About this site
Who we are
This site is one of The Right Sites family.
Our mission
The project is designed to correct a national mistake. Almost all popular discussion about government ignores the most important problem in running a country. How do you turn political rhetoric into workable policy?
Politics is good fun. It is a great drama, and more bloody than most sport. But politicians and parties are really fighting over who should hold the levers of power. This site is concerned with that machinery. How does policy grow out of politics? How does policy get administered?
We want to be an accessible place where these difficult (and, yes, boring) issues can be aired.
Our manifesto
This project believes that better government is attainable. What’s more, whichever party or leading politician grasps it will vastly increase their political attractiveness. The problem is, of course, that government is a dull business. It doesn’t deliver soundbites. Smiles don’t make it work better.
However, we live in a post-ideological age. The left-right divide is now complicated. Class is an unreliable indicator to voting habits. Politicians need to find a away to promote themselves as professional, managerial and serious. Or at least to ensure that they are seen as appreciating these qualities in the civil servants who serve them.
This flies in the face of most of the modern political skills that a generation of politicians, egged on by the media, have developed. They have invested a huge amount of effort in working out how to talk to the public, but much less effort in running the country. That means that the Parliament in Westminster has been undervalued, whilst the civil service in Westminster has been all but ignored. Indeed, the most celebrated adminsitrative machine in the world has become something everybody feels free to mock.
Power has had to shift somewhere. We have seen a small army of politically-appointed advisers, party aparatchiks and hand-picked politicial insiders gathered in an increasingly isolated inner machine at Number 10. Begining under PMs such as Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher, but catastrophically under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, we have seen an entire power structure sidelined.
The Prime Minister’s role was once embedded within a Cabinet of ministers, each of whom was emebedded within a Whitehall ministry. That meant that a stable profession of administrators was connected to elected leaders. The Civil Service was both obedient and influential. Ministers might come and go, but they were rooted in an “institutional memory” derived from their ministries.
Much of that has now gone, though it could be revived in short order.
This site is about enabling a renaissance of stable, widely-based, politically-alert, public-spirited government producing a sustainable but evolving policy and practical measures.
