Starmer will let the ‘Blob’ take over Britain

Britain’s unelected and ineffective quangocrats are already amassing more power under Labour

How worried should we be about the ‘Blob’? Tory ministers in the last government would often complain about their plans being frustrated by unelected officials – from high-ranking civil servants to government lawyers to the bureaucrats and regulators who populate Britain’s vast array of arms-length bodies. Yet, just like the culture war, leading figures in the ruling Labour Party tend to claim that the Blob is a myth or an invention of the right. In truth, not only is the Blob real, but it is also getting considerably more powerful under Keir Starmer’s leadership.

Much of the Blob in Britain resides in what are called quangos – short for quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations. These are arms-length bodies, made up of unelected appointees, who oversee certain economic sectors or policy briefs. Although it was only elected in July, the new Labour government has already set up a vast array of new quangos, including Great British Energy, the National Wealth Fund, the Industrial Strategy Council, the National Jobs and Careers Service, the Fair Work Agency, Skills England, the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, and the Passenger Standards Authority. There is also the new Ethics and Integrity Commission, the Border Security Command, the School Support Staff Negotiating Body and the Independent Football Regulator. Drawing on Gordon Brown’s creation, in 1997, of the Better Regulation Task Force and the Better Regulation Unit (to better regulate the regulators), the new government has established the Regulatory Innovation Office. It also plans to set up Climate Export Hubs, Community Payback Boards and a National Cladding Taskforce.

With the exception of Great British Energy, which will be overseen by Juergen Maier, ex-CEO of Siemens UK, nobody really knows who is to run any of these new institutions. At the last count, before Starmer set up his own quangos, the Cabinet Office oversaw nearly 300 such bodies, which spent a colossal £265 billion a year and employed about 300,000 people.

These bodies have a few notable features in common. First, any top member of a quango usually tries to hold down posts at several others. Juergen Maier chairs Innovate UK’s Digital Catapult, serves as vice-chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and is also leading an expert review of UK rail and transport infrastructure. A notorious example of this is Helen Pitcher, chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which allowed the wrongly convicted Andrew Malkinson to be kept in prison for years and twice turned down his appeals against his wrongful rape conviction. Pitcher currently has at least nine jobs, four with links to the public sector.

Life is good for the full-time Blobbers. Regulators of private-sector communications, water, energy and education tend to enjoy swish offices, fat salaries and plenty of ‘revolving door’ opportunities to join the firms they are supposed to be watching over, and vice versa. The number of civil servants on six-figure salaries has risen by 40 per cent in the past year.

The Blob tends to fill its ranks from the elite classes. It is dedicated less to public service than self-preservation, which is achieved primarily through avoiding democratic accountability. Sardonically referring to the welfare granted to the poor of his day, James Mill (1773-1836) described the British Empire as ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes’. The Blob today is a similar system of sinecures for the well-to-do.

The term ‘the Blob’ is older than you might think. In 1987, Ronald Reagan’s right-wing education secretary, William Bennett, claimed that American schools had nurtured a large bureaucratic ‘Blob’, which grew even when pupil enrolments fell, and which absorbed dollars that were better spent in classrooms. His opponents countered that administrators represented just 6.6 per cent of employees in US public schools at the time. But since then, particularly since the 2000s, the proportion of administrators to teachers – and their pay relative to teachers – has climbed considerably. Bennett’s warnings were prescient.

Talk of the Blob first went mainstream in the UK in 2013, when the then Tory education secretary, Michael Gove, lamented the intransigence of a ‘network of educational gurus in and around our universities who praised each others’ research, sat on committees that drafted politically correct curricula, drew gifted young teachers away from their vocation and instead directed them towards ideologically driven theory’. This network of the unelected went into overdrive to try to defeat the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition’s education reforms, many of which were designed to wrest control of schools from local authorities. You don’t need to share the politics of either Bennett or Gove to recognise that Blobs exist on both sides of the Atlantic.

Whatever the issue, the Blob thinks it knows best. Often, defenders of this undemocratic, technocratic arrangement will say we need ‘experts’ to drive and shape policy. Actual expertise in a given subject, or experience in a field, is no bad thing, of course. But is that what we’re really getting from the Blob?

It is now widely observed that parliament has few MPs with experience of industry or business: far too many have read Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Oxford. The same charge should also be made of the Blob. Take Emma Pinchbeck, who is set to be appointed as the CEO of the Climate Change Committee. She is currently the CEO of Energy UK, a trade association for the energy industry. She read Classics at Oxford, got a training contract in financial services to fund large-scale renewables and learned about board governance and auditing, and then obtained what she called a ‘dream job’ at the green charity, the WWF. All well and good – but how much does she understand about the physics and technology of energy? Given her boosterism for notoriously unreliable renewable energy, dare we say that could be very little.

This is not a new problem either. In the early 2000s, prime minister Tony Blair appointed ex-BBC chief John Birt to advise him on everything from health and crime to drugs, education and transport. Birt’s qualifications? He had no background in any of these fields, but was considered a ‘blue-skies thinker’.

Unelected, underqualified and overpaid, the Blob needs to be challenged if we are to have efficient public services and an effective state. Yet the new Labour government seems intent on doing the opposite. It wants to cosy up to and empower the quangocrats. The ‘change’ Starmer promised to the voters will not come any time soon.

Photo: File ID 330587899 | © Tennesseewitney | Dreamstime.com