative, and it doesn’t have any of these arrangements.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah.

Ian Dunt: I think there is an extent to which we should have these thoughts in our heads when we calculate this stuff and how we increase confidence in the system. But there is an extent to which we can exaggerate once that kind of poison is out there. A lot of that is online disinformation. It’s kind of a separate debate we can tackle in a different way. But they would always find a way of raising these paranoias about the way that the system is operated, and we have to find a way of countering those in a more effective way.

Rob Wiblin: We have an interview from years ago with someone who was working to promote approval voting within seats. I’m not sure whether you’re familiar with approval voting, but you keep the one member, one constituency thing, but you’re allowed to vote for as many members as you want. So basically with each person you get to say yay or nay, and whoever has the most yes votes is the one that gets elected.

It greatly reduces the need for strategic voting. In the UK, because there’s many multiple different parties in a given seat, the person who you prefer just might have no chance of winning, so you end up voting strategically for someone who’s like your second, third, or fourth preference basically. This removes the need to do that. Basically you can vote for the person who you like the most, and for the person who you think is likely to get up. And it makes it easier for insurgents to come in. It makes it easier for people to express what they actually like. This is a different approach of opening things up.

Ian Dunt: It’s also funny that it plays in the same area that I always find quite attractive: finding voting systems that are trying to disentangle your pragmatic from your ideal self. The classic thing you see in France is that having a two-stage process just means the first time that everyone votes with their heart, and then afterwards everyone’s like, “Does that look good to you?” And everyone’s like, “No, that looks f***ing horrific. It looks like apparently the fascists are going to get it” — and so the second time everyone votes with their head.

These experiments are kind of fascinating and useful in their way. I have to say again, as ever, I think simplicity is our friend when it comes to electoral reform. And the simplest explanation is usually the most effective.

Actually, when Roy Jenkins’s proposals for electoral reform were put to Jack Straw — who then would have been in charge of selling them for New Labour — he said he clearly wanted to stop electoral reform. And he said, with absolute delight in his voice, “Oh, it’s very complicated!” Yeah, that’s exactly what they want it to be. If they want to stop it, they say, make it as complex as f***ing possible — because then you’ve never got a chance of getting it on the page.

Rob Wiblin: Have you changed your mind about any of your proposals from the book? Either in a positive or negative direction?

Ian Dunt: No, no. The thing is, it hasn’t been very long since I wrote it, and things are still f***ed. So no. There are many things in my life that I have changed my mind about. Of those individual proposals, no. What’s changed, especially on electoral reform, is that the people around me who would support it are no longer as vociferous as they used to be.

Rob Wiblin: Because it would enable people who they disagree with?

Ian Dunt: Exactly. Because the winners of it at the moment would be the right, whereas before it would be progressive forces. You look at the 2019 election: 2019 was get Brexit done. In fact, you look at it in terms of votes, most votes were for remain, by far.

Rob Wiblin: At that point.

Ian Dunt: Yeah, but at that point they were divided, whereas the case for Brexit was solid. It all went to one party. First of all, first-past-the-post punishes division. Now the division is on the right. So if you put together the vote for the Tories and Reform, you get 50% — 25% on both of them. You eke out about 42% from the progressive parties: if you put the Greens and the Lib Dems and Labour together, you’re still not there.

So right now, if we had a proportional system, we would have a very, very right-wing government. I believe in proportional representation. So even when there’s a situation that goes against my core beliefs as to which way this country should be governed, I should be defending that result, because it is a reflection of what people want. But nevertheless, I find that the people around me aren’t necessarily.

Rob Wiblin: They’re more pragmatic perhaps.

Ian Dunt: Pragmatic is one word for it, yeah. [laughs]

Rob Wiblin: All right. A final question: If you had a meeting with Keir Starmer and he was saying, “What are your top suggestions for things that I could plausibly do that –”

Ian Dunt: What makes you think that I don’t have that meeting?

Rob Wiblin: Well, when you have meetings with Keir Starmer: what are the policies that you think he could plausibly adopt that he might actually take forward, things that might actually happen that would be good?

Ian Dunt: Outside of electoral reform, I think every single proposal in that book, many of which we’ve talked about here, could easily be done. You know, they wouldn’t cause that much of a backlash from right-wing press: “It’s just boring constitutional nuts-and-bolts stuff, and we don’t really care about that. Let’s talk about asylum seekers again.” I think you could get away with almost any of them.

The most important one to me is giving the Commons control of its timetable. Just on point of principle, the legislature should be able to decide what it does and for how long, in a democratic system where the people are sovereign. On that basis, that is how it should be arranged. And I would hope that by giving it that sense of stature, its sense of gravitas back, its behaviour would begin to reflect something that was a little less infantile than it is right now. So if I had to pick one, I would pick that.

But honestly, I know why electoral reform is really hard and why no one that wins an election is ever going to do it — because they just won an election on a system that they can operate. Outside of that, I think all of those proposals are easily doable politically, logistically, operationally — and we’d be in a much better place, and Labour Party would be in a much better place, if it was to do.

Rob Wiblin: My guest today has been Ian Dunt, and the book is How Westminster Works… and Why It Doesn’t. Thanks so much for coming on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

Ian Dunt: I’m so tired. This is like, the longest podcast I’ve ever known. I am so tired. [laughs]

Rob Wiblin: Thanks so much.

Ian Dunt: Thank you.