Douglas Carswell: Restore the State (Part 1): Britain’s state of dysfunction

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.  He was previously the MP for Clacton. 

This is part one, of a weekly mini series exploring how to fix the workings of the British state.

Four years in America has made me realise quite how dysfunctional the British state really is.

In the first four months of his second term, President Trump deported 140,000 illegal immigrants and used troops to secure the southern border effectively. In contrast, the British government struggles to manage its borders. Prime Minister Keir Starmer posts performative updates on X about “tackling migration,” which seem detached from reality. Over the past five years, an estimated 5.2 million legal and illegal immigrants have entered the UK.

Since 2001, both the U.S. and UK have overspent beyond their tax revenues, accumulating massive debt. While opinions on Joe Biden vary, the U.S. can at least point to the fact that his American Rescue Plan and CHIPS Act spurred economic recovery post-COVID.

What has Britain gained? The UK spends £141 billion annually on welfare, supporting 14 per cent of the working-age population at public expense, including 1.2 million foreigners whose Universal Credit payments alone cost $11 billion.

In three decades, Britain has failed to open a major new runway, reservoir, or road.

With an economy seven times larger than Britain’s, the US is always going to have more resources to throw at things.  But look at how badly we squander what we have.

With debt interest payments now twice the size of the defense budget, the Ministry of Defence still manages to employ nearly as many civilian staff (60,000) as there are frontline soldiers in the chronically undermanned Army.  Our Ministry of Justice, with 90,000 employees, faces a backlog of approximately 2 million court cases in England and Wales, yet many courts operate below capacity.

The U.S. isn’t immune to government inefficiency—Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative exposed staggering waste.  But there is an awareness of the failures of the administrative state in America –and a determination to fix them.

Too many Brits still do not fully grasp that the failures of officialdom are systemic.

Many still naively imagine that if only they elected a different lot to Parliament, things would improve.  Few yet grasp we need not only a change of government but change in how the country is governed. The deep-seated dysfunction is a consequence of a radical transformation in the way the country is run, which started with Tony Blair’s landslide election victory in 1997.

Increasingly, power has been passed away from those we elect to unelected bureaucrats and judges.  The Bank of England was granted independence to set interest rates and oversee the economy. Energy policy is now dictated by the Climate Change Committee, while the Migration Advisory Committee has permitted millions of low-skilled migrants to enter the country.

The Blairite reforms reshaped the judiciary and constitution, establishing a Supreme Court, expanding judicial review, and empowering judges to override executive decisions. When Blair spoke of constitutional reform, he promised to “modernise Britain’s governance for the long term”. Instead of modernising government, Blair created a system that malfunctions.

It has become a cliché for former ministers and advisers to complain about a broken system they once helped run.  Most seem better at describing the problem than at offering solutions.

One common assertion made by former officials is that our system of government suffers from a lack of long term thinking.  This sounds superficially insightful and clever, but how would giving even more power to unelected officials—by letting them set long-term strategies—improve the situation? The track records of the Bank of England and the Climate Change Committee suggest it wouldn’t.

The British state’s dysfunction stems from already entrusting too much to unaccountable officials who pursue their own agendas, and double down on their failed group think.

Another common refrain is that the British state is overly centralised, with too much power concentrated in the hands of a few institutions and individuals. But is that really true?

The problem surely is that nothing gets done.

Roads, reservoirs, and runways remain unbuilt because no one has the authority to approve them. Illegal immigrants are not removed because publicly funded lawyers can clog up the courts to stop it.  Even tax and spending decisions are half determined by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Isn’t that what Parliament is for?

Decision-making power isn’t overly concentrated; it’s mired in complexity. Elected officials are hamstrung by bureaucracy, and in key areas, policy control has been ceded to quangos, reducing ministers to mere lobbyists with limited influence.

In Whitehall, ministers lack control over civil servants who prioritise process over results and overly confident in their ability to manage outcomes. Far from a model of excellence, the civil service stifles ministerial initiatives with legal excuses and inertia. Even determined ministers face resistance from officials backed by the ministerial and civil service codes, which allow them to disregard clear instructions.

Even if ministers are willing to act, they are frequently overruled by judges, who have extended the scope of judicial review allowing them not just to overturn policy, but to dictate to ministers what that policy ought to be.

To make the British state more effective, a future government with a Commons majority needs practical policy solutions developed now, before taking office. Once in power, ministers are distracted by urgent matters, and officials often dilute reforms they oppose, as happened with John Birt’s proposals nearly two decades ago. Trying to work out how to reform Whitehall once in government would be like trying to fix a bike while riding it.

Now is the time to work out what an incoming administration needs to do right away to restore the British state:

1. Creating a Department of the Prime Minister: The U.S. President has at his disposal a robust White House team, with departments offering expertise from legal counsel to budget advice. In contrast, a British Prime Minister operates with a small Downing Street staff, often focused on managing the news cycle. The Cabinet Office functions at arm’s length, and despite the Prime Minister’s nominal role as First Lord of the Treasury, budget-setting is largely delegated to its officials.

This structure creates a dysfunctional triumvirate at the core of government, undermining effective executive power. If Keir Starmer embraces the idea of a Department of the Prime Minister, it must be done properly.

Merging the Cabinet Office into a new Department of the Prime Minister, led by the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, would streamline authority. The Treasury, despite its dominance over Whitehall’s spending, often fails to deliver results. A reformed structure would empower the Prime Minister to drive meaningful change, overcoming Whitehall’s limitations.

2. Rewrite the Civil Service Management Code: In the U.S., top administrative roles are often filled by political appointees, and recent executive actions have made it easier to replace permanent officials, increasing accountability to the administration. Britain needs a similar shift. Currently, ministers oversee departments but lack real control, as the Civil Service Management Code, shaped by career civil servants, limits their ability to hire or fire key staff. This allows officials to make political decisions by interpreting ministerial intent, undermining accountability.

Rewriting the Code is essential to empower ministers to build teams aligned with their priorities, strengthening governance and accountability to Parliament.

3. Judicial reform: In Britian, we pretend that judges are objective, narrowly interpreting the law as it is.  In reality, judicial restraint has largely disappeared.  Judges routinely adjudicate, as in America, on the basis of what they think the law ought to be.  If British judges are to behave like American judges, perhaps they should face American-type oversight?

The chief justification for the abandonment of judicial restraint in Britain has been that our centralised executive wields excessive power.  If judicial activism really were just a response to an overbearing executive, why has it risen across nearly all Western nations, not just Britain?

Granting judges greater powers to review government actions has significantly hindered the executive’s ability to govern effectively. Judicial reform is essential in order to ensure Britain is effectively governed once again.