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This article is about the corrosive effects of the Tony Blair premiership in the UK and the stasis resulting from his promotion of what the Brits call Quangos (stand alone non-governmental organisations with regulatory powers) and his preference for subordinating parliament to the courts and the civll service.
It is my view that this particular philosophy has infected all the Westminster polities including ours.
The article addresses how only the authors of the system can correct the system. In the UK that is Labour. In Canada that is the Liberals.
Burnham threatens to be the latest PM thwarted by Tony Blair’s deep state legacy
Even Starmer ended up frustrated that the administrative and judicial state stands in the way of delivering for the voterswww.telegraph.co.uk
"Is there any reason to expect Andy Burnham (assuming it is he) to break the pattern? Will he, like his predecessors, get in promising all sorts of things – welfare reforms, speedier deportations, more houses – only to find his proposals blocked by our bureaucracy and courts?
"Not necessarily. He starts with advantages that his predecessors lacked. First, and most obviously, he will not discover the problem while on the job, since almost everyone in politics now recognises it. Second, because he is taking over from a Labour prime minister, he will not come to office convinced that every problem stems from Tory idiocy. Third, being Labour, he can more easily repeal the most problematic laws.
"A Conservative ministry that set out to scrap the Equality Act or the Human Rights Act would be accused of bullying minorities. Labour would be trusted to remove the objectionable portions of those laws, perhaps replacing them with statutes that had similar names, but that did not give such huge powers to the deep state."
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Arguably Mark Carney has already started treading this path. He is among the most Conservative Prime Ministers of my life time. He is not repealing laws so much as gutting them and working "over, under, around and through" them.
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For me this is the most interesting part of the article because it resonates with my view of our Canadian problem.
"Even as I write, I sense the impatience of some readers. Few people are interested in process and, because of our media culture, we never blame civil servants, only politicians. You doubt me? OK. Can you name any of the officials involved in the only event at No 10 during lockdown that met the ordinary definition of a “party”, and which happened while Johnson was 40 miles away? Precisely.
"We are governed, not by the carousel of party politicians, but by the permanent apparat. That apparat might not be partisan, but it does have corporate opinions. It is safetyist, interventionist, eco-obsessed, Europhile, high-spending, woke and invulnerable to public opinion.
"We see its structural biases in every Whitehall ministry. Treasury officials ignore the dynamic effects of tax cuts. Home Office employees hate deporting illegal immigrants: it was their trade union that took the Rwanda scheme to court. The Education Department is slavering at the opportunity to replace Michael Gove’s knowledge-based curriculum with something less demanding and more anti-colonialist. The Business and Trade Department longs to sign up to EU rules. All subordinate their notional departmental goals to their twin ruling principles: net zero and DEI.
"Even more radical was the Blairite juridical revolution. In 2003, seemingly from no higher motive than his dislike of the “men in tights”, Tony Blair announced that the Lord Chancellor would no longer control judicial appointments, and that a Supreme Court would be created. On paper, the Lord Chancellor’s role had indeed been anomalous. He was a member of all three branches of government: head of the judiciary, Speaker of the House of Lords and a member of Cabinet.
"Yet, precisely because that combination was hard to justify, successive Lord Chancellors were meticulously neutral in their judicial appointments, promoting on merit. Once their function was taken over by a new Judicial Appointments Commission, the door was open to political favouritism, usually in the name of DEI, which eventually became formally recognised as part of the Commission’s remit.
"Result? We now have a troop of activist judges who legislate from the bench. Labour ministers are as frustrated as their Tory predecessors by the determination of immigration tribunals to overturn repatriation orders on the flimsiest of pretexts. They are frustrated, too, at the readiness of courts to stop people building runways, power stations, even houses.
"Eventually, Starmer himself, the very embodiment of a Doughty Street activist lawyer, came to see what was wrong: “For too long, blockers have had the upper hand in legal challenges – using our court processes to frustrate growth.” Naturally he, not the judges, took the rap."
“Only Nixon can go to China.”
