Incompetent or arrogant,.... or both

Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph two weeks ago illustrated incompetence and arrogance of the present Government.

His main point was that bills are rushed through, often not even debated properly , with the result that laws unravel. The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act,for example, which extends criminal records checks to 10 million adults, was so badly drafted that 250 amendments had to be made at the end of its parliamentary progress, so that it was not properly scrutinised. Again and again legislation needs subsequent changes, or further acts, because they do not work.

In part it is because of the torrent of legislation which pours out of a government which is not happy if there are still areas of life which it does not directly and minutely control. The 1950 Parliament, says Johnston, put 720 pages of Acts and 2,970 pages of statutory instruments on to the statute book. In the last year of the Blair government there were 4,609 pages of new Acts and 11,686 pages of statutory instruments. This means a sixfold increase in pages of Acts and a fourfold increase in the case of statutory instruments.

An expanded civil service could perhaps have covered the vast expansion, but most of the extra civil servants are merely crunching numbers in relation to government targets. Worse, the civil service with all its accumulated experience, was made subservient to political appointees and generally not encouraged to make a contribution.

NuLabour have attempted too much, and kept at arms length those who might have contributed to reducing errors by more thorough drafting or by debate in committee or in the House.

I could add that a further question must be the quality of some ministers themselves, who make statements one day and contradict them the next, sometimes claiming that what they said in clear English did not mean what it said. The general incompetence of departments, and ministers who run them, is generally accepted - lost CDs and laptops, white elephants like the Dome, cost and time overruns on large schemes, volt-face in policies like the 10p tax band, helicopters desperately needed by troops but standing almost mothballed and able to fly only in very special circumstances and farmers denied payments received months before from the EU.

Arguably one of the more effective ministers described his department as "Not fit for purpose".

Incompetent, with almost daily examples of waste and confusion, but also arrogant in overriding others, doing deals and sweeteners to overcome reluctant MPs, and ramming everything through without proper coinsideration. It is not "or", it is "both".