ILLUSTRATION BY BETH GOODY
A Martian looking down and taking an interest in British politics would assume that the government was accountable to judges and lawyers at public inquiries, rather than to elected politicians in Westminster.
For it is only a public inquiry that seems to be able to get to the bottom of what goes wrong with policy and administration, and why. In this way, the Inquiries Act 2005 is now afundamental constitutional instrument.
Take three high-profile public inquiries currently taking place in the United Kingdom.
One is about public health, and it is looking at the response to the Covid pandemic. Another is about public administration and miscarriages of justice, and it is looking at how a government owned entity—the Post Office—was able to wrongly prosecute hundreds of people and to then cover up its wrongdoing. And the third is about alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, and it is looking at how senior officers knew about concerns over executions of prisoners but appear to have done nothing to address those concerns.
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