‘Stakeholder’ is one of those strange Westminster words which doesn’t quite translate into standard English the way you’d expect it to.

Its closest approximation would be ‘vested interest’ – yet the usage of the two is almost reversed. You would not, after all, expect to see a decision-maker in any other area of life castigated for inadequate consultation with vested interests, or self-selecting surveys of vested interests treated as though they were a good or legitimate basis for policy.

Yet in Britain today that is, as Sir Keir Starmer’s former director of strategy wrote in the Times last week, more or less how we’re run. But why?

David Willetts, in his column on Tuesday, suggested that “Ovenden’s argument is an alternative to the superficially attractive account that the problem is that politicians just aren’t good enough”, whilst also noting that “he does not put civil servants in the firing line; he instead sees them as victims on the receiving end of these pressures”. If true, that’s remarkably good news for pretty much everybody who’s held a senior position in the British State for the past few decades: the state of Britain is, somehow, not actually their fault.

But that doesn’t leave any obvious place for the buck to stop. The legion of ‘stakeholders’ doesn’t have any formal position in our constitution, and thus wields no power save what politicians choose to give it. Perhaps the courts? Willetts writes:

“Ovenden’s so-called “stakeholder coalition” has been empowered by the courts. Every decision is justiciable. Judges struck down the last Conservative government’s attempt to cut the growth of disability benefits by judging that the consultation process had not been properly conducted.”

Judicial activism is a problem – but the question again is why is everything judicially reviewable? If it is in part judges taking a more expansive interpretation of their rights and responsibilities, that itself is downstream of politicians legislating in such a way as gives them more freedom to do so.

Sometimes they do this in big, obvious ways, such as passing the Human Rights Act. But very often the judiciary avails itself of the innumerable handholds provided by MPs who insist on inserting ‘have regard’ clauses into bills; these serve no purpose except a) to allow the politician to signal that they have done something about something without having to think about any of the detail and b) to do this by providing a vector for judicial review.

Whenever a ministerial decision is overturned by the courts, as often as not it is because the court deemed the government not to have adequately ‘had regard’ to this or that – and the poor minister normally has no way of actually knowing what it means to adequately ‘have regard’ to it until the courts spell it out, because such a clause is MPs’ substitute for proper, detailed lawmaking.

Here’s one example from our manor: William Hague wrote in October about the way that the State chokes innovation through such bureaucratic measures as ‘social value’ requirements:

“Firms bidding to supply the new technology have been asked to demonstrate the “social value” of their supply chains, including employment of refugees. Such rules have contributed to a two-year process while other countries forge ahead. Real social value would come from having a growing economy, with cheaper energy, in which everyone has a better chance of finding work.”

He makes a good point. But nowhere in the article is it mentioned that Hague was himself both Foreign Secretary and First Secretary of State in the very government which passed the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012. I don’t know how often I can make the Casablanca joke before it stops being funny, but once again a politician is “shocked, shocked!” to discover that the things they’ve been doing have been taking place.

The truth of the matter is that the rise of the ‘Stakeholder State’ is not an alternative to the idea that politicians haven’t been good enough as an explanation for the state of the UK – it is a product of that inadequacy. It was MPs and ministers who passed sloppy law after sloppy law which transferred powers to the courts; MPs and ministers who colluded to slash the Commons’ sitting hours such that it no longer has time to legislate properly (whilst passing more legislation than ever); MPs and ministers who pandered to unwise lobbies with good PR by enacting self-harming regulations such as the post-Grenfell two staircase rule, or Martyn’s Law; MPs and ministers who repeatedly hide behind consultations to avoid taking difficult or expensive decisions.

Ovenden himself, to his credit, concedes this. As he writes (my emphasis): “The Stakeholder State looks formidable because it is everywhere, but it is a colossus with feet of clay. Its strength has been gifted to it by politicians and it can all be taken back.”

The British constitution gives a government with a majority in the House of Commons the power to do anything it likes. The upside of this is, as Ovenden argues, that a parliamentary majority with sufficient will could fix a lot of this country’s problems, including breaking the back of the ‘Stakeholder State’.

The downside, at least for people who have been in senior leadership positions, is that they are ultimately responsible for the failure to exercise that power and demonstrate that will. One is put in mind of this passage by Joan Didion:

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” 

Part of growing up is realising that it is not merely your actions that weigh in the scale of your life, but your omissions too – “every evasion and procrastination” must, in the end, be owned. Perhaps allowing the grandees to pretend the ‘Stakeholder State’ was something done to them is simply the price we must pay for their admitting it exists. But it would be better if they grew up.

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