Demise Of The Leviathan

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Rowland Lockey, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

From Wikimedia Commons: Sir Thomas More, his father, his household, and his descendants (Rowland Lockey, 1593)

While historically defined as the guarantor of ordered liberty and the embodiment of a sovereign people’s will, the British state has evolved into an adversary of its own citizens. This inversion is the deliberate outcome of a constitutional coup, executed with velvet resolve by Tony Blair’s New Labour after 1997. As the historian David Starkey has argued, what masqueraded as “modernization” was in truth a surreptitious revolution: the systematic dismantling of parliamentary sovereignty and its replacement by a judicial and expertocratic regime fundamentally hostile to the instincts and interests of the British people.

Contemptuous of Old Britain, but equally disillusioned with left-wing traditionalism, New Labour bred a polity in which democracy is reduced to ritual, borders dissolve under legalistic sophistry, and the ancient constitution—forged in the fires of common law and parliamentary assertion—lies in ruins. The pessimism pervading Starkey’s analysis reflects not so much the indulgence of a curmudgeon as the clear-eyed recognition of an existential crisis. Replacing Sir Keir Starmer with another Labour figurehead (i.e., Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Manchester) offers no salvation; it merely refreshes the personnel of a system structurally inimical to national self-government.

At the heart of Starkey’s criticism lies the indictment of Blair’s institutional revolution. The scope of the post-1997 reforms went far beyond tinkering with the machinery; they shattered the delicate, evolutionary balance of the British constitution. Parliamentary sovereignty, that hard-won doctrine whereby the elected representatives of the people stood supreme, was subordinated to a new legalistic architecture. Judges, liberated from their traditional roles, assumed the mantle of “guardians”—not of law as historically understood, but of abstract rights drawn from European and international conventions. This shift empowered the unelected at the direct expense of the electorate.

Starkey’s voice cuts through the complacent chatter of the metropolitan commentariat: the British state has ceased to serve “Alarm-Clock Britain”; it is subject to the ideology of the “Blob,” that loose but potent alliance of activist lawyers, NGOs, human rights lobbyists, and liberal officials who view popular sentiment as a threat to be judicially contained.

The creation of the UK Supreme Court in 2009 exemplifies this rupture. Starkey has characterized it as an entirely unnecessary American import, severing the judiciary from the House of Lords and encouraging judges to behave as if they occupied positions on Capitol Hill rather than in the sober continuity of English legal tradition. Formerly, the Law Lords operated within Parliament; their judgments were informed by legislative context and political reality. Once detached, they gained the institutional confidence to assert a more expansive, activist role. The antithesis of organic evolution, this replication of foreign models was ill-suited to Britain’s unwritten constitution. The consequences have been profound. Judicial review expanded, turning courts into arenas where government policy, especially on immigration and asylum, could be routinely challenged and frustrated.

Another blow to tradition was the redefinition of the ancient office of Lord Chancellor. With its tripartite responsibilities spanning judiciary, legislature, and executive, it had symbolized the organic unity of the constitution. Its effective neutering under Blair represented a dogmatic imposition of the separation of powers doctrine, alien to British practice. Starkey sees this as catastrophic. The Lord Chancellor had acted as a bridge, ensuring judicial independence without judicial supremacy. Stripped of this unifying figure, the judiciary became both more independent and more politicized—a paradox only superficially contradictory. Independence from parliamentary oversight translated into license for ideological adventurism. The judiciary, now self-consciously “constitutional,” began to interpret statutes not according to the intent of Parliament but through the lens of evolving human rights norms—customarily imported from Strasbourg.

The Human Rights Act 1998 stands as the centerpiece of this new dispensation. Championed by progressives such as Lord Bingham, it incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, creating far-reaching powers for judges to scrutinize and, where they saw fit, obstruct executive action. Starkey identifies it as the core mechanism designed to “tie the hands of elected government.” Where Parliament once legislated with finality, ministers now operate under the shadow of potential judicial veto. This is not the “rule of law” in the Diceyan sense—law as the expression of parliamentary will—but “the rule of lawyers,” where rights are treated as trump cards held by individuals (e.g., foreign criminals or failed asylum seekers) against the collective interest of the nation.

The perversion of democracy is tragically evident in the realm of immigration. Successive governments, even those notionally committed to control, have found themselves thwarted by judicial rulings on deportation. Foreign criminals, including those with records of violence or sexual offences, have repeatedly evaded removal on grounds of Article 8 “family life” rights or other universalist claims. Starkey’s analysis here is merciless: such decisions directly undermine national security and fly in the face of the clearly expressed desires of the electorate.

Polls consistently show overwhelming public demand for tighter borders. Yet the machinery of state, captured by human rights orthodoxy, treats majority sentiments as regrettable prejudices to be overruled. The Rwanda deportation scheme, for all its flaws, collapsed not primarily through parliamentary opposition but through legal activism that elevated international conventions above sovereign intent. Parliament has been reduced to a powerless spectator, its sovereignty a constitutional fiction sustained only by nostalgic rhetoric.

The judicial overreach embodies a deeper antidemocratic pathology: the elevation of experts and judges, placing them on top rather than on tap. The phrase, often attributed to Winston Churchill in the context of scientific advice during wartime, captures a vital principle of legitimate governance. Experts—whether legal, technocratic, or administrative—possess valuable specialized knowledge. Their role, however, is instrumental: to inform democratic decision-making, not to supplant it. Blair’s revolution inverted this hierarchy. The “rule of experts” became the rule of an insulated elite—insulated both by tenure and by ideology.

The Blob thrives in this environment: judges, civil servants, and NGO activists form a self-reinforcing network that prioritizes cosmopolitan legalism over the prosaic concerns of national cohesion, integration, and security. “Alarm-Clock Britain”—the hard-working, tax-paying majority rising early to sustain the nation—finds its voice drowned out by the procedural machinations of this distant oligarchy.

The consequences cascade across the body politic. Mass immigration, both legal and illegal, has transformed the demographic and cultural landscape of Britain with astonishing rapidity. Meanwhile, democratic management has proven illusory. Governments promise control; courts, treaties, and activist interpretations deliver paralysis. Small boats cross the Channel because the legal framework renders deterrence nearly impossible. Deportations are blocked, appeals multiply, and the public’s legitimate demand for a pause—for the preservation of social trust, housing stock, welfare provision, and cultural continuity—is dismissed as “nativism.” The state, far from mediating between popular will and administrative necessity, actively sides against its own people. It is, in a profound sense, the “enemy within.”

Starkey’s pessimism is bracing because it refuses false consolation. The Conservative Party’s long years in office after 2010 achieved little in reversing the decline; bureaucratic inertia and fear of legal challenge proved too formidable. Labour’s return under Starmer merely entrenched the regime. This prime minister, himself a product of the human rights legal world, embodied the continuity of the post-1997 settlement. The expectation that replacing him with a populist mayor will avert the crisis is illusory. This move is going to change the accents and perhaps the emphases of rhetoric, but not the structural realities: a constitution rigged against majoritarian democracy, a judiciary habituated to intervention, and a Blob deeply embedded in the institutions. The fundamental imbalance persists.

The broader historical lesson is sobering. Britain’s constitution succeeded for centuries precisely because it resisted codification and rigid doctrine, evolving through precedent and political accountability. Blair’s reforms imported the worst of American and European models without their safeguards, creating a hybrid monstrosity: judicial supremacy without a written constitution to constrain it, rights inflation without corresponding duties, and expert rule without democratic override. Instead of enlightened governance, “soft despotism” has been introduced—with power migrating from the ballot box to the courtroom and the conference chamber.

To arrest this decline would require a counter-revolution of considerable magnitude: repeal or radical reform of the Human Rights Act, restoration of parliamentary supremacy, and a cultural reckoning within the legal profession. Yet the political incentives point in the opposite direction. The Blob defends its privileges fiercely; much of the media and academy cheer it on. The British people, repeatedly thwarted, grow cynical and disaffected. Starkey’s persistent criticism serves as a vital diagnostic, but the patient—parliamentary democracy itself—remains in critical condition.

The collapse is equally institutional and spiritual. A state that treats its own people’s desire for security and continuity as an inconvenience to be judicially managed has forfeited its moral claim to loyalty. The social contract of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan has been broken. Absent a miracle, the trajectory is clear: further erosion, further alienation, and the slow death of a once-mighty constitutional tradition. Starkey’s pessimism may prove the realistic stance. The alternative is denial, and denial, in the face of such evidence, is not statesmanship but folly.