2025-11-08
Is good government more about checks and balances, or cheques and balances?
There's a good case to be made that neither are properly working features of our British Governments of recent decades, with results that Nick Hubble points up very clearly in the latest offering from Investors Daily.
And yet ... am I right to suspect that such arguments, whilst admirably correct, are simply the symptoms of a deeper malaise/design defect that afflicts our seats of power: the propensity to dishonesty that results from (a) lack of basic integrity, and (b) lack of fear of being found out, and yes (c) lack of any fear of the consequences of being found out.
The "revolving door" between regulators and the regulated corporates is now so well understood that I don't have to explain it here ...
The inability of any elected government to sack non-performing civil servants is legendary.
There is little personal linkage between cause and repercussion within the Palace of Westminster Yes Minister.
And if there were, the trail always goes cold at the point where policy implementation is outsourced to private enterprise (commercial confidentiality is sacrosanct don'cha know.).
The fate of politicians who carry the electoral can for failed policy implementation by the civil service and its corporate cronies is also well understood. So is accountability broken.
And the role of the media in turning a blind eye (where the interests of its corporate owners and advertisers is concerned) is also beginning to be more widely understood. Fearless champions of truth and integrity they are not.
So if we were to be brave enough to take our cue from the original American ideal of "government of the people by the people and for the people" literally, how might we redesign our government from first principles in compliance with that ideal?
