Lord Butler

Lord Butler has attacked the "centrally controlled" government in which the Cabinet makes "no decisions".

The former Cabinet secretary has also said that parliament does not have "sufficient control of the executive".

He said the government was introducing "a huge number of extremely bad bills, a huge amount of regulation and to do whatever it likes - and whatever it likes is what will get the best headlines tomorrow".

In an interview with the Spectator magazine, the man who led the most critical inquiry into the run up to the Iraq war, was scathing about the mechanics of Number 10.

"It isn't wise to listen only to special advisers, and not to listen to fuddy-duddy civil servants who may produce boringly inconvenient arguments," he said.

"Good government, in my view, means bringing to bear all the knowledge and all the arguments you can from inside and outside, debating and arguing them as frankly as you can, and to try to reach a conclusion.

"I mean, it is clear that politically appointed people carry great weight in the government and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but if it's done to the exclusion of advice from civil servants, you tend to get into error, you make mistakes."

Central control

Butler went on: "I would be critical of the present government in that there is too much emphasis on selling, there is too much central control and there is too little of what I would describe as reasoned deliberation which brings in all the arguments."

Following home secretary David Blunkett's comments that the prime minister did not like people to stand up to him Butler said: "The Cabinet, and I don't think there is any secret about this, doesn't make decisions.

"I think what tends to happen now is that the government reaches conclusions in rather small groups of people, who are not necessarily representative of all the groups of interests in government, and there is insufficient opportunity for other people to debate, dissent and modify."

When asked whether he thought the country was well-governed on the whole, he said: "I think we are a country where we suffer very badly from parliament not having sufficient control over the executive, and that is a very grave flaw.

"We should be breaking away from the party whip. The executive is much too free to bring in a huge number of extremely bad bills, a huge amount of regulation and to do whatever it likes - and whatever it likes is what will get the best headlines tomorrow.

"All decisions are delegated by politicians - because they don't want to take responsibility for them - to quangos, and quangos are not accountable to anybody.

"You know, all those commissioners who give out the lottery money, the Bank of England are now responsible for interest rates. Now what can you really hold a politician responsible for in domestic policy?''

'Shameful'

Lord Butler also said that "Britain is worse governed by the fact the executive has got so free of any inhibitions that are imposed either by parliament or the public".

"It is extraordinary and shameful that the House of Lords, which I am proud to be a member of but which is an unelected body, puts the inhibition on the will of the government [on Labour's law and order agenda] and it is a shameful thing that the House of Commons doesn't," he said.

In response the prime minister's official spokesman said: "In terms of the prime minister's style of government, what the prime minister and the government should be judged by is the results it has achieved across a wide range of subjects."