"The party’s greatest failure in government was not reversing Blair’s legal vandalism"
Telegraph: 28th July 2024: Journalist Martin Howe makes the PopCon case on where the Conservative Party went wrong
"When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, he embarked on a huge programme of constitutional and legal change. The Human Rights Act embedded into British law the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the judgments of its court at Strasbourg. Devolution was introduced. The law lords were replaced as our highest court by the new and assertive Supreme Court. The Bank of England was made independent. Many other powers were hived off to independent, supposedly non-partisan bodies, including the Climate Change Committee in 2008. And one of the last changes made by Labour in 2010 was to pass the wide-ranging Equality Act into law.
These changes exempted many state functions from democratic control by voters through their MPs. Large areas of the state ceased to be accountable to the electorate, but their decisions did not cease to be political just because they were not taken by ministers. Most of these bodies were stuffed with appointees from the endemically incompetent and increasingly Left-leaning quangocrat class.
There were many failings during the past 14 years of Tory government, but the most grievous was total inaction in reversing any of these changes after the Blair era..."