Target seat parliamentary candidates don’t have much time to read books. But they ought to find time at some point before the election to read How Westminster Works…and Why it Doesn’t, by Ian Dunt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023), to warn them how dysfunctional they will find Britain’s Parliament and government have become,
Some Liberal Democrats will be familiar with Ian Dunt from his previous book, How to be a Liberal, which came out in 2020. His analysis of Westminster, based on extensive research and interviews with current and former parliamentarians, staff, civil servants and outside observers, is devastating. Parliamentary sovereignty, he argues, is a convenient myth that covers executive dominance – which has become more dominant in recent years, above all under Boris Johnson’s prime ministership.
Political reform is not an issue that excites most voters. Dunt attempts to explain how repeated failures in policy outcomes are affected by the constant changes in ministerial posts, the weakness of parliamentary scrutiny, the adversarial culture of the Commons and the increasing control by central party machines of the recruitment of candidates who are assisted into safe seats. He includes two case studies to illustrate how policy disasters emerge out of the concentration of power in too few, often poorly-qualified, hands: Chris Grayling’s privatisation of the probation service, pushed through against strong advice from experts, and the evacuation of British and local Afghan staff from Afghanistan, by a Foreign Office which had run down its relevant expertise and ministers who only paid intermittent attention to its urgency.
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