Recently, “depoliticisation” has attracted interest as a method of understanding our political establishment — or, to use the nearly-common term, “the blob”. Doug Stokes’ article on the 15th July did an excellent job of summarising the connection between this obscurantist “blob” and the impact it has on the constitution order of this country:

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.

More and more, commentators are pointing to depoliticisation for its explanatory power as a method of diagnosis for what exactly is wrong with Britain. Quangos abound as the political solution to every possible problem, on every side. The “Migration Advisory Council” was tasked by the Conservative government in its dying days to ‘independently’ set a target on annual immigration numbers, a proposal that was decried almost instantly by commentators for the simple reality that nobody would elect this body, and yet it would be the authority on how many people could legally enter Britain every year. 

None of this is to mention the litany of Quangos that the new Labour government is set to introduce: GB Energy; Border Security Demand; even the Independent Football Regulator. Signalling a complete lack of trust from the British establishment on the self-regulating powers of civil society — power it itself has had a hand in undermining — the bonfire of the Quangos that David Cameron pursued has been well and truly throttled. 

And after all, there is a palpable sense that the British public is not in control. Why else would the phrase “take back control” have been used by political figures as diverse as Dominic Cummings and Sir Keir Starmer? Fundamentally, because it resonates with the public, and intimates an increasingly-spoken truth: Britain is out of control. 

But these Quangos, and the depoliticising impulse that surrounds them, is not the answer, largely because it is the symptom of a complete evaporation in belief in the power of the British state to do anything. 

However, many people throw around this term with very little, clear understanding of what it actually means. Now comes the dry academic bit. Depoliticisation, as a term, was popularised primarily by Professor Pete Burnham in the early 2000s, in response to New Labour giving the Bank of England operational independence, essentially making it responsible for setting key economic factors such as interest rates — a decision that is rapidly reported on now, often in the hopes they will come down.

depoliticisation means … taking an issue important to public, social or even constitutional affairs out of the hands of political actors

Burnham was keen to stress that depoliticisation means not the withdrawing of “politics” from an area of life — like “taking politics out of the classroom”, for example — but taking an issue important to public, social or even constitutional affairs out of the hands of political actors. As a result, “governments are insulated from the political consequences of notionally unpopular policies, by emphasising an ‘automaticity’ and the necessary nature of relying on a strong, rules-based system.”

This “emphasis on automaticity” is central to the point: the government is able to deploy a range of arguments in response to demands from the public at large or parts of the public, such “there is nothing we can do”, “it’s a natural process”, “it is the consequences of faces beyond our control” or even, famously, “there is no alternative”. 

Developments in the theory of depoliticisation have since focused on the removal of institutions and ideas from public control (as specified by Buller and Flinders), as well as the very fact of government agency (as specified by Jenkins). In other words, the government is unable to make decisions, either because of a lack of capacity (as in the former — institutions are no longer under political control or influence) or even the ability (as in the latter — government is unable to act at all on the issue). 

There are, in my opinion, three key expressions of depoliticisation as it exists in Britain. First, is the “hollowing out” of the state, in which the once-unitary and sovereign power of the Westminster parliament has slowly derogated its own powers by passing them to external actors, in every direction. 

Second, there is agenda-shaping depoliticisation. This is usually supported by the first type, in which major issues on which the public expresses its opinions are taken off the table in key centres of decision-making and delegated to newly-created bodies. No matter how those opinions are made, from placid forms (dry academic articles on depoliticisation) to violent forms (riots), the government condemns the expression of the opinion, yet never addresses the causes. 

And third, but the one that very few are yet to recognise — because to do so would place them beyond the bounds of respectability — is “linguistic depoliticisation”. This is a strategic form of depoliticisation, in which contentious terms are snuck into public discourse with otherwise uncontentious or widely-accepted language. This is what I refer to as “Trojan Horse depoliticisation”. 

It’s easy to get lost in abstractions, so let me offer some examples. 

We in Britain have experienced the first form of depoliticisation the most and therefore can point to the most examples. The first, and most obvious, is devolution, which created an uneven legal landscape and fractured the political unity of this once-unitary country. By design or not, the New Labour government destroyed the constitution of this country because it blew apart the unity needed to underpin the idea of a people. 

The second is, as I say above, the proliferation of quangos. We are not at the high-point of quangos in Britain — at one point in the 1970s, we had over 2,000 — but the use of quangos has proliferated in the areas of contentious public issues, so much so that the Economist was capable of referring to Rishi Sunak as a “technocrat” merely years after Michael Gove declared that Britain was ‘sick of experts’. 

The third is the marketisation of key industries that are key to the economic independence and self-sufficiency of a nation — railways, steel, and even now farming. I want to make it clear that I am broadly in favour of free-markets, but only from a methodological perspective, and I still favour steering a market away from practices detrimental to a nation’s people’s independence, such as the Polish government last year, in preventing cheap Ukrainian grain from flooding its markets and undercutting farmers’ prices. 

And the fourth is the commitment to supra-national institutions. Alongside the administrative vandalism of devolution — which exacerbated the delusions that the Scots and the Welsh, whilst culturally different to the English, are not legally the same nor subjects of the same crown — the surrendering of the nations courts’ abilities to mediate between its citizens to a foreign power only made worse the emerging sense of dual loyalty that was gestating in an increasingly multicultural Britain. 

The greatest acts of constitutional vandalism — the creation of the Supreme Court, the Human Rights Act, the project of devolution, the reforms to the House of Lords — all committed by the forebears of the current administration upended the balance of the country in a way none but constitutional historians loyal to the idea of Britain could have predicted. 

Each of these deserves an invective all their own, but the simple fact is that each of these altered the operation of Britain’s constitution in different ways, but creating a legalistic straightjacket around Parliament: the Supreme Court subverted the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty; the Human Rights Act made that Supreme Court loyal to a power beyond the boundaries and popular control of Britain; devolution created parallel laws applying to the same citizens at different times and in different places across the country; and the neutering of the hereditary aristocracy resulted in an upper chamber dedicated to ambition, avarice and cronyism.

Meanwhile, agenda-shaping depoliticisation, which is wrapped so closely to the above, has been noticed more and more that in Britain we have begun to speak of the blob, whilst in America they refer to the “Deep State” as the administrative behemoth. 

Curtis Yarvin’s idea of the Cathedral is yet to break into the public awareness in Britain, but it’s the best analysis of agenda-shaping I have read, in that it points out the shared cultural backgrounds of the opinion formers who infest academia, journalism, the civil service, the charitable sector and the machinery of modern politics. 

You have seen the phrase “we were never asked” used more and more in relation to immigration. This is a perfect example of an awakening consciousness in relation to agenda-shaping depoliticisation: the recognition that a politically significant strategy has been pursued without the knowledge, or counter to the wishes, of the public at large. 

But the factor people are yet to begin to truly understand in Britain is our linguistic depoliticisation. I’ll begin with a common phrase: “trans rights are human rights”. Because one half of that phrase is unobjectionable (“human rights”), so must the other be (“trans rights”). After all, you believe in and agree with the concept of human rights, so if something is a human right, it must be acceptable. Sir Roger Scruton expertly analysed the political implication of this “rights inflation”, but I don’t think the right has begun to truly understand the constitutional implications of it. Imagine a slight reformulation — “trans rights are British rights”. It’s less convincing, isn’t it?

The very term “human rights” has shaped our political language to the extent that we are now unable to linguistically defend the uniqueness of our own political identity. After all, the old phrase the freeborn rights of Englishmen carried much the same political purpose, in that it laid out, even if hazily, the limits of government interference and intervention in the personal life of its subjects. But that was the key part: it provided a limited remit to that government, in that it was specific to the relationship between the government and its citizens or subjects. “Human rights” mean the government has an obligation to all humans.

This is not so damning in and of itself, though it is deeply concerning. But when intertwined with the above points of a delegation of decision making and the removal of agency from the central government, the consequence is one of paralytic government. Let’s imagine a scenario not quite inconceivable. A person born outside of this country, and therefore not a citizen of this government, whilst living here, attacks a citizen of this country. The government then seeks to return that person to the country of his birth, but this person claims that doing so will result in harm. What decision can be made? In times past, the government would be able to respond with a rather simple answer: we are responsible to and for our citizens, and our laws say you are not allowed here any longer. What happens to you once you have left is not our problem anymore. 

Imagine such a scenario, if you can. 

I will close this article with some important caveats. One might be forgiven for thinking that I take depoliticisation to be a problem inherently. Indeed, reading Professor Stokes’ highly perceptive article, it would appear that the Blairite state’s attempt to depoliticise matters of “political struggles over identity, sovereignty, and the social contract” — and therefore settle them – is the cause of our current discontents. 

I disagree slightly; depoliticisation did not settle these issues, but made it impossible to settle them. Consider depoliticisation and its impacts on British identity: exacerbating Scottish and Welsh nationalism has reduced attempts to continue or reforge the principles of this national to procedural questions — should we have a referendum on Scottish independence or not? — or vague identity markers that could be applied to anywhere or any when — diversity, equality and inclusion.

In fact, the areas of depoliticisation I have laid out here are both cause and effect of the Blairite project. As Lord Norton pointed out, Britain’s constitution was seen as remarkably settled for long periods of time — so much so that, as Eric Nelson masterfully showed, the US constitution designed its key principles on the Framers’ English inheritance. 

Interestingly, Eric Kaufmann calls for depoliticisation in his new book Taboo, especially for a “neutral and depoliticised public service concentrating on excellence and serving the country”. An applaudable goal, one we should strive to restore. 

So I would like to offer an attempt at a criterion of acceptable depoliticisation for conservatives and those of us on the right. We should depoliticise, as far as possible, any central institution that is fundamental to the existence and preservation of Britain as a nation. For example, the monarchy: Britain is a product of our monarchy, from the union of crowns in 1604, to the Act of Union in 1707, and all the way through to the creation, dissolution and transformation of the Empire into the Commonwealth.

Let us remember that depoliticisation is not “taking politics out” of the thing; rather, it is limiting political interference in the thing. 

But such depoliticisation will only be possible after a long project of repoliticisation — of putting our politics back into key institutions. We are out of government, and have been out of power for a good few decades now. Only by repoliticising, resettling and restoring our national identity can we then discuss depoliticisation once again.