Interesting Claims About UK Politics

I went to a progress studies dinner last week. Met a few interesting people there, one of whom was a girl who worked in a fairly senior role in a major think tank. I spent a while talking to her about politics.

We talked a bit about government failures. On planning (e.g: it being impossible to build things in the UK, especially housing but also industry/infrastructure). On migration (can’t deport serious criminals due to ECHR, huge numbers coming in on student or social care visas). On crime (prisons ran out of places despite years of advance warning this was incoming, 2 year + court backlogs, chronically low detection rates, etc…)

In my head there are always two conflicting explanations for these kinds of problems. One kind of explanation is that government is fundamentally efficient and just stuck in bad, but rational equilibria. e.g: Governments underfund courts and prisons because they’re things voters don’t have contact with and hence funding cuts are less immediately electorally damaging than cuts to frontline services such as the NHS. The other is that it’s not a careful political calculus. It’s just incompetence. After our conversation, I’ve updated more towards incompetence.

A bunch of interesting stuff

• Ministers and running departments
  • Most MPs go straight to politics. Very few have experience in the private sector. Even fewer in management. Even fewer in senior leadership roles (e.g: managing an org or large company). These same MP’s then become ministers and are responsible for managing huge government departments, even the smaller of which would be FTSE 100 companies in their own rights.
  • Ministers don’t have much real control over their departments. Firing civil servants is basically impossible. Hence ministers authority is fairly limited. Spads (special advisors, political appointees of whom a minister is allowed to hire a fixed amount to work for them) are also unable to fire/promote etc… anyone
  • Most ministers don’t really care about policy. Most are more focused on media attention and whether they’re in the headlines than anything else
• Government failure
  • Much of the UK government operates through arms-length bodies. We call them quangos. They’re set up and funded by the state but separate from the civil service and with their own charters. These bodies typically have a CEO who is replaced every 5 years and appointed by the sitting government. The conservatives were in power for 14 years and yet did not do much to replace most of these bodies. As a consequence you had e.g an anti DEI government but most of these bodies pushing DEI on industry/academia etc…
  • Often obvious cases of bias in bodies. E.g: (haven’t verified this, medium confidence, seems implausibly bad) fiscal impact of migrants by the treasury is calculated excluding the fact that migrants will get old and draw pensions
• Regulation
  • Huge incentive to pass regulation. Incentive for regulators to “gold plate” international treaties. Regulators are held accountable for bad things that happen due to lack of regulation but not good things that do not happen due to regulation. Ditto for politicians.
  • Very hard to roll back regulation. No one really cares. In no one’s interest to do so.
• How influencing works in her job
  • Spends a month+ writing a 100 page report. Shops it around. Goes on media. Get’s access to ministers. Most don’t read the full report or really care. It’s mostly just padding. Still has to be solid so opponents can’t find anything obvious to attack.
  • Limited salaries. Even in a pretty senior role in a think tank 70k is a ceiling.
  • Hard to change minds. Influencing is mostly done to get people who already agree with you to do X, not to persuade those who disagree.
  • Never forced to advocate for something she doesn’t believe. Is barred from advocating for stuff she does believe but the think tank does no agree with