"We must find the courage to do the same: to carry out our own Restoration, repeal the vandalism of the New Labour years and restore the popular sovereignty we previously enjoyed."

Spectator: 3rd November 2024: David Starkey shares his thoughts on the big tasks facing the new Conservative leader

"The Conservatives finally have a new leader. But Kemi Badenoch must be under no illusions: after the disastrous July election, we have a mountain to climb and a revolution to undo. But we can remain hopeful, because we have been here before – and found a way out.

In 1974, the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath, having taken Britain into Europe, blown up the economy and been humiliated by the miners, was defeated by Labour’s Harold Wilson. The future of the Tory party was in doubt. Surveying the wreckage, Sir Keith Joseph, who had served in Heath’s cabinet, had a revelation: ‘I had thought I was a Conservative, but now see that I was not really one at all’.

Joseph’s eyes were opened primarily by reading the Anglo-Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who converted him from the post-War Keynesian consensus to free-market economics. And Joseph, in turn, converted Margaret Thatcher, who replaced Heath as Conservative leader in 1975. The rest is history. The Tories succeeded then as we will do now. But in order to do so, we need to diagnose clearly where the Conservatives went wrong – and how to avoid repeating those mistakes.

In 2002, Margaret Thatcher was asked to name her greatest achievement. ‘Tony Blair and New Labour,’ she replied. ‘We forced our opponents to change their minds’.

Unfortunately, Thatcher was only half right – and it turns out she had only half won the battle. New Labour did indeed accept (or at least pretend to accept) Thatcher’s free market economics and her consequent denationalisation of the economy and defanging of the trade unions. But the hydra of the Left was not slain. Instead it changed its line of attack – and the Tories fell into the trap.

Between 1997 and 2010, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown launched a series of guerrilla raids on the British constitution. The individual steps – devolution for Scotland (1997) and later for Wales; the independence of the Bank of England (1998); the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into Common Law (1998); the setting up of the Supreme Court and the demotion of the lord chancellorship by the Constitutional Reform Act (2005) and the Equality Act (2010) – appear haphazard and piecemeal. But their cumulative effect was radical, even revolutionary. These changes undermined the central principle of the British constitution: the supremacy of the unitary Crown-in-Parliament over all the functions of state: legislative, executive and judicial. Blair’s reforms weakened that key principles. And now we are all paying the price.

To understand what went wrong, we must remember that Parliamentary sovereignty is not the narrow supremacy of the House of Commons, as the preening John Bercow and ardent Remainers thought. Nor is it merely an abstract principle. Instead, it is the living expression of the sovereignty of the British people. Parliament is sovereign today because, since the coming of democracy a century ago, everybody is represented there as they were in principle from the origins of Parliament in the Middle Ages. This is why the idea of consent is central to our political life: we obey the law because we took part in making it. It is our law; not an alien imposition. But then the New Labour constitutional revolution changed everything. These ‘reforms’, conducted by stealth, never dared to challenge the principle of parliamentary/popular sovereignty head-on but rather eroded it bit by bit.

The result has been the worst of all worlds as the British government, which until recently was a model to the world, has disintegrated into a perma-crisis. The irreconcilable principles of parliamentary and judicial supremacy repeatedly clash; power has seeped relentlessly from elected MPs to unelected judges and quangocrats; the Equality Act, by effectively privileging minorities, paradoxically undermines the principle of equality before the law; the doctrine of universal human rights makes frontiers porous, erodes the distinction between natives and immigrants and calls the very existence of the nation state into question; while devolution, mass immigration and a state-sponsored assault on our history and collective memory turn British citizenship into a mere flag of convenience, conferring rights but no responsibilities. Conservatism itself has refused to address these issues. Even with a large majority, the Conservative party found that the new-fangled constitutional architecture prevented it from doing most conservative things.

So, what now? Keir Starmer used his Labour conference speech in September to warn that Britain was broken and that the foundations of our country need fixing. He’s right, of course – and he should know. After all, it was Labour that broke Britain. But the Tories must share the blame. Conservatives were in power for fourteen years, but they failed to undo what New Labour had done. Indeed, we made it much worse. We added new quangos, like the Office for Budget Responsibility. We made Net Zero legally binding. Above all, we trashed our own brand, with one leader who ‘modernised’ us into welcoming Liberals and another who called us the ‘nasty party’.

Finally, to keep the show on the road we simultaneously imposed austerity and raised taxes to a peacetime high. This meant that government services got worse and more expensive at the same time. This is the politics of the madhouse; the Tories fully deserved our shattering defeat.

The Labour party, of course, is not the answer to Britain’s problems, because it is the problem. It has become the party, not of the working class, but of the well-paid, university-educated professionals of the public sector. Their numbers have multiplied with New Labour’s ‘reforms’ and their quintessence is Starmer himself. A human rights lawyer and vehement opponent of ‘populism’, his first few months in power have already exposed him as fundamentally unsuitable for the job. Starmer talks of ‘public service’, but practices self-service. His ‘taking back control’ will simply mean more of the same: to parody Abraham Lincoln, ‘government of the blob, by the blob, for the blob’. It’s depressing that Labour’s huge majority means we are powerless to stop this. But there is an opportunity for the Conservatives in the mistakes Starmer has made, and will go on making.

The result, and probably sooner than later, will be a crisis, as when Britain was forced to go to the International Monetary Fund in 1976, or the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1979. The Conservative party, as it was when Margaret Thatcher was in charge in 1979, must be ready. But the remedy needs to be be different this time, because the situation is different. This means invocation of Thatcherism or Thatcherite free-market economics is not what we want now.

Instead, we need to look back to the earlier, greater crisis of the so-called Puritan Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. This was a real revolution which anticipated much of the New Labour revolution by stealth. A self-appointed and self-righteous elite seized power in the name of liberty. But they became increasingly authoritarian. They aimed to cut off our history with the king’s head. They used military rule to impose a ‘purified’ form of Christianity and reform popular behaviour and customs. And they engaged in constant constitutional experimentation.

Finally, the English had enough and did that most conservative of things. They reversed a revolution of their own volition and without foreign intervention. There was a great repeal of the acts of the revolutionary years and a restoration of the King, the Church of England and the ancient parliamentary constitution.

We must find the courage to do the same: to carry out our own Restoration, repeal the vandalism of the New Labour years and restore the popular sovereignty we previously enjoyed.

‘It can’t be done’, the sceptics will cry; ‘it will be going backwards’, they will say. But, as our ancestors showed, it can and it won’t. The Restoration was followed by the Glorious Revolution and the extraordinary flowering of the newly United Kingdom of Great Britain, which invented modernity at home and conquered the world abroad. 

There is also the contemporary example of Eastern Europe. Here Poland and the Baltic States, newly liberated from socialism, are simultaneously restoring their past and embracing a future of spectacular economic growth. In so doing, they are putting to shame the sclerotic, over-regulated EU and us, its Blairite, Brexit-in-Name-Only satellite."

This article by the renowned historian and broadcaster, Dr David Starkey, was first published by The Spectator on 3rd November 2024 and is republished here with permission.