GOATS

I want to write about goats. Not the nibbling, munching kind, but non-politicians brought into the U.K. Government in order to form a Government Of All the Talents. Surgeons become Ministers in the Department of Health, admirals become Ministers for Security, businessmen become Ministers for Trade, and so on.

In the U.K. Ministers have to be members of Parliament. So the goats are made Life Peers, ennabling them to sit in the House of Lords, the Upper Chamber. Two widespread criticisms of this system are first, that because they are not subject to questioning by the (more important and elected) House of Commons, the mechanism is undemocratic. And secondly, when the goats resign (as they often do when they discover that government is not what they expected), they get to retain the Life Peerage, with the title, the expenses and the prestige.

Other countries also import outsiders into Government who are not M.P.s; Denmark, for instance (Connie Hedegaard, the Climate Minister who ran the recent Copenhagen summit, was a journalist before she became a Minister, though she had been in politics some time before that). And countries that have a strong separation of powers (eg France, the U.S.) prohibit Ministers from also being members of Parliament or Congress; if Deputies, Congressmen or Senators are picked to be a Minister, then they must resign their seat.

There is no shortage of proposals to the U.K. goat problem. For instance, the former Prime Minister, John Major, has suggested that goats should lose their peerage once they resign as a Minister. However, that strikes me as using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The requirement that Ministers be in Parliament is, under the U.K.'s largely unwritten constitution, a convention rather than a law. If Parliament wants goats to be accountable to Parliament (i.e. to the House of Commons), then the sensible solution is to pass a law allowing anybody to become a Minister, but requiring them to answer to questions in the House of Commons. Nobody would then have to ennoble a goat.

Walter Blotscher