Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

An end to sofa government

by Aaron Wherry on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 10:53am - 5 Comments

David Cameron wants to overhaul British democracy.

But it’s not just by decentralising power and reforming parliament that we can redistribute power away from an over-mighty executive. We need to end the culture of sofa government, where unaccountable spin doctors in No 10 – whether it’s Alastair Campbell or Damian McBride – toss around ideas and make up policies not to meet the national interest but to hit dividing lines or fit the news cycle. So we’ll put limits on the number of political advisers, strengthen the ministerial code, protect the independence of the civil service, and ensure that more decisions are made by cabinet as a whole.

Much more at the Guardian’s New Politics project. Read and imagine what it’d be like if we were having as serious a discussion in this country.

Tags: Alastair Campbell, britain, Damian McBride, David Cameron, England, Gordon Brown, MP expenses, New Politics

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Mark Greenan

But like our self-interested political elites in Canada, he takes the most transformative reform – proportional representation off the table.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/25/david-cameron-a-new-politics1

So really Aaron, the debate here is not THAT much different.

LeenieJ

gotta start somewhere.

CAPS

In England (as it used to be here in Canada) shouldn’t it be Chestefield government?

http://www.savedarfur.org Sophia Geffros

We stopped calling them chesterfields?
I feel so behind the times.

oompus boompus

Britain is one of the most socialist countries in the world. The amount of centralized control, domestic spying, overbearing police presence, monetary and economic mismanagement, corruption, foreign affairs stupidity, government perfidy, and political and bureaucratic hypocrisy is approaching that of the old USSR.

If you want to see a world-beating example of shuffling deck chairs, then kindly peruse this bit of drivel …

“So we’ll put limits on the number of political advisers, strengthen the ministerial code, protect the independence of the civil service, and ensure that more decisions are made by cabinet as a whole.”

To paraphrase, we don’t need fewer nannies, we just need to slightly modify the way that the nannies are organized! Or to introduce a Canadian hobby horse, we need to select our socialist nannies through proportional representation! LOL.