In the first two parts of this mini-series, I looked at how policy is made, and how its creation is managed. Today, I want to look at its failings, the implications of those failings, and how future policy making might be shaped.
As a party of perpetual opposition, our inclusive but often ponderous policy-making regime allowed members to influence core policy, in the knowledge that it would be a means of attacking the Government, but was unlikely to be applied. Occasionally, that led to somewhat populist ideas being espoused but, if a Government did something in a field where our policy was obsolete, or overtaken by events, our spokespeople had a set of principles to fall back on.
Such an arrangement worked, for the most part, especially in small Parliamentary Parties. However, its weaknesses became more apparent as Labour’s mania for legislation produced a plethora of technical changes in need of detailed scrutiny.
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