A decades-long trend of outsourcing democratic decisions to unaccountable institutions like the OBR is leading Britain towards ruin.
Last week’s Spring Statement decision to cut the benefits of the weakest members of our society, on the basis of a series of forecasts by the Government’s spending watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility, wasn’t democratic but technocratic. The argument of the Chancellor was that she had no choice and the fiscal rules imposed this on her and us. But what then is the point of voting when a body which is totally unaccountable to us ultimately decides our fate?
The OBR is just one example of this broader problem, albeit an important one of decisions being outsourced from democrats to technocrats. Representative democracy is ultimately an issue of trust. Will the people we’ve elected deliver on the promises contained in their manifestos? For decades trust in politicians has been breaking down. The world has become more complex and much more difficult for politicians to run while we have become much less trusting, less deferential and more cynical. The answer has been to ditch democracy for technocracy.
The critical moment in the long march to the outsourcing of power came with the Trilateral Commission in 1973. This was a non-governmental body established by the banker David Rockefeller which brought together decision makers from the USA, Western Europe and Japan to look at the growing threat of inflation. The Commission determined politicians could not be trusted to control price rises as they gave in too easily to demands from their electorate to ‘spend more money than they had’. The key recommendation of the Commission was the establishment of independent central banks to take key macro-economic decisions out of the hands of politicians and the people and into those of the bankers.
In the UK this elite shift in thinking eventually manifested itself in Labour’s 1997 move to give interest rate decisions to the Bank of England, ironically without any mention in their manifesto. The establishment of the OBR in 2010 by George Osborne to act as a control on government spending, was a further development of this trend and a confirmation that the politicians didn’t trust themselves. Politics had now been separated from power.
We now live in this grim world where some decisions are outsourced and others not, sometimes politicians agree with the technocrats they appoint, other times they don’t. The confusion and the contradictions cement the crisis of democracy, which unless resolved, will only benefit the anti-democratic authoritarian populists.
Just look at the mess Labour is now in. Before the Spring Statement Labour argued that benefit reforms were designed to get people working, but on the eve of the statement the OBR reported that the cuts announced were insufficient to hit the £5bn target that it had stipulated for the government to stay within its fiscal rules.
So overnight another £1.4bn cuts were found, which evidently had nothing to do with getting people into work and everything to do with jumping the hurdle set by the technocrats. Later last week the Prime Minister clashed with the independent Sentencing Council for England and Wales over so-called two-tier sentencing. Next month the first private rail company will lose its franchise and become part of GB Railways, an arm’s length body from the Transport Department. But only a few weeks before the Health Minister Wes Streeting killed off NHS England to bring responsibility for health management back into his department. Confusion reigns. There is no coherency to the governments approach.
To really see the bite of the bureaucrat look at the way the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, the IMF refused Greece help with its post-crash debt crisis and forced austerity on the country despite the democratic mandate of its government. Now look at the way that Germany is reforming its own debt brake to meet defence and social security spending demands. Citizens look on bemused by the incoherence and rules made up as the politicians go along.
Finding a way out of this bind will not be easy, the problems are deep rooted issues of democratic structures and culture intertwined with the power of capital and media oligarchs, but there are straws in the wind of change.
Last Friday the increasingly popular Labour MP for Norwich South, Clive Lewis introduced his private members bill on water ownership. One of his demands is the establishment of a citizen’s assembly to look at how water could be democratically governed in the future. The campaign is also looking at how multi stakeholder boards of customers, workers, and communities could have influence on how this public service is run.
This shows what is possible, but politicians must acknowledge and accept the limitations of their powers. Because it’s not really democracy that is in crisis, but one form of it, representative democracy. At one level it is literally a crisis of representation as the landowners and workers have been replaced by professional politicians in the Commons. This technocratic political class then manage our affairs via outsourced, remote and unaccountable institutions like the OBR.
The system must be renewed but we also need to move beyond it. We need a radical renewal of our democracy, starting with proportional representation and proper devolution of decision-making and resource, not just to councils but to neighbourhoods.
And we need to shift to deliberative democracy, the coproduction of public services and the infrastructure of cooperation in the public and private sector, like the use of two-tier boards, to embed democratic muscle wherever citizens and workers need it. But too often when confronted by citizens assemblies, MPs simply retreat to the grim adage that we already have a citizen’s assembly called the House of Commons as if everything was just fine in that House. They rightly see the threat to them of these innovations but it’s our democracy, not theirs.
We live in a complex world, and to manage that complexity requires ever more complex forms of governance. This complexity cannot simply be outsourced to technocrats. Maybe these command and control politicians should remember the wisdom of Marshall Ganz, the fabled American community organiser, who said that ‘leadership is accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty’.
Of course, the phrase that hangs over all of this is ‘take back control’. But real control isn’t something you can take back or even impose, it’s something we can only negotiate together. Democracy far beyond the now obvious limitations of its representative form, is the only means by which we can do it. People are sick and tired of this technocratic elite and many will vote for national populism instead.
They know that the system is broken. The financial markets aren’t stupid and can see that pinning everything on arbitrary measures of fiscal headroom won’t create economic stability – quite the opposite. It’s a trust doom loop. If we don’t change the system and deepen democracy then the mob will show up with their pitchforks outside of both the OBR and Parliament itself. We’ve been warned.
This article first appeared in the Byline Times on 4th April 2025.