I’m going to write about parliamentary tactics today. Not because it’s interesting – it’s about the inside baseball of the UK Parliament, and is thus really only interesting to about ten people in the world ever – but because it’s been tickling me ever since I noticed it. This is going to be a post about how the government runs itself politically, how it organises its business to avoid political risk, and how the government is already preparing for the next election. Okay?

There’s a reason why this post is happening today, and it’s not going to be a surprising one. The Huhne departure and the subsequent intake provoked fevered speculation (£) and even a a flurry of moves on the betting market. All of which is marvellous, and I’m sure that the merits of the Huhne story will keep us all entertained for weeks to come. But what was noticeable was the change in the way that such political events were handled.

For a start, the reshuffle was announced by Clegg rather than Cameron. I wouldn’t care to dig back into the stats, but it’s certainly the first time since the beginning of Thatcher’s government that a reshuffle was announced and presented by someone other than the PM.

The significance of this is heralded by the fact that it was widely referred to as a “Lib Dem reshuffle”. And lo, only Lib Dem ministries were affected, and hardly any of those at that – Ed Davey, a grassroots favourite, joining the bigtime, with Norman Lamb picking up his old seat at Business. And that’s pretty much it: a tiny reshuffle, by any measure. This mirrors the replacements of David Laws and Liam Fox, both of whom were replaced in straight promotions.

What’s the point of all this? I find it interesting that three high-profile exists have resulted in no shuffling of the deck chairs. Nearly two years into the parliament and the only changes to the roster have been those enforced by circumstances. What’s going on?

Well, partly it’s a reversion to the norm. The Blair and Brown ministries were tumultuous; the former was a famous reorganiser, making no fewer than fifteen discretionary changes during his 12 years in office. Wikipedia has the movements of the Brown Ministry (which just over two years, remember) in handy diagram form:

Click to enlarge

This frenetic pace was due to the tactics prioritised by both Blair and Brown during their times in office, and is due in part to the dual nature of a cabinet role.

On the one hand, a seat at the Cabinet table is a job. It requires understanding, dedication, and knowledge, often of a broad area of policy with far-reaching effects on the lives and livelihoods of a chunk of the population.

On the other, it is a perk – a position of power and responsibility, and a visible measure of one’s position in relation to one’s colleagues and coevals. It is a springboard for further career development, or an acknowledgement of distinguished service.

These two impulses are often found in opposition to one another. An MP who is granted cabinet office as a political stepping-stone, as part of the process of being groomed for leadership or simply to keep a talented public figure inside the tent tend not to have a background in their designated office, and tend not to have a very developed interest in its minutia. In a climate where political offices are treated as tools of favour rather than jobs, any MP who has a background in a specific area tends not to be ambitious beyond the remit of that area, and thus simply gets stuck. Chris Mullin MP said in his valedictory speech, and transcribed into his diaries:

“Mr Speaker, government needs to become a little less frenetic. The practice of annual reshuffles is massively destabilising and confers enormous power on the civil service. There have been eight secretaries of State for work and pensions in the ten years since that department was invented. Of late we have been getting through Home Secretaries at the rate of almost one a year. Goodness knows how many Health and Education secretaries we have had. We are on our tenth Europe minister. Our ninth or tenth Prisons minister. I was the sixth Africa minister, the current incumbent is the ninth. Mr Speaker, this does not make for good government.”

One of the things that the Cameron government has done right has been to settle the ship in that area. I’ve written before about the merits of Iain Duncan Smith as a knowledgeable and capable Secretary of State, but it is notable that most members of the cabinet have a background in their chosen area. There is a real reticence towards moving people around for the sake of securing political obedience. When Tory rising star Louise Mensch was misquoted last year about being discontent at her lack of ministerial position, the response was tepid – not because Mensch is uncapable (she is capable) nor because she is unpopular (she is one of the leading faces of the 2010 intake), but simply because this is not a government that reshuffles lightly.

But this is part of a broader tactical change brought about by the coalition government. One of the key advantages of the approach taken by the government towards reshuffles is that it means that Secretaries of State can spearhead their own Departments’ initiatives. This is a big tonal shift from the recent past, and one that the opposition has failed to fully adapt to.

The effect of this is that backlashes to unpopular policies – and there have been many over the past two years – are effectively confined to their silos. While private schools (Michael Gove), NHS cost-cutting (Andrew Lansley), benefits cuts (IDS), banker-bashing (Vince Cable) and baton charges (Theresa May) – not to mention austerity (George Osborne) – have roused ire on both the left and the right, David Cameron’s popularity has stayed more or less completely static, and the damage to the government’s popularity as a whole has been surprisingly muted. Because David Cameron is not perceived to be spearheading any of these initiatives, attacks from Ed Milliband on him personally – both in speeches and at PMQs – have failed to stick. But because he represents the government in the mind of the electorate, he provides his party with a degree of cover even as his ministers’ reputations get progressively worse and worse.

This is a huge shift in the way that government is conducted. Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown all ruled, to a greater or lesser extent, in a presidential style, taking political ownership of policies enacted by their cabinet and ultimately coming unstuck when they could no longer evade the consequences. Cameron is returning to an older style of politics which prioritises collective responsibility. It has its weaknesses – back-bench unrest is harder to quell with the promise of patronage, as seen by the growing number of Tory and Lib Dem mutineers (the latter part has seen more defiance against the whip since 2010 than it did in the entire prior decade), and in the unlikely event that the government enacts some popular provision it is, by the same token, unlikely to rub off on Cameron himself. But it is also an astute response to a time of coalition and austerity. Whether it can keep the poll numbers of the coalition partners robust until 2015 remains to be seen.

…Dave, Eden, UKTV Gold, Good Food. The Austin Powers song would be much less catchy.

The BBC’s currently catching some heat due to its lack of female representation in its top news programming. Lib Dem MP Tessa Munt is leading the charge, and is currently not facing much resistance. The Today Show, Radio 4′s flagship current affairs programme, typically has a male host, and around 80% of its correspondents are men; Tory MP Louise Mensch is taking aim.

Of all of the BBC’s woes, this is a relatively simple one to fix. The bigger issue is cultural, and is as follows: As an institution funded by a mandatory tax, it is almost impossible for the BBC to fulfil all of the functions it is expected to fulfil.

I’m not going to delve too deeply into that as it’s a well-trodden issue. An institution that both annoys Rupert Murdoch and gives a mouthpiece to Jeremy Clarkson knowingly runs the risk of making enemies. The BBC think that they can handle this and they should know.

What I want to talk about is the fundamental structure of the BBC and how this adds to their woes. The biggest obstacle to the BBC’s public image is self-inflicted: the sense that the BBC is a single organisation with a single objective, rather than a series of four or five entirely separate bodies with entirely separate objectives, business models and output.

The “main” BBC, which sits under the Director General and is what people generally think of when they refer to “the BBC”, is a mostly public body which supplements its income from some clandestine private ventures. It is responsible for all programming; it is subdivided into BBC Vision (which handles BBC 1 to 4 and commissions their various outputs), BBC Audio and Music (which handles the national radio stations as well as music-based television, such as the BBC Proms and the output of the BBC Philharmonic), and Future Media (iPlayer and the like), as well as corporate functions. This covers a lot of the BBC’s visible function in the UK, and is thus frequently considered to be the most significant part of the BBC. In fact, it is politically and economically the least important part of the Corporation. It has a single function: to partially justify the continued existence of the licence fee.

The BBC Trust is a separate body with an overall monitoring function. It’s mission is to ensure that the BBC acts in the best interests of licence fee payers. Its existence is mandated by the Royal Charter that gives the BBC licence to operate on the basis of a levied television tax; it is funded entirely by the licence, taking its chunk directly from HMRC rather than from the BBC itself. The current government wants to abolish the Trust and have the BBC entirely subject to external oversight when the current Royal Charter expires in 2016.

Next is BBC News. BBC News nominally sits under the “main” BBC, and is thus funded in the same slightly ambiguous way as the parent corporation, but is operationally distinct. Since the early 2000s, there has been political pressure on the BBC from all sides to protect the editorial independence of BBC News, which has massive influence in the UK, and the current Government has a stated policy of forcing the BBC to divest of the News operation altogether and have it be run as a separate entity. In practice this is functionally already the case; the BBC has been steadily preparing for the inevitable for several years.

Slightly further along is the BBC World Service. The World Service functions as the credible half of the BBC’s Trojan Horse of Cultural Diplomacy. The World Service deals with the BBC’s news channels outside of the UK; it transmits programming in 27 different languages and is available by radio in most of the world. While the BBC Charter mandates that the BBC World Service be politically neutral, it is of course anything but. It’s production is handled by BBC News, but its editorial and managerial structures are entirely separate, and – until 2014, following reforms enacted in 2010 – is funded by the UK Government’s Foreign Office rather than the licence fee. It is thus explicitly political and is used as such. Iran hates the Farsi version of the World Service, while Aung San Suu Kyi is a big fan. Neither of those things are unrelated to the World Services’ editorial positioning.

The BBC’s operations start to get murky when we get to BBC Worldwide. BBC Worldwide is the “commercial arm” of the public entity and, again, is run as an entirely separate concern. It was spun off from the main BBC in 1995 with an explicit mandate to be run as a commercial, profit-making entity, and its revenues are routed back to the main corporation to subsidise their operations. Over the last decade and a half Worldwide has taken a very flexible approach to the activities it is permitted to perform.

Worldwide’s core activities initially involved producing commercial BBC products (broadly, anything that you can buy in a shop: magazines such as Good Food and the Radio Times; Top Gear DVDs; In The Night Garden stuffed toys) and selling the rights to BBC programmes overseas. This has expanded greatly and BBC Worldwide now operates its own commercial, advertising-supported satellite and digital channels, both overseas (BBC America [which is unrelated to the operations of the World Service, despite the naming convention], BBC Entertainment in India) and in the UK (it is little known that channels such as Dave, UKTV Gold, Really, Blighty, Watch etc are all run by the BBC). Further: BBC Worldwide now commissions original programming for its commercial channels, including panel shows for Dave and nature documentaries for Eden. BBC Worldwide is the sole owner of Lonely Planet’s line of travel guides. More worryingly, Worldwide may be on the verge of buying the UK’s Channel 4, further consolidating the BBC’s stranglehold on terrestrial programming in the UK.

The interesting thing about BBC Worldwide is that it exposes a little lie: that the BBC can’t operate without the licence. In many ways, Worldwide is duplicating the BBC’s operations at a smaller scale, but it is by some distance the most profitable satellite operator in the UK, annually returning more money to the BBC than Sky does to its shareholders. Access to a half-century of the BBC’s most beloved programming helps; while the decision to create a channel with low operating costs, dedicated to showing repeats of Top Gear and panel shows, was extremely low-risk, the success of channels like Dave has surprised even the upper echelons of the BBC’s senior management.

But the money generated and returned to the BBC’ budget by Worldwide still only accounts for around 10% of the Corporation’s operating budget. While Worldwide is an interestingly murky corner of the BBC’s operation, it doesn’t yet provide a model that the rest of the BBC can follow. It would be interesting to see what Worldwide could do with BBC1′s viewing figures, however. The argument has always run that the shelter of the licence fee allows BBC the creativity to experiment with its programming. Whatever Worldwide’s approach it is, however, it can’t be worse than season 2 of Sherlock.

Amid all of the sound and fury surrounding the government’s attempts to change the UK’s benefits system, sight of the grand strategy of entitlement reform was lost this week.

First, a recap. The dramatic interventions of the House of Lords put paid to a couple of the cabinet’s initial skirmishes; plans to cap the benefits that can be claimed by a single household to £26,000pa were stymied by an amendment which has caused child benefits to be excluded, essentially rendering the policy pointless (as the £26,000pa cap is impossible to reach without child benefits being a factor). In a further incursion, the Lords blocked a plan to make single parents pay for the right to claim child support from their absentee coeval. Earlier, the Lords had also dispatched some of the more egregious depredations planned for the Disability Living Allowance in the aftermath of the Responsible Reform (“Spartacus”) Report (pdf). All in all, it’s been a series of bloody defeats for the government in the House of Lords.

Taken individually, you could quite justifiably suggest that the government was acting in a manner that was arbitrarily and deliberately malicious to single mothers, the disabled and the unemployed. Of course I couldn’t possibly comment.

But these individual battles do take place in the context of a wider war. The government wants their benefits to carry a smaller price tag, and are unrepentant about the fact that this will require a reduction in the overall levels of benefits paid out. However, the endgame also features a few policies with real value, including a promise of the holy grail of benefits reform.

Firstly, it’s important to look at the idea of the Universal Credit (£) as a principle. In short, the Universal Credit rolls most existing benefits – including income support, jobseeker’s allowance, disability living allowance, child benefits and housing benefits – into a single means-tested benefit.

This isn’t a massively new idea. The DWP has been pushing the benefits of a universal credit internally since the end of the Major government, and it has been the recommendation of most benefits-focused think tanks and organisations at some point over the last two decades. The reason why it doesn’t exist already owes a lot to the nature of politics in the UK. One of the main criticisms levelled against the last Labour government was that it failed to take the Work and Pensions brief seriously. This was symptomatic of the way that Blair in particular organised his cabinets: positions were often allocated on the basis of loyalty rather than expertise, and as a result the position of Secretary of State in what became the DWP was treated as a political stepping stone rather than an office with an actual function. Part of the problem is that Work and Pensions is not one of the sexy Offices of State – it lacks the glamour of the Foreign Office, or the power of the Home Office or the Chancellery. The benefits portfolio is massive – accounting for by far the largest portion of government spending – and one that it is almost impossible to succeed in.

Whatever criticisms can be levelled against Iain Duncan Smith, however – and there are many – he is the first Secretary of State that the DWP has had since well before Thatcher that both supports the premise of a benefits structure and possesses a practical interest and knowledge in its workings. He is not a careerist – he has lead his party and has no aspirations. That alone is important for one reason: the continued presence of an interested Minister means that, for the first time in decades, there is a genuine interest in reform.

The shift to a Universal Credit comes with some positive and negative consequences, but responses have split – as everything does, these days – along strictly tribal lines. So before we go too much further, this needs to be said: the idea of a universal credit has held a position of logical necessity for almost every expert in the field of benefits reform for nearly thirty years. The specifics of implementation are important and worth more rigorous consideration, but the raw benefits and disadvantages of a universal credit go deeper than political ideologies.

First, pros. The administration of a single universal credit scheme would be massively more manageable than the bloated manpower infrastructure and costs generated by the DWP, which is something like the fifth largest employer in the UK today. If the government has to cut costs then this is an unambiguous win – every penny that can be saved in benefit administration is a penny that doesn’t have to be cut from the benefits themselves. A massively detailed pdf by Gareth Morgan suggests that those who require benefits for a single reason would find themselves better off under the scheme. More will be done on a sliding scale, meaning that benefits can be more flexible to recipient’s needs, rather than the currently rather inflexible scheme that sees millionaire pensioners automatically receiving bus passes. Finally, the single universal credit has the big advantage of removing the delineation between different types of benefit, and thus the attached stigma that comes with specificity.

Then there are cons. While the recipients of single benefits would on the whole be better off, those who claim multiple benefits – child support and disability living allowance, for example, will find their net benefits decreased, although they will also find the process of applying for the single benefit more straightforward than the current melange. On that subject, however, means testing is controversial. That dispute is also varied in quality – some assert that it is a way of bullying recipients into accepting less, some claim that it’s a more direct way of objectively evaluating and eliminating scroungers – but either way, it is indisputable that means testing results in lower payments overall. Importantly, given the government’s recent record of aggression towards claimants, a wholesale switch in systems can be used as a trojan horse to sneak benefit cuts in through the back door. And finally, while the operation costs of a universal credit are much lower, the implementation costs are high. The Chancellor is reportedly relaxed about this, but there are reports that some of the more extreme attacks on existing benefits levels are being added at his behest, so it is unclear whether the calculus will change for him if the Lords continue to work in exclusions.

Finally, the risk of any change to the benefit system is the accompanying rhetoric. Whatever happens, expect more fulminating about scroungers.

So the devil remains in the details. On balance, a universal credit’s benefits outweigh its depredations – any negative impact on overall benefit levels can be counteracted from the massive stack of money that will be saved from operation costs. Whether you trust the current government to pass a policy that works as benignly – or think you can count on the House of Lords to stand in the way of the worst excesses – is another issue.

From the Guardian:

So no overlap on the venn diagram between “foreigners” and “decent, law-abiding people” then, Theresa?

(h/t Jenny for the spot)