Originally posted by BBC.

What about Jack?

“In the end it is about the system rather than the people. He got into the system. He wanted the power. He did some good, I think, but at the end of the day what he could do was very limited by the system and what the system enabled you to do.”

Ed was a student politician himself – Gordon Brown’s future chief whip Nick Brown helped him get elected to the helm of Manchester student union four decades ago – but decided to “pursue a different path”.

“I couldn’t be a politician – I’d last about six months. I’m far too inclined to speak my mind, or the truth as I see it.”

It sounds like there could be a lively discussion or two over the family dining table. But he bursts that vision by saying: “We don’t talk politics. He’s endlessly nagged – so when he’s with the family we can give him time off.”

There is also a next-generation Straw hoping to become an MP next year – Jack’s son Will. He’s been sent a copy of the book: “I’m waiting to hear back from him to hear if he’s seen the light.”

The thrust of Ed Straw’s book is that the current system of government is too adversarial, fails to include any feedback on whether policies have succeeded, gives little choice to voters and suffers from a civil service which hampers politicians’ attempts to get things done.

“Between elections, the places where power resides are the news media running their various agendas, good and bad, political and business – large companies and industries with expert preferential lobbyists and party funders, dealing with a political and civil service class mostly ignorant of their business,” he says.

He says governments “limp on with a mixture of muddle, error, howlers and the occasional success” and politicians “rarely work out before getting power that it’s bust”.

Civil service reform needs to be a day-one issue for any new government, he says. So does he approve of Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude’s efforts to reform it?

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Jack Straw at a glance:

Age: 68

Political career: MP since 1979, home secretary, foreign secretary, justice secretary during Labour government

From the archives: “Well, it was the most serious decision I’ve ever had to take and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Bear in mind what my family felt. It wasn’t as though the arguments weren’t being tested.” Did you have rows? “No, we had discussions. It was too serious to have a row about.” (Interviewed in The Guardian in 2012 about his memoir Last Man Standing)

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He says he does, and that a report he wrote in 2005 for the Demos think tank called The Dead Generalist may even have influenced the coalition’s policy.

But – isn’t there always a but – he says Francis Maude is joining him and “a long line of people” who have attempted to reform the civil service and failed. He says he has come to the conclusion that the civil service cannot be reformed on its own, because reform would involve transferring more power to the government, which would “make it worse because they have too much power already”.

So his solution is a revamp of the whole system of government.

The better-known reforms that he wants to see include proportional representation and state funding of political parties – with a ban on large donations – to promote competition among parties and make sure that individuals or interests cannot buy influence.

Swiss-style referendums would be held on a more regular basis, while governments would be limited to four-year terms and prime ministers not allowed to serve more than eight years (to stop the “autocracy cap” where a leader with pretty much unchecked power becomes autocratic and “wants to stay for ever because you can’t imagine life without that power”).

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Lessons from Scotland – Ed Straw’s view

“To the delight of all those who know our system has an incurable and terminal condition, the Scottish referendum has released the pent-up demand for good government. At last. But the debate is collecting around the trading of constitutional artefacts.

“English votes for English laws is the neat trap laid by the Conservatives – into which Labour has obligingly stepped. Hard to argue with, but by how much would the application of this principle alone improve our quality of lives?

“Regional government for England is trading well. Good. But are people going to vote for another layer of high-cost, low-quality, detached government – without its transformation first? Devolution to cities is another – great. But today’s local authorities have as many fault lines as the centre, and 90% of the power is exercised by officials. Executive mayors are a big step in the right direction but far from all that is needed to produce flourishing and effective real local government.

“Scotland has shown how parched minds respond to drinking at the well of active and equal engagement in constitutional concepts, previously sanctioned as too weighty for the commoner.”

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His more radical ideas are based around bringing in new feedback systems into the working of governments.

He likens government at present to a gardener planting seeds, telling people what the garden will look like but then never actually checking whether or not they have grown as planned (instead spending lots of time checking on the sharpness of a spade or the water efficiency of a hose).

That is in contrast to the private sector, which checks on the outcomes of spending continually. A similar discipline needs to come into government, he says.

There has been progress with the National Audit Office, the Office for National Statistics and select committees, he says, but he wants them all brought under the umbrella of the second chamber (the House of Lords at the moment) becoming a “Resulture” able to score policies and kill off those ones which are not working.

The civil service would be radically revamped with it retaining a smaller administrative role, but in other areas there would no longer be a permanent civil service. Instead specialists with knowledge of, say, the railways, would be brought in to contract, manage and regulate that industry.

One example he gives of how government policy went along without getting proper feedback from voters or experts was immigration policy under the last Labour government.

As he puts it, there was a conscious decision to allow mass immigration to tackle the “dependency ratio” (the fact there were increasingly more older people per working-age person) largely to ensure the country could afford public sector pensions in the years ahead.

This led to a “virtuous circle” in the chancellor’s mind where large scale immigration “would pay for the growth in the ageing population and its future pension cost” while locals who lost out to foreign workers could have their benefits paid using the higher tax revenues from the growing economy.

It ignored the impact on congestion, infrastructure, public services, house prices and social housing and what it means to be British, he says. “But whilst government ignored the inconvenient variables, in their lives the public noticed them.”

Ed Straw says that his application of organisational theory onto how the UK government works is unique. He has also got strong views on the Labour Party’s structure.

Back in 1992/3 he produced a report for the then Labour leader John Smith which ended up as a blueprint for a restructuring of the party.

He says Mr Smith took up parts of it before his death and Tony Blair “took it up in spades”, such as the need for rebuttal and the idea of a change of name.

But there are still changes needed. He says a lot of Labour’s problems could have been avoided if they had a better process for challenging or replacing a leader, saying the Conservative system is much more efficient.

It would have allowed Mr Blair to be removed before the 2005 election, for Gordon Brown to have gone within a year of taking office and John Smith to have led Labour in 1992 rather than Neil Kinnock, he says.

But whatever the changes within parties, he says that successive governments have shown that nothing much will change without the wider reforms he is suggesting.

He wants established parties to sign up to his programme of government, although reading his proposals there might be an element of “turkeys voting for Christmas” if they do.

He has sent his book to Nigel Farage, whose UK Independence Party backs the idea of policy referendums, but has yet to hear back.

The question is what happens if nothing changes. Ed Straw issues what he describes as a “call to arms” saying that if none of the existing parties adopt his proposals it is time “to get agitating” adding that “it takes a ‘burning platform’ to get an organisation’s people to shift”.

But before concluding that he is advocating the type of bloody revolution seen in years past in France and China, think again.

His goal is that, if the establishment refuses to take on board his ideas, he will create his own party with the aim of getting elected on a pledge to bring in all the changes via a referendum and then disband within two years and let “the regular parties resume power in a system that now functioned”.

As he said, in his view it’s not the people who are the problem; it’s the system.

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Originally posted by BBC.