"The Conservatives must focus on our constitutional order"
The Critic: 15th July 2024: Doug Stokes article explaining how and why we must finally 'take back control'
"...The “blob” derives its power from sets of Blairite innovations... The Tories were in control but playing checkers on a Blairite chessboard...
The new Starmer government will build on this constitutional settlement. His 2022 commissioned report, “A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy”, outlines the logic...
The Labour supermajority will likely carry out several of the report’s recommendations... The proposed reforms... threaten to further undermine democratic accountability by transferring significant decision-making power from elected representatives to unelected bodies, increasing technocratic complexity with more administrative layers and devolved powers, making it difficult for citizens to understand and hold decision-makers accountable...
...Starmer’s fragile coalition will likely fragment over the next few years. It is equally likely that as it does, authoritarian technocracy will grow ever more with more significant restrictions on free speech, what we can do, and what we can think...
...This presents an opportunity. In the place of regulation, nannying technocrats and endless expanding forms of layered bureaucratic governance, we need an almost spiritual reboot that reaffirms the importance of human agency and freedom...
...The Conservative party should lead a new constitutional reform act that reboots the primacy of freedom, equality before the law and human dignity. We need to remove the endless layers of bureaucracy and reaffirm the democratic accountability of the “blob”. We need to take back control...