Power and Politics in Modern Britain

The depoliticisation of governing has led to our current crisis

There is a commone lament among British conservatives that no matter what we vote for, nothing happens. It has become fashionable to blame political inaction and seeming impotence on “the Blob”, wokeness, or some other ambiguous force. This is understandable, but clarity is needed: if we want things to change, we need to understand how and why we got here. Any prescription must follow a diagnosis.

​The central point is this: power (the ability to act) and sovereignty (the ability to decide when and how) have been progressively removed from politics and relocated in administrative governance. Parliament is supreme. But this constitutional principle has been undermined. The political has been removed from politics. This isn’t abstract theory. The battles over immigration and asylum; fiscal and monetary policy; energy and environmental policy; housing; the health service, and so much else that impacts our everyday life are so much harder to resolve in favour of right-wing aims because of this depoliticization.

What happened? In America the legislature has been gradually hemmed in by what the political theorist James Burnham called the “managerial revolution”. From a growing population and industrialization arose a mass economy, culture, and society. Up to WWII, there was increasingly a “separation of ownership and control”in the corporate world, whereby owners surrendered control to managers of corporate structures rendered increasingly complex by a dramatic increase in economic mass and scale. This was mirrored by what we might call the “separation of power and politics” in the world of governance: those in government increasingly lacked the ability to implement their political aims over a population subject to the same increase in mass and scale, requiring a new administrative class. This newly centralised administrative order was entrenched and expanded through WWII and the postwar years.

​A similar process occurred in Britain, albeit along a different timeframe, reflecting our own context. There was massive state-economic fusion through our adoption of total war, followed by postwar nationalisation. But Protherough and Pick show that the depoliticization of our politics increased under Margaret Thatcher: “By 1980 it was being asserted, as a self-evident truth, that ‘the management ethos must run right through our national life—private and public companies, civil service, nationalized industries, local government, the National Health Service.’” The ensuing “agencification”, whereby decision-making ability was transferred to non-government organisations and agencies, began the process of removing power and sovereignty from politics into the realm of administration. Thatcher undid much of the previous iteration of the managerial revolution but laid the foundations for the next stage: quangos are a Thatcherite innovation.

​What the New Labour government did was a radicalisation and intensification of pre-existing trends. Thatcher’s economic revolution that demanded efficiency in government was succeeded by an administrative revolution that demanded submission of the political realm to the administrative. New Labour implemented reform by devolving evermore executive authority to non-governmental institutions: “independence for the Bank of England, Foundation Trusts within the NHS and the creation of OFCOM were predicated on the view that certain functions of the state could not be trusted with Ministries such as the Treasury, DHSC and DCMS respectively.”

This led to a massive rise in government spending on Non-Departmental Public Bodies, supposedly independent but which launder the agenda of the managerial class through Parliamentary bodies, who in turn wash their policy preferences through these same legitimating institutions. All this is expressed in the managerial language of efficiency and utility. The “stakeholder” style of governance, of which the “charity-industrial-complex” is a part, positions politicised identitarian groups and organisations that march in ideological lockstep with the state as “civil society”.

​This devolution of power and sovereignty to managers was mirrored by the Blairite constitutional reforms. The passing of the Human Rights Act 1998, the House of Lords Act 1999, the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, the creation of the Supreme Court in 2009, and the passing of the Equality Act 2010. All of these reduce the supreme power and sovereignty of the of the Crown in Parliament, in service to increasing the power of an unelected and supposedly impartial managerial class.

Under a Starmer-led Labour government we facethe completion of the Blairite managerial project. The constitutional revolution drawn up by Gordon Brown will further erase Parliamentary supremacy vested in political parties. Parliament will answer to the judiciary. We will have devolution within England implemented by managerial stakeholderism, in service to the reshapingof Britain as a federal instead of a unitary state. This new managerial order, and the social order already formed by the Blairite project, will be entrenched via a written constitution. The effect will be to dissolve the primary basis for political sovereignty itself.

​Accepting this likely reality does not mean throwing one’s hands up with hopelessness. It is too late in the day to mount a wholesale rollback, and Starmer’s reforms will present a huge challenge. But this depoliticization was achieved through the use of political power, so what political power remaining to a future right-wing government must be used to re-politicise the political. To govern is to choose, and a serious conservatism must choose to act.

A future conservative government must repudiate the Starmerite project. Following this, as Substack commentator Tom Jones writes, defunding bodies like the Art Council which serve as funders and enablers of the culture of repudiation must be pursued. Longer-term, any serious future conservative government needs to abolish the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, ending the Supreme Court and restoring the Law Lords and Lord Chancellor, abolish the Human Rights Act 1998, and leave the ECHR.

Conservatives should also aim to abolish Part 11 of the Equality Act 2010. This contains Section 149, which enforces the Public Sector Equality duty that encodes “disparate impact” based on “disparity = discrimination” into law, and which means Britain has the highest level of DEI administrators in the OECD. This would also remove Sections 158 and 159 that constitute a loophole to the “no quotas” rule, allowing affirmative action for “underrepresented” groups. Such an amendment would be more feasible than total repeal, immediately removing much of DEI’s power.

In this vein, the Charities Act 2011 should also be abolished, itself a reform of a Blairite reform, that means the government funds its own opposition.

A serious British conservatism should seek to use political power where it can to roll back the managerial revolution. A conservative counterrevolution will be needed.

Henry George is a freelance writer and researcher based in the UK.