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“We can’t affordGMPSWmpmpYour browser does not support the element. not to act,” said Wes Streeting, the health secretary. After six months in office the Labour government on January 3rd unveiled its scheme to sort out England’s social-care system. All parties agree the system is a disgrace. It jams the , heaps pressure on close-to-bankrupt local councils and causes misery for the infirm and disabled. So act Mr Streeting did: he unveiled an independent commission on social care. Its final report is due in 2028.British politics has become a prisoner of process, with social care simply the latest topic to be banged up. “Process is a worthy means to an end,” wrote Sir Tony Blair in “On Leadership”, a self-help book for people who think they should run 7 countries. “The trouble is its tendency to become the end.” The result is “a continuous loop of deliberation not decision”.Commissions, consultations and inquiries designed to improve policy instead delay and distort it, allowing politicians to duck difficult but necessary decisions, such as who pays for social care and how. In the 20th century arrogant and over-powerful governments trampled voters with the view that the ends justified the means. Now means trump the ends. Guardrails introduced to avoid the errors of the 20th century are instead enabling the errors of the 21st, in which stasis has led to decay.Decisions that can be made are delayed. Consider the Lower Thames Crossing, a £9bn ($11.1bn) tunnel to the east of London. In 2023 Sir Keir Starmer, who has styled himself as a builder, bemoaned its slow progress, pointing out that the tunnel had cost the best part of £800m before building had even begun. After several consultations, the project was due to receive a yea or nay from ministers in the autumn. Instead, the government delayed its decision, and launched another consultation. It is a controversial project: environmentalists hate it; local s love it. Someone will be angry, whether it is blocked or built. A belief in immaculate conception has been replaced by the immaculate consultation: the idea that something can happen without someone being screwed.If the purpose of a system is what it does, then consultations, commissions and inquiries are there to ensure decisions are simply not made. After all, in Westminster, doing nothing is wise. Sophisticated operatives quote “Yes, Minister”, a 45-year-old television satire about a minister and his wily civil servants. “He is suffering from politician’s logic,” says one mandarin of a minister keen on action. “Something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it,” replies another. 1 is a world where sins of commission are everywhere and sins of omission do not exist.When stasis is the norm, legislation at normal speed can seem irresponsibly quick. The most consequential moment of Labour’s tenure so far came when a bill on whisked through its first stages in Parliament in November. Rather than representative democracy in action—s debated a topic, and sent it through to the next stage—some saw an abuse of process. A Royal Commission would have been a better approach, they said. People who see assisted dying as little more than state-sanctioned murder would care little if the policy were first suggested by a panel of grandees with a soup of letters after their names. In such a moral case, the means hardly matter when the ends are so profound.When the choice is between doing and discussing, British politicians instinctively opt for the latter. Consider the recent frenzy over “grooming gangs”—the abuse of thousands of girls by men of mainly Pakistani heritage in Rotherham and other towns from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. The facts are well-known; culprits were jailed; hundreds of pages of reports, detailing wretched abuse and the screw-ups that led to it, are available to read.Rather than action to prevent a repeat, Conservative s and far-right outriders combined to demand a more comprehensive inquiry. Even extremists, whose policy prescriptions sometimes involve mass deportation or the death penalty, called for a grandee to re-examine what is already known. In response the government confirmed it would enact some of the recommendations of an inquiry into child abuse from 2022, which included basic measures such as a statutory duty for certain people working with children to report suspicion of abuse. That the Tories did not enact them while in office is telling. After all, the inquiry had done its job; the means to a better policy had instead become the end.People worry, fairly, about the future of democratic politics in Britain. The stability of Parliament, where Labour enjoys an unassailable majority, stands in contrast to the chaos of public opinion, where both main parties are remarkably unpopular. Too often, the saviour is more process. Citizens’ assemblies, in which randomly selected people chew over knotty issues and present their conclusions to lawmakers, are beloved by wonks. At their heart is the mistaken idea that people are unhappy with the manner of decisions, not their effect. Forget the ends, consider the means.Offering another commission, consultation or an assembly becomes little more than an ineffective “accountability sink”, into which blame for a decision can be poured. The term was coined by Dan Davies in “The Unaccountability Machine”, one of the most useful books of 2024. In it, he defined accountability thus: “The extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa.” In other words, a shop assistant might be able to fob off an angry customer by blaming a system they have no power to change. Politicians have no such defence. After all, a government is almost always able to change something. It can hide behind process only for so long. Voters see through it, eventually. Means are no protection if voters are unhappy with the ends.
