If we must have Special Advisers, and it is lost on me what they are for, then why shouldn't a Minister appoint whoever he likes to that position, even if having three of them does seem a bit much?
We are already to have a situation whereby MPs' staff are employed centrally by the House and allocated out of some sort of typing pool, on the unquestioned assumption that all political parties are identical and even interchangeable. On that same unquestioned assumption, is the same arrangement now to apply to SpAds, too?
But I still cannot see the point of them. Can anyone else?
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Yes
ReplyDeleteWhat is it, then?
ReplyDeleteYou don't really want an answer. You were making a (bad) rhetorical point.
ReplyDeleteBut the answer is pretty simple - it's that all civil servants working for a Minister are politically neutral. The SpAd therefore has a unique role in giving the Minister poltiical advice on policies
Oh, I am very open to persuasion that there should be highly politicised people at the heart of these things.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I simply and strongly believe that to be the case. It is whether this is they way to go about it: that is where I need persuading. You have made a start. Although that is all that you have made.
How politicised anyone appointed by any current member of either front bench actually is or would be, is altogether a different question. Steeped in the gossip, yes. Come up through a party machine, especially a student one, undoubtedly. But interested in politics, properly so called? Probably not.
You ahve to go back before Thatcher for when civil servants were neutral. Blair made things worse but Thatcher started it. That's 30 years ago, before young Myers was born. Do you know him, by the way? He was at Durham.
ReplyDeleteIf Wint is right, then why are special advisers paid out of the public purse instead of by their parties?
No, I don't know him. Being of Hague's circle, so to speak, I am surprised that he isn't Oxbridge. Perfectly ignorant of the North, the London media hear Hague's accent, which by all accounts Myers shares, and they assume him to be some sort of Billy Liar made good.
ReplyDeleteBut both he and Myers come off wealth and privilege, as does the Ffrangrant Ffion, a member of the Welsh-speaking oligarchy that is one of the world's last great Brahmin castes, mostly because the same people who do not understand how the North works do not understand how Wales works, either.
The explicitly political dimension is an integral public good. I would be much happier with the use of public money in order to facilitate it if I thought that it was really happening.
Here is a Lindsay-like idea for you. Have each party's conference elect the three people who would be each department's Spads when that party held the cabinet portfolio. Delegates to vote for one candidate and the top three to get in. In a coalition, top two from the cabinet minister's party and top one from the other party. But in normal circumstances a left and an old right/soft left Spad to balance the Blairite in each department, or a Faith, Flag and Family Spad to keep both the Cameroon and the Thatcherite on his toes.
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure. But we certainly need to require all political funding to be by resolution of membership organisations, as well as parliamentarians' staff to be appointed from lists maintained by such organisations in return for payment of at least half of those staff's salaries, thereby requiring politicians and parliamentarians to have links to wider civil society. The same for SpAds? Why not?
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