David Cameron’s recent directive to his MPs to give Gordon Brown an easier ride in the Commons is unlikely to have left the Prime Minister with a warm, tingly feeling of being valued. Indeed, to be labelled as so politically hapless that even your principal rival can’t stand to see you endure further humiliation must rank somewhere above Charles I’s doubled shirt allowance on execution day in the list of the top ten least comforting gestures.

Naturally, Cameron knew this at the time, and his less-than-secret entreaties to his party must have been partly intended to enhance Mr Brown’s reputation as a lost cause. But behind the ridicule, a genuine tactical purpose is underpinning the idea, that purpose being to preserve the faltering Brown government in order to forestall the rise to power of a younger, perhaps more media-savvy generation of Labour leaders-in-waiting who might pose a stiffer challenge at a general election. Better the devil you know, goes the theory, especially when that devil continually trips over his tail, stubs his hoofs, or pokes himself in the eye with his own trident.

At the heart of this is the feeling that a Purnell, a Burnham or a Miliband or two might be ready to step into the void if Brown is felled, and that they might fare better in revitalising a threadbare, battered government than their beleaguered predecessor. After all, following a humiliation in Crewe and obliteration in Henley, they could hardly do any worse.

As a matter of risk avoidance, it might seem a sound plan to keep the turkey alive until Christmas; but it’s nonetheless a misjudgement, both of Brown and of the vultures circling over his head. Firstly, Brown may be bloodied, but he’s not yet out for the count. Hesitant and faltering as his first year has been, he is still an experienced and entrenched political heavyweight. If he can bring to bear on the current economic crisis the same ingenuity he employed as Chancellor in camouflaging the true extent of his borrowing and spending, he might yet rebuild his reputation and drag Labour to safety. If the Tories can finish him off before he has a chance, they should do so.

Secondly, Brown’s potential replacements are hardly terrifying. The interchangeable forty-somethings now being spoken of are either unknown or unimpressive or both. Having served as junior ministers and now in the cabinet, they also lack the credentials to represent a change of direction. Youth and likeability are of course advantages in political life, but only as adjuncts to genuine political skill and standing. Tony Blair and David Cameron both combined these essential assets; none of the Labour prospects yet appear to. A general election pitting Cameron against his supermarket own-brand equivalent is only going to go one way.

Offering Brown pity may allow the Tories to appear statesmanlike while sniggering on the inside, and as such is an attractive plan. But the better option would be to strike while the iron is hot, and do everything possible to dislodge a leader who is still his party’s most dangerous fighter – damning with faint praise though that description is.

“We will, by about two years’ time, have completed about 120 guidelines.  And from then on we won’t be able to do any new ones……. …. So what we’re proposing to the government is the government invests much more heavily in our guidelines programme, so that we can not just keep the existing ones up to date, but do a whole lot of further guidelines.” Professor Sir Michael Rawlings Chairman of NICE, BBC Today 27^th June 2008

Last week NICE, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence and Quango extraodinaire, celebrated its ninth birthday. In a sixth of the time that the NHS has been around NICE has so successfully entrenched itself that we’d be forgiven for believing we were born with it.  For achieving such unquestioned status so quickly it must top the chart of the 111 new quangos set up by Labour since 1997.

It’s Chairman, (founding and still in situ) Professor Sir Michael Rawlings’s ambition for NICE is expansionist. Sir Michael, who has managed to chair the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs over the same time period and has been proud to announce that in a career’s lifetime in the NHS he had never had to send a bill to patient and wouldn’t know how much to charge if he had to, was breezily confident about drawing on evermore government funding.  He seemed blithely unaware that the money is running out, that the country is in the worst economic downturn since the 70’s, that Gordon Brown is facing a further billion pound bill to pay for his 10p tax fiasco, on top of the 2.7 billion rescue package to date.  

But then all this clearly passes you by if you happen to run one of the country’s 1,162 quangos.   A recent report by the Taxpayers Alliance revealed Quangos’ lack of inhibition about spending our money.  Quango creep has left the Exchequer and us poorer by £64 billion per annum, the equivalent to £2,550 per household.  Quangos now employ almost 700,000 bureaucrats.  Even under the Cabinet Office’s restrictive definition, the cost of these bodies has risen by 50% in the last ten years.

But cost and waste aside should we worry about the role of quangos in our lives?  Undoubtedly we should. 

The conclusions of the recent Price Waterhouse Report – Review of Prison Based Drug Treatment Funding,  illustrate why: 

“The strategy will need to clarify and prioritise the required outcomes, and introduce revised commissioning arrangements to facilitate the coordination of drug treatment services and ensure that best practice is followed.”

 You might just write this off as contemporary newspeak or gobbledygook. That would be a mistake.  Underneath the verbiage what Price Waterhouse is recommending is the imposition of a treatment system already an expensive failure in the community, this time across the entire prison estate.  Yet the depressing ‘outcome’ of this ‘more focussed national strategy’, is unlikely to be the rehabilitation of drug using offenders or indeed the reduction of crime and re offending.  It is likely to be an inescapable imposition of methadone maintenance across the prison community. Should the individual prisoner want to use his time locked up to get clean, tough.  In this new Price Waterhouse world of prison treatment the extraordinary idea of retoxifying prisoners to cope with their presumed illicit drug use on getting out even gets credence.  Forget the urgent need for down to earth solutions  – the dearth of and need for ‘dry’, secure and safe, post release  half way house accommodation and care -  when complex bureaucracies can be established and computer system installed to track the hoped for  seamless movement of offenders from methadone in prison to  methadone in the community.

How did the Price Waterhouse Review, arrive at these conclusions so confidently and so uncritically?  How could they be so utterly unaware that the approach of the National Treatment Agency (another Quango) that their plans mirror, has been laid bare like the emporer’s new clothes? 

The answer can be tracked back to NICE - where else? The ‘Evidence of Drug Treatment Effectiveness’ on which the PW conclusions are premised comes straight from NICE. And guess what?  It is the same evidence that has so influenced the National Treatment Agency which they so repeatedly invoke in justification.  And when we see that several members of the Expert Panel and Steering Group of Price Waterhouse Review are closely professionally connected with each other and with the NICE drug treatment guidance panel………

And it goes on.  Now a senior member of the NTA Board, Professor Lord Kamlesh Patel, has just been put in charge of another Prison Drug Treatment Review Group, funded by the Ministry of Justice and Department of Health. On what will he be basing his thinking over this process? To the assembled delegates at the recent National Treatment Agency conference he made this quite clear – the recommendations of the Price Waterhouse Report.  Of course.

If our schools could ensure that all of the top 20% of pupils, in terms of their academic ability, fulfil their potential and go on to get the qualifications they need for a place in higher education, then the number of young entrants to UK universities would increase by 25%.  

This fact has emerged from a recent piece of research produced by the Sutton Trust. They have found that 60,000 pupils who at the age of 11, 14 or 16 are among the top fifth of academic performers in English state schools do not subsequently enter higher education by the age of 18.

The sad news, is that the students who fail to go onto university are largely those from poorer backgrounds. And at a time when research has shown that social mobility is declining, and the growing demands of the international economy mean that we need a well educated, equipped and trained workforce, this is a shocking waste of talent and opportunity.

What is the answer to this problem? There is probably not one quick fix solution. More setting and streaming of academically gifted children in schools to ensure that their education most closely matches their ability, mentoring by teachers and/or outside advisors to give them confidence and support in the process of preparing to apply for university, and encouraging parents to take an active interest in their children’s education at secondary school. Perhaps all of these are important, but the driving force behind the reform of our education system, so that it makes the most of the talents of every child, will come from more local decision making in the schools and personalised intervention around the pupils.

With this may come a culture that is more excited by achievement, than it is frightened of failure. 

New data released this week confirm America's vibrant religious culture. More than half of adults consider religion very important in their lives, and 86 percent say that it is at least somewhat important. About 6 in 10 American adults report membership in a local religious congregation, and nearly 4 in 10 attend at least once a week.

No wonder campaign strategists are seriously sizing up religious voters during this heated election season. But more profound than moving a voting bloc is the potential of America's spiritual capital to meet serious social needs, and to shape our approach to policy as a result.

Yesterday in Washington, President Bush highlighted this potential in a speech to a national conference organized by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives--an office he launched in his first executive order in 2001. Four cabinet secretaries and the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy were also on the agenda. The President has sought to make government systematically more friendly to civil society solutions, which has been accomplished in a variety of policy areas, from drug treatment to prisoner re-entry to homelessness. Thirty-five governors--more than half of them Democrats--now have similar faith-based efforts at the state level.

But the faith-based initiative's rhetoric has at times outpaced implementation, and the devil in the policy details demands persistent attention over the life of a program (reauthorization proposals for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR--and their abandonment of core elements of original administration policy--are a case in point).

The initiative's major policy accomplishment has been to prompt serious reflection on the significant capacity of American civil society. Moving forward, policymakers should draw lessons from these recent years and hone proposals that expand the vision for reshaping government. For example, the role of faith-based organizations should figure more largely in discussions of curbing entitlements and dependency generally. Entitlement and welfare state programs represent a competing paradigm for solving social needs, in contrast to the local, personal, and flexible nature of civil society initiatives. Runaway entitlement commitments saddle every child born today with $175,000 in debt. Continued growth of government will have a dampening effect on civil society. Conversely, religious and community-based groups can play a role in entitlement and welfare state reform by providing alternative means of meeting needs as well as helping individuals and families navigate complex systems or transitions.

Money and politics are necessary but uncomfortable bedfellows.

In the US, Barak Obama has got into a stew this week for his decision to forego federal funds – which allows him to spend as much as he wants on his campaign.  This runs directly contrary to a previous promise to stick to the limits (which only apply if he takes federal funding) – and leaves him open to the allegation that his commitment to the “new politics” only applies when its convenient.  McCain, as one of the leading proponents of limiting the extraordinary sums spent on campaigns in the US, has got some good ammunition.

Here in the UK, politicians must wish they had Obama’s problem.  The Labour Party, in particular, can only dream of a situation where too much money rather than too little is the problem.

The UK problem is much more severe than Obama’s.  Here, politicians are caught between a rock and a hard place.  On one side the public chafes at giving them a slice of their taxes in order to run campaigns which many regard as wasteful.  On the other, they protest when big donors provide the funding that the parties need and are quick to claim that corruption is rife even where it probably is not.  

Indeed, those protests may grow stronger if stories that trade union leaders have drawn up a series of demands in return for saving the Labour Party from bankruptcy are true.  

Tony Blair knew how unsatisfactory it was that the Labour Party should depend so heavily on a cabal of trade union leaders with a strong political agenda.  But the Party’s funding situation is now so desperate that they may be thrown back on their mercies.  If that dependency is seen to result in damaging concessions, public anger at the financial relationship between the government and the unions may boil over.  

We should pay heed to the criticism levelled at Barak Obama.  His critics are right that the “new politics” does not feel compatible with high spending, and with dependence on private funds – whether from trade unions or from big donors.  

There is resistance to public funding of political parties, but, in truth, this bridge was crossed long ago.  The Conservatives benefitted to the tune of £1.5 million in the first quarter of this year.  Yes – there will be complaints about the spending of taxpayers’ money on campaigns, but those complaints will be a useful discipline on wasteful spending.  It is the awareness of the need for such restraint that, in relation to MPs’ salaries, has already led the front benches to forego part of the proposed increase this year.

As Jack Straw’s proposals for party funding continue to founder, we should take the opportunity to propose a full clean out of the stables, and commit to a new way that takes private money out of politics.

Last week’s CPS seminar on public services in the post-bureaucratic age provided an opportunity to see first hand how Conservative policy is developing. The role of the voluntary sector was a key theme and the depth of analysis to be found in Greg Clark’s recent green paper shows the Party’s commitment to getting the relationship between state action and voluntary action right. Unsurprisingly, another key theme was decentralisation: how people can be given more say in how public services are delivered. Reflecting on the thoughtful contributions to the discussion I have concluded that if we really want decentralisation to work then Conservatives should start thinking seriously about a written constitution.

If structures that depend on civic engagement and community action are to be developed and sustained then there needs to be a degree of certainty about their permanence and status. Local decision making will only be taken seriously if people believe that the decisions they make have genuine authority. Planning provides a good example of why this is the case.

During the seminar the Shadow Housing Minster Grant Shapps suggested that giving local communities more control over planning could result in more housing if they receive the full benefits from development in terms of tax income. Research by Policy Exchange a couple of years ago suggested that local communities were more sympathetic to new development in Germany for this very reason. But Germany has a federal system enshrined in a written constitution, local communities know that the federal government cannot interfere. By contrast, a planning bill, currently being forced through parliament, will take control over big infrastructure projects away from local councils in England and give it to a new quango. Even if central government did allow local councils to keep all the tax revenue to be derived from a population influx, what is to stop a future government simply taking this revenue away?

If we want to make decentralisation work then we should consider a more formal constitutional settlement. It is yet another reason, in addition to those I mentioned in my very first blog, and Harry Snook outlined last week, why Conservatives should start taking this subject seriously.

Watching the Chancellor on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday morning, I had to check that my heart was still beating and that my coffee was having the desired effect, because if what he said was true, then I had fallen asleep and been transported to another planet.

On Planet Darling, the new Labour government had inherited an economic mess in 1997.  The subsequent ten years of broadly benign economic growth had nothing to do with the world economic situation, and everything to do with Gordon Brown’s stewardship of the British economy. 

Suddenly, in around August 2007 with the onset of the “credit crunch”, Britain’s economy had become miraculously interlinked with the rest of the world, and all that is bad in our current situation was driven solely by those global forces, and domestic policies and politicians were powerless in the face of those forces.

With some confidence, one can put forward a case that is slightly closer to reality.  After the 1992 ERM debacle which meant the Major government never recovered a reputation for economic competence in voters’ eyes, things did stabilise.  Labour in fact inherited a generally favourable economic situation when they came into government. 

After pledging to match Conservative spending pledges in the 1997 election, so as not to “frighten the horses”, the brakes came off government spending in 1999-2000, and Labour have since overseen an unprecedented expansion in the public sector’s share of overall economic activity (as measured by GDP).  It is only very recently that the government has been forced to re-apply the brakes to an extent, as tax receipts begin to fall. 

Much of this increased spending has been fuelled by government borrowing.  Having forecast in his March Budget that government borrowing would be £43bn next year (compared to an original forecast in the Pre-Budget Report of £36bn), on Sunday the Chancellor did not give a clear answer when asked whether he would now break his self-imposed fiscal rules.  The OECD certainly seems to think that he will – see http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/7/4/20209191.pdf

The central charge against the government is that, having and borrowed and spent like drunken sailors when the economy was going well, they are singularly ill-prepared to weather the current downturn.  The accusation certainly holds a great deal of truth, and for the moment all that the electorate can do is cross their collective fingers and hope that this batch of Labour ministers are better at tidying up their own mess than their predecessors (Denis Healy going to the IMF for a loan to prop up the pound in 1976 springs to mind).

As well as laying blame, it is also necessary to ask what would be a coherent policy response to the current situation?  Mr Darling calls for pay restraint in both the public and private sectors to stop inflation being fuelled, but serious doubts remain about Labour’s ability to really stand up to the unions (given their symbiotic relationship). 

It should be one of the central planks of policy to focus hard on cutting government debt (rather than, for example, borrowing an additional £2.7bn on a whim to fund a series of measures to replace the 10p tax rate abolition).  This would reduce debt service costs and give some room for manoeuvre to help particularly hard-pressed parts of the economy.

Reducing debt levels will mean reducing spending.  Labour’s knee-jerk response to this suggestion has always been to say that this necessarily means cuts in “schools ‘n’ hospitals”.  The case must be made forcefully that this is not true (and it manifestly is not!).  The current government is on the cusp of losing its reputation for economic competence once and for all, and for many a government this is fatal. 

The opportunity is now there for a convincing alternative narrative to be put forward – one that shows that we can reverse the trend of a transfer of economic activity from the productive private sector to the non-productive public sector (productive versus non-productive in the sense of having the ability to generate economic wealth), and that we can do so in a way that will leave us better placed than we are currently to emerge from the downturn with strong economic prospects and growth. 

The welcome recent news that four police forces are to abandon government targets and allow officers greater discretion provides some solid evidence of a ‘post-bureaucratic’ approach in action. The decision certainly chimes with rising public dissatisfaction at the way public services have become detached from the public after years of centralised command and control.

It also fits the theory outlined in a new book – Systems Thinking in the Public Sector – which, despite the less than eye-catching title, offers a devastating critique of the mismanagement of public services over the last decade. The author John Seddon shows convincingly how, across the public services, ‘command and control thinking rules everywhere’ and how, far from amounting to a programme of ‘modernisation’, the so-called ‘reform agenda’ has been neither modern nor effective in delivery. The mistakes have perhaps been shown best by the Government’s target culture, where arbitrarily-set values have distorted delivery, created perverse incentives and fuelled public dissatisfaction.

In policing, Seddon lays the blame for the death of initiative, judgment and common sense on the ‘science of delivery’ or ‘deliverology’. It has, he argues ‘spawned a bureaucracy that stifles achievement of purpose and instead has created a bureaucracy of recording and reporting. It is not only demoralising, but it undermines performance and creates a culture of fear.’ Or to put it another way, ‘capturing data does not help police officers capture criminals.’

Seddon’s analysis – and his advocacy of a ‘systems approach’ alternative which designs against demand - should be required reading for Ministers, and their Shadows. Perhaps it’s too optimistic even to contemplate, but you never know, the longed-for twin goals of cutting waste and improving efficiency in public services could perhaps start being turned into reality.

Davis resigned in order to provoke a by-election, thus enabling him to put a clear choice before the people of Haltemprice and Howden - 42 days detention, yes or no.  So what?  Well, by provoking the by-election Davis has implicitly reminded us that the votes taken by Members of Parliament in many cases bear no reflection of the views of those individuals the MPs apparently represent.  The reality is that the British form of democracy creates almost no incentive for MPs to vote as their constituents might desire.  As a result, the decisions taken in parliament do not necessarily reflect the wishes of the people. 

In the United States on the other hand Congressmen and Senators are left in no doubt as to how they should vote on matters of importance.  They are left in no doubt because the spectre of a primary challenge is never far away and the prospect of a challenger prepared to exploit a less than perfect voting record hangs heavy in the mind. 

Perhaps it’s time we took a hard look at the job our MPs do and ask ourselves a question as simple as that put before the voters of Haltemprice and Howden – should MPs be there to represent the views of those who put them in parliament or to take decisions without reference to the wishes of the people? 

Only the whim of history and its authors will decide whether David Davis’s quixotic electoral insurrection under the banner of civil liberties will rank as a defining moment in the development of British political culture, or as the last hurrah of a frustrated, ambitious man. But whatever the case, it will prove to be the latest step in the process by which the conservative political tradition has brought forth the most coherent, the most determined and the most ideologically grounded opposition to the erosion of traditional freedoms.

It forms part of the ongoing rehabilitation of the conservative “brand” in the eyes of the public and a notable renaissance of the intellectual traditions of the Right, which has historically favoured limitations on the State’s remit and powers.

Although I personally don’t share his opposition to 42-day detention, I admire Davis’s stand and believe his actions are (at least predominantly) altruistic. But if they are to bear fruit, he and his party must ensure that conservatism of values does not ossify into conservatism of forms. In particular, conservatives must re-evaluate their hostility to a codified constitution; a hostility predicated on a preference for giving full and unfettered force to the electorally-expressed will of the people.

In the modern age, with Parliament increasingly impotent to counterweigh the executive and mass-media political reporting degenerating into a succession of personalised celebrity stories, this fine ideal no longer plays out in practice. The prospect of an election within two years clearly is not frightening Labour or enough of its MPs into opposing further attacks on Habeas Corpus, because the penalties and rewards dispensed by the executive are a more powerful and more immediate influence.

A written constitution could entrench our historic liberties and take them above the fray of party politics. Although it runs counter to the traditional line of conservative thinking, it is a possibility that must not be dismissed out of instinctive unease, but must be taken seriously as a modern means to protect an ancient heritage.