Labour is planning a disastrous second Blairite revolution
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The British state is costing more to deliver services less well. Radical change is desperately needed. How the system is reformed is one of few questions to which Sir Keir Starmer has an answer. He will methodically strip issues out of the political arena, and hand over decisions to unelected civil servants, quangos, and judges to create technocratic governance unimpeded by pesky debates between elected representatives.
For a preview of Starmer’s Britain, take a look at the ECHR case this week in which the Strasbourg Court ruled that Switzerland had violated human rights by not decarbonising quickly enough. What should be the preserve of democratic debate is now being absorbed by a legal-administrative elite accountable to no one.
At the heart of Labour’s plans is a second wave of quangos. Great British Energy will be set up and granted a remit to set energy policy. Education will see a new “National Curriculum Authority”, reinforced by “Skills England”.
Bureaucracy will balloon. Already the laundry list is endless: a single enforcement body for workers’ rights, nationwide Climate Export Hubs, an ironically-named “Office for Value for Money”. There is seemingly no challenge that Labour believes cannot be fixed with ever-more powerful arms-length bodies. Rachel Reeves intends to “hard-wire growth” with a new “fiscal lock” designed to give the OBR the final say on budgets set by the government. Decisions will not be made by elected politicians, but by these “experts” who subscribe to the economic orthodoxy. Whatever noises Starmer makes about “lowering taxes for working people”, their prescription will always be to raise taxes and grow the state.
Executive power is already seeping away from Ministers. Last October, when Steve Barclay, then Secretary of State for Health, ordered NHS Trusts to stop recruiting directly to dedicated EDI roles, the chair of NHS England appeared to reprimand him for daring to tell the NHS how to spend taxpayer money. What Labour propose means even less democratic oversight and accountability when, clearly, far more is needed. The NHS has failed to translate significant increases in doctor and nursing numbers, not to mention a £20 billion rise in health spending in real terms since before the pandemic, into more patients being treated.
Of course, Labour has nothing to fear from the quangos or officialdom that they wish to empower, because they are already ideologically aligned. They believe in racing at breakneck speed towards Net Zero, accept the supposed virtues of mass immigration without question, and recoil at our decision to leave the EU.
The proliferation of wokery through the civil service will spread. Labour will double-down on the Equality Act with a new Race Equality Act that will mandate ethnicity disparity reporting. Disparities in pay and referrals to disciplinary procedures may be used as definitive evidence of “systemic discrimination” in public bodies, warranting ever more EDI training classes and the employment of third party “EDI consultancies”, at the expense of the taxpayer and to the benefit of those who peddle divisive and false narratives about Britain’s inherent and unique racism and intolerance. As we saw with Labour-run Westminster Council this week, hiring practices risk pivoting from assessing merit to racial identity.
Starmer has even more radical plans for eroding Parliamentary sovereignty. Many of these were set out in Gordon Brown’s commission on “renewing our democracy”. The report suggests the creation of a new “Assembly of the Nations and the Regions” with powers to strike down legislation made in the Commons that does not adhere to a new Constitution full of positive rights. This act of constitutional vandalism would provide citizens with rights to every possible good thing regardless of practicality, with policymaking reduced to judicial reviews where judges and technocrats have final say.
It also includes a fresh round of devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. This is premised, as New Labour’s devolution plan was nearly thirty years ago, on the grounds it will act as an antidote to separatism and enable better public services. But on both counts this experiment has already failed spectacularly. As the SNP has trashed the once world-leading Scottish education system, Welsh Labour has driven the local NHS into the ground. Both devolved governments have taken the lead in foolish initiatives such as 20mph speed limits. The more power is handed away from Westminster, the more fractured our nation becomes.
Starmer’s proposals are a direct continuation of New Labour’s constitutional changes to Britain between 1997 and 2010. If Labour is allowed to “rewire” Britain, whichever government follows it will find their control of the system has been diminished even further. A vote for Keir Starmer is not a vote for change. It is a vote to give up control.
The Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP is a former immigration minister
