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David Levy – The Common Factor – Jan 22

With our two party politics, Governments come and go and we regularly vote one side in whilst voting the other side out.   Yet the same old problems still occur.   Why is that so?

The Common Factor in this re-occurring mess is a bureaucracy which has evolved over centuries, and it is in the Halls of Power in Whitehall that grandees have come to rule our sovereign state.   No, it is not as you would like to believe.   Nor is it as you are encouraged to believe — that we have a system accountable to the electorate.   We do not.

1986 was when I took up the mantle to educate myself in the ways of environmental accountability.   That now amounts to some thirty five years of consultation, and generally running with issues that lead into the brick wall of intransigence.   With the blinkers of belief that ‘one can make a difference’, I have been a constant combatant against the slow workings of the state.

Ministry officials are a breed apart.   They have been drilled into ways of conforming to a pattern and that pattern is that change happens at a snail’s pace.   Like the Titanic, this ship of state is operating with a pre-ordained schedule which will deliver pre-ordained outcomes.   Today the system is simply not fit for purpose.

Change is viewed as an undesirable element by the Ministries of Government, and no amount of reasonableness will alter this view whatever the justification and balance of evidence.

The 2021 Environment Bill (now Act) to which Marinet contributed an amendment via The Duke of Westminster, sorry Wellington (sic. Zac Goldsmith), demonstrated the power of the Ministry of DEFRA to rebuff any political overtures for change.

In the end you come to the conclusion that most politicians let the public down.   Which of course is true, but deeper within this problem lies the cancerous carbuncle of bureaucracy.   It refuses to be moved, even when the evidence is that it is poisoning our environment.

For this nation to have any chance of escaping the straight jacket we are currently in we must remove the power from these grandees in the Ministries of Government, with their numerous acquired gongs, from the Palace of Whitehall.   In its place, real accountability to the public built into the system.

It is possible, and it is about time that it happened.

David Levy