The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I don't think they are accurate.
Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.
Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as ‘the government’.
There are many western democracies where there no single ruling party. 'The government' is made by an alliance of many different parties (eg: 25% + 15% + 10% + 5%.) They might share a common overall view of the world but each party can have a very different take on many subjects. The actual government has to do only what all of them agree upon, and the 5% party may have a disproportionate weight because that party leaving the government is as important as the 25% party leaving it.
So, the government is the people in the government and the small parties can be very vocal against it. Opposition from inside is a double edged tool to attempt to get more votes in the next elections, even from within the same coalition.
This is not working. A few decades later the biggest party is like 50% of the politicians.
My theory is that power accumulates like money so you end up having few people with all the power. It's not that original, I must've read it somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law - in political systems with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post voting system, only two powerful political parties tend to control power.
In parliamentary systems we see fractures and reformation all the time, including in the current political climate in the UK.
Duverger's Law is only really parroted by Americans, who's ballot access and districting is determined by a coalition of two political parties instead of an constitutionally defined apolitical government institution. Don't forget to vote Green or Libertarian! Oh wait, you can't because the dems and repubs struck them from the ballot :(
> main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections
This isn't true most actually gain more power because once you're out of the frankly trash job of being the figurehead of the country you can then take advantage of all the deals, favors and contacts you made doing it then move into NGOs/thinktanks/board position at meta/etc and start actually making real money and having real influence without the eyes on you.
They do if they are libertarian governments. Although it's popular to pretend they don't exist, there are plenty of examples of governments reducing their power over history. The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power. And Britain has in the past gone through deregulatory phases and shrunk the state.
Unfortunately at this time Britain doesn't really have a viable libertarian party. Reform is primarily focused on immigration, and the conservatives have largely withered on the vine becoming merely another center left party. So it's really very unclear if there are any parties that would in fact roll this back, although Nigel Farage is saying they would. His weakness is that he is not always terribly focused on recruiting people ideologically aligned to himself or even spelling out what exactly his ideology is. This is the same problem that the conservatives had and it can lead to back benches that are not on board with what needs to be done. Farage himself though is highly reasonable and always has been.
>The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power
Since its foundation, has the US government ever actually reduced its powers? It established itself with limited power.. But since then, its power has only increased via amendments, to the point where the President is effectively an uncontested emperor type figure.
If you define the US as the federal government then yes it has rolled back its powers several times:
- The Prohibition was implemented and then ended, i.e. the state gave up its power to ban alcohol.
- The Bill of Rights itself post-dates the founding of the USA. Those amendments were limiting the power of the state!
- Income tax rates were once much higher than they are today. Of course you could argue that this isn't a reduction of its power given that once upon a time there was no income tax. But it has nonetheless fallen from its once great heights.
- The federal government gave up its power to regulate abortion quite recently.
- In the 60s (or 70s I forget) the US government deregulated the airline industry and has never gone back.
- The War Powers veto. One could argue that it's not been effective because POTUSes have ignored it, but in theory Congress took away the ability for Presidents to declare war.
More specifically, for the past 40 years, the US government has mostly been focused on increasing the power of corporations. It has reduced the government's power where it limits corporations, but increased it where it limits people.
> The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power.
This is not an example for an existing government reducing its power. It's rather an example of revolutionaries recognizing this very problem and attempting to prevent it. As we have found out since then, their solution isn't as foolproof as they had hoped.
Sounds like you're Old Left? The left's positions have changed since 1900 you know.
Labour is fully committed to mass immigration and "diversity", refuses to reduce welfare by even a penny despite imminent financial crisis, has implemented big tax rises, has soaked the rich so much they're all leaving, and this article is about it enforcing heavy handed regulation of information distribution. All that sounds very left wing to me, judged by the modern goals the left have.
Censorship has always been more of a conservative thing. But really more of an authoritarian thing, once you manage to get your head out of one-dimensional political thinking.
But if you want left-right, "helping the poor and disenfranchised" is left, "helping the rich and powerful" is right, and while details have moved around, that core never changed. I don't see conservatives anywhere do much for the poor, and they still love disenfranchising people. It's more that formerly left-wing parties, including Labour, have moved to the right since the neoliberalism of the 1990s.
I’m surprised anti-trans stuff isn’t in there with how much airtime they’ve given it, but I guess they feel there’s not enough distance between them and Starmer’s Labour.
Every party says they want to reduce immigration. Labour says they will "stop the boats" etc. Neither have done so, of course, it's all lies.
The Conservatives don't want to reduce spending on benefits. They always defended the triple lock that makes their pensioner base so happy, of course. They are merely slightly more willing to admit that huge cuts are inevitable than Labour is. Labour also tried a tiny reduction in benefits - there's not much difference between them really - but their MPs are in total denial of the scale of the problem and blocked it.
UK benefits are going to evaporate, it doesn't matter who is in power. Tweaking eligibility criteria is rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic at this point. It's become a financial inevitability post-COVID, just look at the charts. The austerity that's coming will show the 2010s era as the weak sauce it truly was.
As a rule of thumb, governments don't take actions which reduce their power.