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February 20, 2024 - 7:15am
Labour had to row back yesterday afternoon on its plan for citizens’ assemblies, which had been briefed by Sue Gray in an interview published at the beginning of the week. If the scheme were to still become Labour policy, it remains the sort of constitutional frippery that lingers at the bottom of a government’s to-do list, either abandoned or watered down. Perhaps more interesting, even in spite of the climbdown, is the emergence of Starmer’s Chief of Staff into the policymaking limelight, and what that means for the relationships between elected and appointed power in the next government.
Sue Gray moved to Starmer’s staff from the Cabinet Office, where she had developed a reputation of being both inscrutable and all-powerful. One of her strengths, one would have assumed, is that her own politics had been professionally suppressed for so long. Though of course only a Labourite would take a job with Starmer, her exact policy views are hard to fathom. This can be an advantage for an appointed insider.
In the run-up to the election and beyond, Gray’s task is making the Labour machine work. She must turn a political outfit into a governing one, equipping it with the plans and the skills to get things done. Professional ambiguity often helps with that — with enough egos already in politics, operating under the radar can make it easier to cajole shadow ministers and lean on party apparatus.
Being a more public figure can make one a target, for both internal and external potshots. In recent years, prime ministers have suffered from their associate’s public exposure. Through Brexit, Barnard Castle and general abrasiveness, Dominic Cummings alienated large chunks of the Tory Party as Johnson’s number two. Though an odd, symbiotic, who-is-using-whom relationship existed between the PM and his Chief of Staff, it was ultimately the latter who could be sacrificed when the boss needed a popularity boost (and, if you believe the rumours, when his wife had taken against Cummings).
Other Downing Street set-ups have been similarly unhappy in the end. Andy Coulson’s role as Cameron’s Communications Director highlighted the PM’s uneasy links to News International, especially when Coulson was convicted in relation to phone hacking. Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill also became the outlet for frustrations with Theresa May’s leadership of the party, especially after the blundered 2017 general election. Through Blair’s tenure, of course, his relationship with Alastair Campbell was a frequent source of Westminster discussion.
Each of these examples show how advisers can live off the boss’s political capital, and how misusing it can mean it’s the adviser’s time to go. Having Sue Gray publicly expound on policy is an interesting test of this — especially on a matter that could easily sit in Deputy Leader Angela Rayner’s communities brief. This follows recent Labour rows on green spending and the Rochdale by-election.
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SubscribeSue Gray, like her entire class, will support initiatives to remove political issues out of the realm of political discourse, and in to the control of unelected officials, judges, and quangos. Support for citizens assemblies is entirely consistent with that, so we can expect to see lots of them under a Labour government. Ultimately removing a political feedback loop undermines popular consent and leaves the government with all the flack for unpopular policies it now finds it can’t control or reverse. So appointing a Chief of Staff with that mindset, and with no track record of achievement outside the Civil Service (not unfortunately a high bar these days), is anything but shrewd.
Exactly this.
Was about to write on almost identical lines..
Cumming’s stated mission was to weed out the Blairite obstructionists at the top of the Civil Service, Gray seems more likely to nurture them and give them greater power.
remind me how many people voted for Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak?
You don’t know what citizens’ assemblies are if you think they remove political issues out of the real of political discourse.
Okay,
35,507 of the good people of SW Norfolk voted for Liz Truss
36,693 voted for Sunak to be the MP for Richmond in Yorkshire.
WE DO NOT VOTE FOR PRIME MINISTERS, we do not have a presidential system in this country.
How many times does this have to be explained to some people?
So what were the Tory members doing when selecting a person to take the place of prime minister? Because that looks an awful lot like voting for a prime minister to me.
Perhaps if think very, very carefully you’ll understand the difference between a parliamentary and a presidential voting system. Okay, thinking hat on!
Normal people, people whose days are filled with holding down jobs, raising kids, having a drink on a Saturday night, will not have the time or be interested. The few well meaning citizens that do get involved will be rapidly driven out by the activists who descend, chanting and threatening, like vultures on a corpse. This, in turn, will attract the cynical who see a route to power through manipulation of the single issue nutjobs.
Because there will be hundreds of them, the performance of the media, already doing a terrible job of exposing abuses of power or presenting both sides of an argument honestly, will be further degraded.
We are a hierarchical species. They will all finish up with de facto leaders, probably known as commissars.
Jury service works just fine. No doubt mandatory participation in the policy making process will incite another misguided soviet reference.
A once in a lifetime commitment for, usually, a day or two. Not comparable.
Juries are extraordinarily poor at reaching decisions based on evidence. They are usually more influenced by by emotive arguments and strong personalities than by evidence.
Not in my experience of 4 cases at Crown Court (from the Jury benches, not the Dock).
Thanks Martin – you’re correct with that assessment of these ‘assemblies’. That’s exactly how it will play out.
More than voted for Sue Gray ! And we’re also able to get rid of them. Unlike Sue Gray.
We know perfectly well what citizens assemblies would be. More fake “consultation”. We know who would pick the participants. And it wouldn’t be us.
We have a citizens’ assembly. It’s called the House of Commons and all adult citizens can elect a representative.
When Sue Gray says it, what does it mean? Who sits on these boards? Who appoints them?
It’s daft to think that busy working people will take time off to go and sit on a board just because they’ve been chosen at random. The only people who turn up will be pushing for their cause.
No ordinary voters choose the PM. Only MPs decide who is PM. And they can change them as and when they choose.
Absolutely right. Our political class have been so drenched in EU anti democratic groupthink and progressive ideologies since the late 90s they do not hear us laugh. Whitehall has become a toxic permanent partisan state within a state and Labour is the political wing of this Blob far more than the unions (public sector unions of course now dominate the movement). Her silly school debate society nonsense suggests her immersion in dank Whitehall corridors has impaired her imagination The idea that her reputation for inscrutable integrity survived the shadowy appointment process is absurd. Remember the people doing the boozy parties she probed were not Rishi or Boris who attended leaving dos. They were her people – young civil servants. The way her superiors conspired to oust the Brexit top brass on trumped up bullying and partygate allegations signalled the end of the reputation of the Civil Service. Her working for the shoddy no principle Starmer simply completes the fusion of permanent progressive state with the weaker progressives in parliament, creating one nasty broken ineffective detached CCP like Mess.
As you know WM I don’t ‘buy’ all this Blob stuff, well at least in who you are usually describing as such.
The real secret ‘Blob’ is much more in the shadows – it’s the multi-millionaires who’ve massively benefitted from QE and asset price inflation, who’ve stripped wealth from the working people and more recently the middle classess (notice how the v rich got richer recently? Make you think for a mo?), who massively benefitted from Covid’s £800b support package (where did it all go?), who own nearly everything including folks mortgage, who don’t drive the economy, but rather just ‘own’ it, who fund all the dark Think Tanks of Tufton st, who’ll ensure tax legislation conveniently give them exclusions, and who also control as much as the Press and media as poss too – incl Unherd. .
They’ll conscript some useful idiots who’ll throw the scent off them of course by finding other scapegoats. Clever, but eventually folks will begin to see it.
Your ‘Blob’ is no more secret than the one we can all see in Whitehall! Corporations are hardly covert operators. Both influence our worlds. The EU is a lobbyist heavan for likes of German car industry. The difference is that our (rich) permanent state administrators are supposed to be – have to be – non partisan and trusted to serve the elected government. This is plainly no longer true however you want to label it. I think the word Blob.. suggesting inert vast and smothering is dead right. As to your class war comments, I find them naive simplistic and superficial. All London and the SE conspired to enjoy a tax free bonanza of manufactured property wealth, rigged up with the simplest ruse – pile in a million free movers from the EU a year to boost demand, choke off supply with regulatory newt friendly Nimbyism. How convenient!! And how you all protested…not. When Brexit threatened a boom shattering the provision of public services to the poor, what did you all do?? Scream. Subvert the very notion of a mandate. Trigger a parliamentary coup.
And how the Rainbows blind you. NHS consultants are now among the richest 1% in our society. One just got a 169k pa pension. They and the deranged hyper political and entitled young doctors have inflicted vast suffering upon the most vulnerable in our society through their strike action. How come they do not feature in your Manichean depiction of good and bad, rich and poor??
What a marvel you are, Mr Marvel!
I suspect you know perfectly well that the real driver of class division and economic failure in this country is the rent-seeking behaviour of the middle class, and particularly the professional classes that live off the state. But let’s not talk about that, eh? Let’s blame a secret cabal of multi-millionaires.
For all their faults, the House of Commons is the citizens’ assembly that should decide on constitutional changes or on questions such as assisted suicide, while the local authority is the citizens’ assembly that should make the detailed decisions on matters such as housebuilding, within an overall framework set by Parliament. Those bodies are inadequately representative in class terms and in the closely related terms of a lack of ideological diversity, both of which at once reflect and perpetuate the inadequacies of the political parties. But “citizens’ assemblies” or “citizens’ juries” would be so to an even greater extent.
Who is going to choose the citizens to populate these ‘citizens assemblies’? No, no, no, don’t tell me. Let me guess.
If you genuinely want to know rather than relying on paranoia to shortcut the hard work of researching and reasoning there is plenty of information about the selection process online.
It’s not just about the selection mechanism (in practice citizens assemblies are not statistically representative because they don’t have enough members for this to be possible, and selection is typically opaque and easily manipulated). It’s also about who controls the agenda, drafts the terms of reference, chooses the guest contributors, decides the questions and writes the report. They are invariably officials, not random citizens.
Well put. In short, they are a means to enable self-serving bureaucracies and rent-seeking NGOs to bypass the democratic process.
Well said the people that draft the agendas and write the minutes run them.
Just FYI: I know precisely how these soviets work.
They will be carefully selected by Guardian reading civil servants- there won’;t be a Telegraph reader in there ever.
Is this satire or do you genuinely believe it?
I think it was a rhetorical question. Come on, wake up the brain!
I would have thought that Ms Gray’s main brief at present would be to ensure that Starmer doesn’t say or do anything too Socialist.
In the age of career politicians ( ie all “internships/bag carriers”) never wage earners, still less wealth creaters.
The rise of the Sue Grays , Dominic Cummings and assorted rune readers and general soothsayers and auguries translaters is inevitable
Do us all a favour and change your alias so we don’t confuse you with your whiny doppelganger above.
OK. But why can’t you pick an alias so we can distinguish you from all the other ‘Unherd Readers’? Better still, post under your own name.
Such a shame you’re unable to contribute anything resembling original ideas!
I post it in my name (Peter Bolt)
Why it is changed to “UnHerd Reader” I have no idea. ( probably beyond my pay grade )
And the answer is, UnHerd review machine?
Well said!
Oddly enough, that doesn’t apply to Rishi Sunak. He had a rewarding career as a banker and hedge fund manager. He never served his time as intern or bag carrier, which might explain why he’s not much good at politics.
He is far cleverer than the ex spade tho’.
The concept of citizens assemblies should terrify us all. An entryist charter, it will be the final nail in whatever remains of liberal democracy.
Sue Gray’s appointment to Labour’s leadership clique demonstrates beyond any doubt that Boris Johnson was the victim of an establishment stitch-up and that Democracy has been subverted by the Civil Service.
Our political culture is corrupt; and the lobbying scandals and contract awards are trivial by comparison.