Listening to the BBC’s Any Questions? makes me despair for democracy – largely because the audience members themselves seem have given up on it. Listen to them whoop and ululate whenever a panellist says, about almost any subject, “This is too important to be a political football” or “We should just let the professionals get on”. Such has been the justification of every tyranny in history, from Napoleon Bonaparte onwards.

Last week their target was Boris Johnson. The audience was outraged that the mayor of London – who has the third largest personal mandate in Europe after the French and Portuguese presidents – had removed a left-wing police chief. It was, someone complained, a coup.

A coup! That word used to mean the overthrow of an elected person by an unelected one, but we have become so servile in the face of our quango state that we now use it to mean the opposite. The fact of doing what you promised as a candidate is now regarded as “politicising the police”. How much more political can you get than Sir Ian Blair, for heaven’s sake? What makes Boris different is not that he is political but that he was elected.

The purpose of representative government is to remind state officials that they work for the rest of us. Remove the bureaucracy from democratic control and there is nothing to stop functionaries pursuing their own agendas. Policemen who think speed cameras are more important than foot patrols? Judges who regard it as their duty always and everywhere to overturn deportation orders? Teachers who think proper spelling is a bourgeois hang-up? Nothing you can do about it, I’m afraid.

Don’t blame your MP: you were the one cheering the dolt on Any Questions? who wanted to “let the professionals get on”. MPs have responsibility without power, being blamed for the failings of a quangocracy that has long since ceased to answer to them or anyone else.

Everyone likes the idea of the expert: the disinterested patriot who can rise above the scrum of party politics. The trouble is that no such person exists. We all have our assumptions and our prejudices, the expert more than most if by “expert” we mean someone who has spent his entire career in a particular field.

The trouble is that most voters blame the failings of the apparat on their politicians. Hence the delight when Gordon Brown stuffs his ministry with CBI functionaries, United Nations bureaucrats, former commissioners and other unelected worthies. Hence the approval of the idea – now promulgated by both parties – that the National Health Service should be “removed from political control”. Perversely, the worse the officials perform, the more voters blame their MPs, protesting that “voting never changes anything”.

How to break the circle? By making officials directly accountable to their communities. So, in the case of policing, we should make constabularies answerable to locally elected sheriffs, who would set police priorities and budgets and stand for reelection on that basis.

Nor is it just the police who have drifted out of the orbital pull of public opinion. The same is true of the broader criminal justice system. We should put sheriffs in charge of prisons, probation, community service and young offenders. We should let them set local sentencing guidelines (although not intervene in specific cases). This might well lead to disparities. It might be, for example, that the sheriff of Kent wanted shoplifters to serve custodial sentences while the sheriff of Surrey didn’t.

One of two things would then happen. Either Kentish crooks (and crooks of Kent) would flood across the border in such numbers that Surrey would elect a tougher sheriff; or Kentish ratepayers would get sick of funding the requisite prison places and would demand alternative sanctions.

What goes for criminal justice goes across the board. In The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, we set out an agenda for the unbundling of the British state: an end to the government monopolies in education and healthcare, parliamentary control of foreign policy, open hearings for heads of executive agencies, self-financing local authorities, the devolution of social security to counties and cities, more referendums.

And before you say it’s impractical, we show how a new government could achieve all these goals with just 30 legal acts in a single parliamentary session.

True, we’d have to get power back from Brussels in order to disperse it at home. You can’t democratise Britain while 84% of our laws come from a super-quango, the European commission. But we don’t see the recovery of our national independence as a disincentive; rather, we see it is a bonus.

The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain by Daniel Hannan MEP and Douglas Carswell MP is available at www.renew-britain.com

Send your ideas on this week’s Think Tank to think@sunday-times.co.uk

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