John Redwood: To reverse national decline, government must be prepared to actually govern the state

Sir John Redwood is a former MP for Wokingham and a former Secretary of State for Wales.

Conservatives believe in the rule of law. We do not believe in the rule of unelected lawyers. It is the role of the elected Parliament to listen to voters, debate the problems, establish priorities, change laws and marshal budgets.

Growing voter frustration comes from a sense that either the politicians lie with their promises, or they are incapable of seeing them through because officials, quangos and lawyers disagree. The reason Conservative and Labour find themselves around 20 per cent support only, and Lib Dems around just 11 per cent, is all three parties have been damaged by being in government.

The electorate has been shouting at  them to curb illegal and legal migration, only to see it balloon. Voters have wanted better growth in their incomes and prosperity, only to see slow progress. Electors want clean rivers, trains running on time, hospital waiting lists down, traffic jams eased, taxes lower and debts under control.

Instead taxes gave gone up, especially under the current government whilst these public services and regulators have  failed to deliver. Trains are delayed, patients made to wait, interest rates and inflation have gone up.

Some politicians argue back that the public expects too much. The socialists amongst them tell the public the rich – and in practice many others – have got to pay a lot more tax to fix it. They overlook the fact that the NHS and railways have had billions more in recent years without improvement. They ignore the collapse in public service productivity.

The more conservative politicians tell the civil service and public bodies they can and should deliver more for all the money they are already getting. They announce new initiatives to stop the boats, cut waiting lists, improve the trains, and clean the water. Often, however, very little happens; sometimes quangos and law courts presume to know best, and block the policies.

So what is to be done? Anyone wanting to run the country successfully has to change the way government and the law work. We need to return sovereignty to Parliament.

Out must go the myth of the independent body. If it is paid for out of taxation and mandatory user fees, and has a board appointed by government, it should carry out the will of government in Parliament. Ministers will be blamed when it gets it wrong anyway. Existing quangos should have to agree annual budgets and plans with the sponsoring and responsible minister; the minister and Parliament should review their progress at the time of the annual report.

Where there is need of a genuinely independent power for the quango to adjudicate individual cases or set base interest rates, that can be ring fenced away from the Minister. The rest of what the body does and the bulk of its budget must be under government control.

It is important that British individuals and companies can challenge  government in court where they think there has been maladministration or unfair treatment. There should not, however, be so many easy routes for illegal migrants to challenge an asylum decision in a non-UK court, or in a British court acting under international or treaty law, and one domestic appeal only if there are sufficient grounds.

HM Government should not  surrender an important military base for fear of future action in the International court (which has no power to adjudicate on Commonwealth matters anyway). The UK must too set its own energy and environmental policy following debate and votes in Parliament; policy should not be driven by an external committee, nor dictated by court judgements based on an international treaty.

There should be no reset giveaway of powers to the EU to make laws and settle taxes and budgets. Our 28 years in the Single Market brought us ever slower growth. They were years when the US powered ahead far faster than the EU: today, American GDP per head is twice that of Europe. The EU has too many of the wrong kind of anti-business, anti-jobs, anti-innovation laws which drag them down. Adopting more of that would frustrate voters even more.

I was asked to speak about all this to a recent Conservative conference for Berkshire and Oxfordshire. There was general agreement amongst councillors, campaigners, and senior party workers there that Conservative councils, and a future Conservative government, need to show they can tackle the unresponsive and unhelpful parts of the British state. Words and promises are not sufficient – people want results.

Reform is offering to cut through. Will they show how to make cuts to the huge £1.4bn Kent county budget? What reductions will they bring in this year? Do they have plans that would in practice stop the small boats that would not fall foul of lawyers and treaties? Being responsible for councils will pose them the governing test.

National government is too slow, too costly, and too cut off from public need. If it got on with cutting legal and illegal migration there would be big savings, and taxpayers would be pleased. If it took strong action to stop HS2 costing a runaway fortune, and to turn round the catastrophic loss in NHS productivity, the national mood would lift. Taxes could be lowered. Then we would have more growth.