Achieving accountable government
Time to tackle the growth of the ‘payroll vote’
The number of Members of Parliament who take the ‘Government whip’ has continued to grow. This trend is exacerbated by a larger number of members of the House of Lords who have become Ministers, who escape the kind of scrutiny which we associate with the House of Commons. Stewart Wilks-Heeg argues that is time to […]
Fixing the Revolving Door
There are many good reasons for government and business to talk to one another, to understand how the other side works, and to learn techniques that can be transferred from one context to the other. But wherever such interactions occur, there is a potential conflict of interest. The risk is most acute where particular individuals […]
News International and corporate power in Britain’s democracy: just the tip of the ‘unelected oligarchies’ iceberg
The News International scandal has rightly caused public outrage and led to a sea-change in relations between UK politicians and media moguls. Yet Murdoch’s empire has been only part of a much wider structure of unaccountable power which has exercised a dominant influence over British politics and policy making in the past two decades or […]
Reforming the constitution: process matters
Andrew Blick argues that policies impacting significantly on the UK constitution were central to the programme underpinning the formation of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition in May 2010. They include fixed-term parliaments; a reduction in the number of MPs combined with an equalisation in the population size of parliamentary constituencies; a referendum on AV; and a requirement for […]
Police reform: why democracy is not just about elections
Amongst the many pieces of legislation with important democratic implications the present government has introduced, the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, currently passing through its final stages in the House of Lords, has received comparatively little attention. Yet it has fundamental constitutional implications. Andrew Blick argues that consideration of the bill helps illustrate the inconsistent – […]
Special advisers and the ‘phone-hacking’ scandal
One of the many issues involving the functioning of UK democracy raised by the phone hacking/police corruption scandal is that of the role of the special adviser in Whitehall. An important facet of this affair, underlining claims of an inappropriate closeness between the ‘Murdoch press’ and politicians, involves Andy Coulson, Editor of the News of the World from […]
Who monitors external appointments to government departmental boards?
Non-executive directors (NEDs) have been a feature of departmental boards since the formative stages of their development in the early 1990s. Employed by Conservative and Labour governments alike, the directors are seen by many as a complementary addition to the machinery of Whitehall – valuable for the experience and ‘outsider’ perspective that they are deemed to bring […]
What’s happening to our democracy?
Stuart Wilks-Heeg, 28 February 2011 Our fourth Audit of UK democracy, due for publication later this year, deploys International IDEA’s ‘State of Democracy’ assessment framework and is built around 77 separate ‘search questions’. As we consider the huge evidence base which our Audit is generating, however, one ‘overarching’ question which is not part of the framework becomes […]
Reports of Parliament’s decline much exaggerated
Andrew Blick, 31st May 2011 The last decade has seen a series of significant innovations in the way Parliament holds government to account, mostly involving the House of Commons, but in some cases the House of Lords as well. They include: More resources for select committees; The introduction of ‘core tasks’ for select committees in the Commons […]
Democratic Audit's core funding is provided by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Additional funding is provided by the London School of Economics.