In his latest column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, talks about the abolition of NHS England. 

A key objective of PopCon is to persuade conservatives (both inside and outside of the Tory Party) that we need a restoration of Parliamentary sovereignty. The government of Britain is increasingly in the hands of judges, lawyers and bureaucrats. The UK risks having a mere veneer of democracy. Those we elect are increasingly at the mercy of the “machine”.

It should have come as a welcome surprise then that even the Labour government seems to be moving in our direction. NHS England is to be scrapped and its functions moved under full departmental control. Maybe Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, will do a good job, maybe he’ll do a terrible one – but if the buck stops with him, then power and control needs to begin with him.

So, are we seeing a bonfire of the quangos on Starmer’s watch? Not only has he taken the bold decision to kill off the bureaucratic disaster of NHS England (the world’s biggest quango), but he even used the PopCon-style argument that we needed to return key government activities to being under democratic control.

Without wishing to sound ungenerous or ungrateful, I fear the Prime Minister’s latest move is unlikely to be the start of a bonfire – it’s more akin to a gentle smouldering at the edges of the state machine. As the Conservatives pointed out this week, Labour has created 27 new quangos since coming to office last July. This equates to a new powerful bureaucratic body being created nearly every week.

Earlier this week, the government announced that it would axe the Payment Systems Regulator, which oversees rules about how you can use your Mastercard. Who knew we had such a body and who ever thought we needed one? 

However, it turns out the reality is that the PSR’s functions are merely going to be subsumed within the Financial Conduct Authority, whose job often appears to be to make financial services so risk adverse that they can barely innovate at all. This might end up saving a bit of money on paper clip procurement but is unlikely to achieve much else.

The truth is that the hydra of our state machinery cannot be defeated by attempting to lop off one head at a time. Our political process is geared to creating more quangos faster than any politician can scrap them, especially if these things are just considered on a case-by-case basis.

Instead, we will need an incoming government to introduce a Great Repeal Act to tackle the out-of-control blob with one enormous and lethal blow.

The PopCon team have been on the airwaves and all over social media this week discussing bureaucratic, quango-run Britain. One interesting piece of pushback from those one might expect, in general, to be sympathetic to the broader conservative cause has been that the real issue isn’t whether politicians or bureaucrats are in control of so many functions – it’s whether such functions are conducted in the state sector at all or left to the market.

I have reached the conclusion that economics are downstream of the constitution. You can argue for a more free market economy all you like, you can even vote a party into government that professes to support lower taxes, less regulation, tighter controls on public spending and sound money. But none of these things will come to pass if your overall institutional structure is pushing so hard in the opposite direction. 

Restoring Parliamentary sovereignty is not a guarantee of conservative, market-orientated government. But it would at least ensure that if you elect such a government it has a genuine opportunity to implement its programme.

Keep the flag of freedom flying.

Watch Mark speaking to Alex Phillips on TalkTV about the abolition of NHS England and the remaining size of the UK quangocracy.

And if you want to know more about what a Quango is, watch this video where Mark explains all.