At the weekend, I read three enlightening comments from a former civil servant who told Guido Fawkes’s readers why, with a great majority of MPs, the Conservatives cannot truly enact an agenda of reform.

His first comment is in response to this:

When they got an 80 seat majority the first things they should have done were strip down the House of Lords, streamlined the implementation of new laws and culled many of the civil service jobs.

Unfortunately, the Government did nothing to take on these vested interests and Labour Party will only further reinforce the status quo and tie the hands of future governments.

The former civil servant says (emphases mine):

As I say repeatedly – HOW?

The MPs don’t get super powers to bulldoze over obstructions based on the will of the population. You go to White Paper to review (possibly [a] Royal [Commission] for this), multiple boards of review after this for the stakeholders impacted (guaranteed rights under law).

What you are proposing would have been a 3/4 year process MINIMUM. Boundary reform has taken a decade and has been watered down.

Then when you’ve done the relevant reviews etc. you have to hope that the High Court or Supreme Court don’t strike down the Legislation (which they would).

The next commenter suggested that only direct action in the streets would resolve the most tenacious issues.

The former civil servant replied:

I think we will see direct action against activist judges and those who have been seen to have stopped ‘the will of the people’ the next time the Tories are in. I can see them shifting blame from the chamber onto the legislative stack, and it’s not going to go down well with some sections of society that their democracy is trampled upon by the judiciary in particular.

I expect a more populist anti-1mm1gr4tion Tory party will win a majority after a single Labour term, given trends we have seen in Europe as we cross crime and civic cohesion thresholds.

A third reader persisted with the Government’s notional ability to effect change:

Parliament sets the law, so the first thing you do is repeal all the delaying legislation, then you set the new law for civil servants.

It doesn’t take long if there is the political will to do it – as we saw with the Coronavirus legislation.

The courts have no power to strike down legislation if Parliament has passed that legislation saying they can’t.

This was the response. SC refers to the Supreme Court, HC the High Court, CS the Civil Service and WP the White Paper:

No, you keep saying this, it’s not true. You always make these statements and you are always wrong.

There is an established process, you cannot undermine this process with your own process, until your process has gone through that process.

In short, you cannot change how parliament functions without going through the way it currently functions. You cannot establish law that cancels out other law without it going through constitutional review if a point of order is flagged up. Critically, and Blair constructed it this way, you can’t legislate the SC out of existence without the HC then SC agreeing to it being legislated out of existence. The SC sits above HoC in terms of supreme constitutional power (even just as an arbiter).

The coronovirus legislation was ARGUED for and SUPPORTED by UK CS and all parties – it wasn’t just about the will of the Commons, the entire legistlative stack pushed in one direction and things went quickly.

So even with a majority in the Commons you still have all the other opposition parties briefed by UKCS to make points of order; the courts will step in before first reading after the WP is published.

There is no institutional will for major constitutional reform benefiting the UK public at a government framework level, as in all the supporting civic arms of government are anti-democratic in their function, and they act as a ‘check and balance’ for the democratic government in the rare case of an outbreak of populism. All the lessons that needed to be learned from Thatcherism have been brought on board and enacted. It is not happening again.

It is antithetical to any centralised bureaucratic structure to ease the passage of legislation that would undo the centralisation is has spent hundreds of years undertaking. There’s a gravity to it. You could replace the entire elected parliamentary Tory Party with radical libertarian de-centralisers but it doesn’t change the broad WILL (as you put it) of everything else. It just leads to a pro-democracy bias in ONE element of the process.

That is so depressing.

Tony Blair pulled a blinder. Even after he dies, any future Conservative government will remain trussed up like a Christmas turkey.

Would the British people — the salt of the earth types — take to the streets? These days, it seems unlikely, especially as police are in place to ensure it doesn’t happen. We saw that during the anti-lockdown demonstrations. The police don’t have time for burglaries, but they’ll have time for Joe Bloggs with a placard. We already know they prefer to investigate tweets rather than crime.

There must be, to borrow a Blairism, a third way. What that is I have no idea. Answers on a postcard, please.