Many of the burning frustrations that many (former) Conservative voters feel towards the party are rooted in its failure to reform a deeper administrative state and constitutional settlement left over from the Blair years. This “blob” constrained policy-making whilst profoundly shaping British institutional life. 

For example, voters intensely dislike wokery and imposed forms of ideological diversity and inclusion. Despite the headline-chasing tough talk, the Conservatives failed to repeal Blair’s Equality Act, which legally mandates diversity and inclusion across the public sector to ensure equal outcomes based on an intersectional oppression matrix.  Taxpayer-funded quangos and activist charities have received billions in taxpayer largesse to ensure ideological compliance. On illegal immigration, the seemingly endless tide of small-boat migrants, 90 per cent of whom are young men, remains a hot issue amongst voters. Why did the Tories fail to grasp the nettle of the ECHR’s “living instrument doctrine” that arrogates the powers to reinterpret the convention to encompass ever-expanding new rights, including those regarding the UK’s immigration policies? If the 2019 realignment was driven by the British people wishing to see the party deliver on its promise to “take back control”, why were so many ministers backseat drivers?

As the British centre-right seeks to rebuild, it must become far more strategically aware of the challenges it faces and its likely entrenchment under Starmer’s supermajority. 

The “blob” derives its power from sets of Blairite innovations whose strategic genius was to constitutionalise and thus settle what are in fact highly contested political struggles over identity, sovereignty, and the social contract. By locking in forms of institutional ordering backed by a constitutional settlement,  Blair’s new Labour secured a political balance of power reflective of its creation time. The Tories were in control but playing checkers on a Blairite chessboard.  

Complicating things was that this constitutional order was armoured through appeals to a politics of vulnerability, where technocratic solutions are employed to protect those deemed needing legislative and state-imposed equality. 

This technocratic moral order depoliticised contentious political struggles and secured progressive victory through an emotional grammar of human rights and equality backed by a new constitutional settlement. Seeking to reopen these fundamental questions, as seen in the Brexit civil war, becomes less a form of democratic political contestation and instead is seen as a form of ethical transgression. In this, politics is transferred from the necessity to build democratic consent to instead insulating the progressive moral order from vulgar explosions of popular will that threaten to repoliticise that which is deemed settled. 

The new Starmer government will build on this constitutional settlement. His 2022  commissioned report,  “A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy”, led by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, outlines the logic. Our vision, it states, is “to ensure that no matter which party is in government” everybody “can enjoy the same access to opportunity and prosperity and right to be listened to”.  

The proposed reforms thus threaten to further undermine democratic accountability

The Labour supermajority will likely carry out several of the report’s recommendations, including replacing the House of Lords with an elected Senate, embedding irreversible devolution, and granting regional leaders significant legislative powers, including vetoes based on “constitutional statutes” with Supreme Court input. Although the report claims to maintain the Commons’ primacy, these changes shift power towards courts and regional assemblies, potentially hindering significant legislation and introducing a constitutional framework ensuring social rights, overseen by judges and committees with an “overarching constitutional obligation on governments to address territorial economic inequality”.

The proposed reforms thus threaten to further undermine democratic accountability by transferring significant decision-making power from elected representatives to unelected bodies, increasing technocratic complexity with more administrative layers and devolved powers, making it difficult for citizens to understand and hold decision-makers accountable. Its constitutional statutes will likely create legal barriers for future governments “to ensure that no matter which party is in government,” this new order will be almost impossible to change. The commitment to expand quangos and legal obligations for cooperation among different government levels will further entrench bureaucratic governance, leading to the fragmentation of national strategy. There is also a strong likelihood that economic growth will be stifled by policies prioritising regional bureaucratic redistribution, increased regulation and government intervention over innovation, and bottom-up forms of market-driven growth. 

What is to be done? It is still very early, but whatever Conservative party emerges from the ashes of the election defeat, it will need a ruthless diagnostic to determine how it got things so badly wrong and alienated its natural supporters. How could it be in power for so long and yet ignore the structural constitutional political conditions of possibility that boxed it in at every turn? After 14 years, British history is denigrated, and a politics of repudiation and reparations drive its institutions. Under the Conservatives, even the pubescent bodies of children have been irreversibly damaged by taxpayer-funded activist charities underpinned by the legal imprimatur of the Equality Act. Is speech and conscience any freer? 

Starmer’s fragile coalition will likely fragment over the next few years. It is equally likely that as it does, authoritarian technocracy will grow ever more with more significant restrictions on free speech, what we can do, and what we can think. This presents an opportunity.  In the place of regulation, nannying technocrats and endless expanding forms of layered bureaucratic governance, we need an almost spiritual reboot that reaffirms the importance of human agency and freedom. The British spirit has a deep duality: lockdown curtain twitchers and scolds versus a rebellious spirit of liberty and can-do. The Conservative party should lead a new constitutional reform act that reboots the primacy of freedom, equality before the law and human dignity. We need to remove the endless layers of bureaucracy and reaffirm the democratic accountability of the “blob”. We need to take back control.