This essay engages David Starkey’s thesis that the New Labour governments after 1997 effected a seemingly harmless but in effect radical and detrimental transformation of the British constitution, dispersing the sovereignty of the Parliament among unelected quangos, regulators, devolved bodies, an empowered judiciary, and an unresponsive administrative apparatus. It theorises this transformation through Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923) and Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867). Schmitt supplies the deeper explanation of Parliament’s vulnerability: the contradiction between the liberal principle of parliamentarism (government by genuine discussion among independent representatives, embedded in an educated public sphere) and the democratic principle of the identity of rulers and ruled. Bagehot supplies both the anatomy of the fused, accountable constitution that was lost and a candid account of how a population’s political will is formed, managed, and hedged. Drawing on Habermas’s reciprocity of liberty and popular sovereignty and his distinction between communicative and instrumental action, the essay argues that critical-reflective discourse underwrites the achievements of modern civilisation well beyond the political system. It contends that the complexity and dynamism of post-Fordist, world-societal reproduction defeat any all-purpose chamber, pointing decisively toward decentralisation via markets and discourses in the plural. The essay extends Starkey with a “ratchet thesis”: the delegation of power did not merely relocate sovereignty but expanded the total quantum of state control, since insulation from accountability itself a enables institutional expansion — illustrated through monetary policy, the legally entrenched net-zero framework, the official arm’s-length-state statistics, and a case study of coercive over-intervention in child safeguarding. The decisive caveat departs from Starkey: the remedy is not to repatriate powers to Parliament but to reduce the scope of political control altogether, returning functions to civil society—exemplified by the denationalisation of money. It closes by assessing the political feasibility of a libertarian turn within existing democracy.
David Starkey has lately given an articulate voice to a disquiet that many in Britain feel but few can articulate with precision: that the constitution under which the United Kingdom is now governed is not the constitution it inherited, and that the transformation—accomplished chiefly under Tony Blair—was both radical and largely unannounced. The “Starkey Thesis,” as it has come to be called, holds that the New Labour governments of 1997 onward carried out a revolution in the British constitution: a systematic transfer of powers out of Parliament and into a proliferating apparatus of quangos, regulators, devolved bodies, a newly supreme judiciary, incorporated supranational norms, and into an unelected administrative machine. The Crown-in-Parliament—the historic sovereign—was, on this reading, quietly hollowed out and its substance dispersed among bodies that answer to no electorate and deliberate in no chamber (Starkey 2024a, 2024b, 2024c, 2025; see the note on Starkey’s sources below).
The Starkey thesis, according to David Starkey’s interlocutor and co-protagonist at PopCon (Popular Conservatism) Mark Littlewood, is meant to answer the puzzling question: why after thirteen years of Conservative government is the UK less conservative and more left than ever? Put more generally, the question is: Why do conservative voter preferences no longer translate into effective policy and state action? For example, why has immigration continued to go up despite repeated polls and election promises pointing in the opposite direction? David Starkey’s answer: parliament - and with it the demos – has been disempowered by the radical constitutional changes brought about by the Blair and Brown Labour governments.
My purpose here is not to rehearse Starkey’s constitutional history but to deepen and reframe it through a theoretical lens that he himself does not employ: Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy of 1923. Schmitt offers something Starkey’s narrative lacks—an account of why the institution proved so vulnerable to hollowing-out in the first place. The answer, I shall argue, lies in a contradiction that Schmitt diagnosed a full century ago: the contradiction between the motivating principle of parliamentarism and the motivating principle of democracy. Once that contradiction is grasped, the Blairite revolution appears not as a sudden act of constitutional vandalism by one unusually careless government, but as a late and predictable symptom of a disorder built into the foundations of the modern liberal-democratic state.
I shall also draw on Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867), the classic anatomy of the system Starkey says Blair destroyed. Bagehot is indispensable here for two reasons. First, his distinction between the “dignified” and the “efficient” parts of the constitution gives us the conceptual instrument for understanding what the Blair settlement actually did. (He left the dignified facade standing but removed large tracts of the efficient power.) Second—and this is the reason I dwell on him at some length—Bagehot was candid, in a way that is almost unrepeatable in our own moment, about the relationship between the constitution and the population it governs: about deference, about the “unequal development” of understanding within different segments of the population, about how political will is not so much expressed by the mass as formed, managed, and hedged on its behalf. Bagehot wrote before the full arrival of mass democracy and universal suffrage, and his frankness about the demos is precisely what makes him useful for the argument I want to make.
My own position, stated here at the outset to guide the reader, has three parts. First, I accept a great deal of what Schmitt says about the original principle and purpose of parliaments. Genuine deliberation—the public contest of argument in pursuit of truth, embedded within a wider public sphere of the educated and accomplished pillars of society—was the animating idea of the institution, and it is this idea, not mere expediency, that explains the constitutional rules under which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parliaments operated. Second, I accept Schmitt’s further claim that parliamentarism so understood stands in tension with modern mass democracy, and that this tension is the source of the pathologies that critics across the spectrum deplore. Third, I agree with Starkey that the Blairite transfer of power away from Parliament was a grave constitutional injury—but I attach to this agreement a decisive caveat. I do not believe that the remedy is to return those powers to a Parliament that does patently not have the requisite knowledge, intellectual competency or capacity to even properly attend to and discharge its current powers. This is not only a question of the lamentable quality of parliamentarians but much more a question of the – in comparison to the 18th and 19th Century - vastly increased complexity of society. The widespread frustration and disillusionment with “our democracy” that the Starkey Thesis so effectively focusses and mobilises against the Blairite revolution and its unaccountable quango state and out-of-touch “blob” or “deep state” should be turned to a different end: not the re-empowerment of the hapless MPs, but the reduction of the scope of political control over society as such. The powers that have drained out of Parliament should continue draining—past the quango, past the regulator, and out of the political system altogether, into civil society, giving more scope and degrees of freedom to private initiatives, to entrepreneurship, to individual and communal self-determination. This is the libertarian inflection that distinguishes my reading of Starkey from his own, and it is the destination toward which this essay travels. (In a long private conversation David Starkey was himself, up to a point, rather receptive to this shift of quango powers into civil society.) I contend that all the key issues that upset voters and that fuel their political disillusionment – immigration into the welfare system, the housing crisis, the costs of living crisis, NHS waiting lists – are creations of an activist state that therefore can best be addressed and solved via the roll-back of state intervention.
Between the diagnosis and that destination lie three further considerations that deepen the case. I take up Jürgen Habermas’s attempt to reconcile liberty and popular sovereignty as reciprocal—a reframing of Schmitt’s contradiction that locates legitimacy in discourse, but that stops short of severing discourse from sovereign command. I then draw on Habermas’s distinction between communicative and instrumental action to show that critical-reflective public discourse underwrites the achievements of modern civilisation far beyond the political system, and that even the interests and facts presupposed in market bargaining must first be formed in non-instrumental communication. And I argue, most importantly, that the complexity and dynamism of post-Fordist network society—advanced far beyond anything Bagehot or Schmitt confronted, and constitutively world-societal rather than national—erects a complexity barrier that no all-purpose debating chamber can surmount, and that points unambiguously toward decentralisation via markets and discourses in the plural.
Schmitt’s decisive methodological move—the one that makes his short book far more penetrating than the ordinary catalogue of parliamentary failings—is to insist that an institution must be understood through its principle, the specific conviction that animates it, and not merely through the practical services it happens to render. He is scornful of those who defend parliament on the ground that it is the least bad arrangement available. Such defences, he says, may be entirely correct as observations, but they miss the point:
“Parliamentarism exists today as a method of government and a political system. Just as everything else that exists and functions tolerably, it is useful—no more and no less. … But they do not carry weight in an argument about principles. Certainly, no one would be so undemanding that he regarded an intellectual foundation or a moral truth as proven by the question, What else?” (Schmitt 1988, p. 3)
To recover the principle, Schmitt sends us back to the canonical theorists—and here he names the very authors whose defence of parliamentary deliberation forms the backdrop to the present argument:
“Like every great institution, parliament presupposes certain characteristic ideas. Whoever wants to find out what these are will be forced to return to Burke, Bentham, Guizot, and John Stuart Mill. He will then be forced to admit that after them, since about 1848, there have certainly been many new practical considerations but no new principled arguments.” (Schmitt 1988, p. 2)
What, then, is the principle? Schmitt locates it with great precision in two linked ideas: openness and discussion. And he is careful—this is crucial for everything that follows—to give “discussion” a strict and demanding sense. It does not mean negotiation, bargaining, or the brokering of interests. It means the disinterested contest of argument oriented toward truth:
“Discussion means an exchange of opinion that is governed by the purpose of persuading one’s opponent through argument of the truth or justice of something or allowing oneself to be persuaded of something as true and just. … To discussion belong shared convictions as premises, the willingness to be persuaded independent of party ties, freedom from selfish interests.” (Schmitt 1988, p.5)
Schmitt’s reference to shared convictions as necessary premisses for genuine discussion is dep and significant. Schmitt sharpens the distinction between discussion and negotiation with an example that anticipates, and rebuts, the modern tendency to reduce parliament to interest-brokerage. When two businessmen settle a deal after a rivalry, each has an eye on his own profit; they may reach a sensible compromise, but this is not discussion in the demanding sense. He quotes Friedrich Gentz—“in this matter still instructed by the liberal Burke”—to fix the contrast precisely: the characteristic of all representative constitutions, as against the old corporative representation of estates, is “that laws arise out of a conflict of opinions (not out of a struggle of interests)” (Schmitt 1988, p.5).
This is the same Burke we already know from the Speech to the Electors of Bristol: Parliament is “a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole,” and not “a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests.” It is the same Guizot for whom representation was “not an arithmetic machine intended to collect and enumerate individual wills” but “a natural process for extracting from the bosom of society the public reason that alone has the right to govern.” And it is the same J. S. Mill for whom the proper office of a representative assembly was to be “the nation’s Committee of Grievances and its Congress of Opinions,” an arena in which every opinion “can produce itself in full light and challenge discussion.” Schmitt shows that these are not four separate observations but equivalent expressions of a single coherent world view, the classical liberal world view, and that the constitutional architecture of the classical parliament is its logical deployment.
Once the principle is seen, the otherwise miscellaneous rules of the historic parliament fall into intelligible order. Schmitt insists that they are not arbitrary conventions but necessary corollaries of the belief in discussion—and that they become unintelligible the moment that belief lapses:
“All specifically parliamentary arrangements and norms receive their meaning first through discussion and openness. This is especially true of the fundamental principle that is still recognized constitutionally, although practically hardly still believed in today, that the representative is independent of his constituents and party; it applies to the provisions concerning freedom of speech and immunity of representatives, the openness of parliamentary proceedings, and so forth. These arrangements would be unintelligible if the principle of public discussion were no longer believed in.” (Schmitt 1988, p.3)
Consider each in turn, as Schmitt invites us to. The independence of the representative—the rule, still inscribed in our constitutional self-understanding and which the Weimar constitution captured in its Article 21 (“the members are representatives of the whole people, they are only responsible to their own consciences and not bound to any instructions”)—makes sense only if the member is meant to deliberate, to be persuaded by the better argument, to change his mind in the chamber. A delegate bound by mandate cannot deliberate; he can only transmit. Burke’s refusal to be the mere mouthpiece of Bristol is not an aristocratic affectation but the precondition of genuine discussion.
Publicity is the second pillar. Schmitt traces it to the long struggle against the arcana rei publicae—the doctrine of state secrets that runs from Machiavelli through the theorists of Staatsräson. Against the mistrusted and despised secret cabinet politics, the Enlightenment elevated openness into an absolute value: “The light of the public is the light of the Enlightenment.” Bentham is, for Schmitt, “the fanatic of liberal rationality” on this point, for whom freedom of public discussion, and especially of the press, is “the most effective protection against political abuses” and the true “check to arbitrary power.” The publicity of proceedings, freedom of speech in the chamber, parliamentary immunity, the reporting of debates—all are instruments of this single demand that power justify itself in the open.
Freedom of the press, Schmitt notes, is in Guizot’s scheme “only a means for discussion and openness and not an independent factor”—the mechanism by which “press freedom prompts citizens to seek the truth for themselves and to make it known to ‘the powers.’” It is the connective tissue between the chamber and the wider public sphere. And this is the point I want especially to register, because it bears directly on the historical reality the Starkey Thesis mourns: the classical parliament was never conceived as a self-sufficient mechanism. It was the apex of a public sphere—an educated, reading, well-informed, public of accomplished stakeholders—without which its deliberation would be a closed and meaningless ritual. Schmitt’s own later development of this point (and Habermas’s celebrated elaboration of it) confirms that the deliberating chamber and the deliberating public were two organs of one body.
Schmitt’s most original contribution in the second chapter is to show that the separation of powers is not a separate constitutional principle bolted on alongside discussion, but embodies the very same liberal belief system expressed in organisational form. The belief that truth emerges from “an unrestrained clash of opinion,” that “competition will produce harmony,” is, he argues, a comprehensive metaphysical system of which both free-market economics and the balance of powers are applications:
“It is essential that liberalism be understood as a consistent, comprehensive metaphysical system. Normally one only discusses the economic line of reasoning that social harmony and the maximization of wealth follow from the free economic competition of individuals … But all this is only an application of a general liberal principle. It is exactly the same: That the truth can be found through an unrestrained clash of opinion and that competition will produce harmony.” (Schmitt 1988, p. 35)
This is a passage of singular importance for a libertarian reader, and I shall return to it, because it reveals that the deepest layer of the classical constitution and the deepest layer of the market order are the same layer—a faith in spontaneous, competitive discovery of truth and value against the pretension of any single will to command the outcome. The point is structural. The division of powers, the balance between legislature and executive, the very identification—enshrined in Article 16 of the 1789 Declaration—that “any society in which the separation of powers and rights is not guaranteed has no constitution,” all express a way of thinking that “creates multiplicity everywhere” so that an equilibrium replaces absolute unity. Parliament is not merely one power balanced against the others; within itself, through government and opposition, it reproduces the same balancing dynamic. “An opposition belongs to the essence of parliament,” Schmitt writes, “and there is actually a metaphysic of the two-party system.”
Crucially, the older liberalism understood the limits of this rationalism. Schmitt observes that the balance theory was deliberately confined to the legislative—to the making of general rules—and was never meant to dissolve the executive into endless discussion. He cites The Federalist: legislation is deliberation and “must be made by a larger assembly, while decision making and protection of state secrets belong to the executive,” where unity and energy are required and where “different opinions” are precisely not useful (Schmitt 1988, p.45). The classical constitution thus rested on a sober division of labour between deliberation and decision, deliberare and agere. The collapse of this division—the absorption of executive decision into the parliamentary process via “parliamentary government” itself—is, for Schmitt, one of the chief solvents of the system. We shall see that this is exactly the mechanism Bagehot celebrated and that Starkey, rightly, identifies as the fault-line Blair exploited.
If Schmitt gives us the principle of parliament, Bagehot gives us the working anatomy of the specific constitution—the English one—whose supposed destruction the Starkey Thesis laments. Writing in 1867, on the eve of the Second Reform Act, Bagehot famously distinguished the parts of the constitution that excite reverence from the parts that actually work:
“In such constitutions there are two parts … first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population—the dignified parts, if I may so call them; and next, the efficient parts—those by which it, in fact, works and rules. … every constitution must first gain authority, and then use authority; it must first win the loyalty and confidence of mankind, and then employ that homage in the work of government.” (Bagehot 2001, p.5)
The Crown and the Lords are dignified; they raise the army though they do not win the battle. The “efficient secret” lies elsewhere, in “the close union, the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers,” effected by the Cabinet—“a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part” (Bagehot 2001, pp. 9–10). Note at once the irony that frames this entire essay: the genius of the English constitution, for Bagehot, is precisely the fusion of the powers that Schmitt’s classical liberalism wished to keep separate. Bagehot openly mocks the “literary theory” of checks and balances as a paper description that the living constitution had already discarded. Where the American presidential system maintains the separation—and pays for it, in Bagehot’s telling, with weakness, deadlock, and “government by an unknown quantity” (Bagehot 2001, p.21)—the English system fused the two and gained energy, flexibility, and above all a “reserve of power” for emergencies (Bagehot 2001, p.19).
Here is the first lesson for the Starkey Thesis. The British constitution had, by Bagehot’s own account and approval, already travelled a long way from the pure Schmittian model of separated, mutually balancing powers. The fusion of executive and legislature in the Cabinet meant that, in normal times, the “sovereignty of Parliament” was in considerable measure the sovereignty of the executive operating through a disciplined parliamentary majority. The chamber that Schmitt idealised as a place of genuine cross-party persuasion was, in Bagehot’s realistic description, already an instrument for sustaining and dismissing governments. What Blair did, on this view, was not to invent executive dominance but to extend and entrench it—while simultaneously exporting great tranches of decision out of the political system altogether. The fusion Bagehot praised became the platform from which the further revolution was launched.
Bagehot is most valuable—and most bracing—when he turns to the population. He is entirely candid that the dignified parts of the constitution exist because the mass of men are neither moved by, nor capable of judging, “the plain, palpable ends of government.” His premise is what he calls “the most strange fact, though the most certain in nature … the unequal development of the human race” (Bagehot 2001, p.6). He demolishes the egalitarian hope that all might soon be brought to one level:
“We have in a great community like England crowds of people scarcely more civilised than the majority of two thousand years ago. … The lower orders, the middle orders, are still, when tried by what is the standard of the educated ‘ten thousand,’ narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious.” (Bagehot 2001, p.6)
From this premise Bagehot derives the political function of pomp, monarchy, and theatre. The “theatrical elements” of the constitution exist because “that which is mystic in its claims … brilliant to the eye … is the sort of thing—the only sort which yet comes home to the mass of men.” The dignified parts are “likely to be adjusted to the lowest orders—those likely to care least and judge worst about what is useful” (Bagehot 2001, p.7). The efficient business of government, meanwhile, proceeds elsewhere, conducted by the educated few. This is not a marginal aside in Bagehot; it is the core of his whole theory. The constitution governs a population most of whose members cannot follow the reasoning of government, and it does so by winning their homage through display while reserving the substance of decision to a competent minority.
It is impossible to read these passages in 2026 without registering how unrepeatable they have become. The frank acknowledgement of an “educated ten thousand” ruling, with the consent but not the participation of the mass, is exactly the candour that universal suffrage and the egalitarian sensibility have made unsayable. And yet—this is the point—the structure Bagehot describes did not vanish when the candour did. The mass still does not, in Bagehot’s sense, conduct the efficient business of the state. What changed is that the mechanisms by which its consent is won and its will is formed, managed, and hedged became less honest, more mediated, and—as Schmitt would insist—industrialised within the modern apparatus of party propaganda and mass media, to manufacture a manageable public opinion.
Bagehot offers one further argument that bears directly on the Starkey-Schmitt convergence. He holds that cabinet government, unlike the presidential system, educates the nation because the great public contest over the fate of a government forces a genuine debate that the people attend to:
“The cabinet system ensures … debates … The nation is forced to hear two sides—all the sides, perhaps, of that which most concerns it. … It succeeds in deciding because the debates and the discussions give it the facts and the arguments.” (Bagehot 2001, p.14)
This is Bagehot’s version of Schmitt’s discussion-principle—the chamber as the “great scene of debate, the great engine of popular instruction.” But notice the fragility he himself builds in. The educative power of debate depends on the debate mattering—on the prize of power genuinely turning on it. Where “debates … are prologues without a play,” where “the prize of power is not in the gift of the legislature,” the teaching apparatus fails and “no one cares for the legislature” (Bagehot 2001, pp.15–16). Bagehot was describing the American Congress. But the description fits, with uncanny precision, the Parliament that the Starkey Thesis describes after Blair: a chamber from which the real prizes—monetary policy, vast swathes of regulation, large areas of rights adjudication—have been removed to bodies it cannot control, so that its debates increasingly become prologues without a play. The decay Bagehot warned of in the presidential system has been reproduced in Britain, not by adopting a presidential separation of powers, but by dispersing power to the unelected.
We arrive now at the theoretical heart of Schmitt’s book and of this essay. Schmitt’s thesis is that parliamentarism and democracy are not the same thing, that their nineteenth-century alliance was historically contingent, and that once that alliance dissolved—once democracy achieved its “victory”—the two principles were revealed to be in fundamental contradiction. 18th/19th Century liberal parliamentarism and 20th Century mass democracy are built on fundamentally different belief systems. Schmitt states it with great clarity:
“The belief in parliamentarism, in government by discussion, belongs to the intellectual world of liberalism. It does not belong to democracy. Both, liberalism and democracy, have to be distinguished from one another so that the patchwork picture that makes up modern mass democracy can be recognized.” (Schmitt 1988, p.8)
The distinction is a matter of principle, not merely procedural. Parliamentarism rests on the principle of discussion—truth emerges from the open clash of argument among independent representatives. Its legitimating ground is the rationality of the process. Democracy, by contrast, rests on the principle of identity—the identity of rulers and ruled. Its legitimating ground is the will of the people, however that will is expressed and whether or not it was arrived at by deliberation at all. Schmitt drives the point to its sharpest edge:
“As democracy, modern mass democracy attempts to realize an identity of governed and governing, and thus it confronts parliament as an inconceivable and outmoded institution. If democratic identity is taken seriously, then in an emergency, no other constitutional institution can withstand the sole criterion of the people’s will, however it is expressed. Against the will of the people especially an institution based on discussion by independent representatives has no autonomous justification for its existence, even less so because the belief in discussion is not democratic but originally liberal.” (Schmitt 1988, p.15)
This is an analysis I endorse, and it is the key to the Starkey Thesis. Every constitutional device that the classical parliament prized—the independence of the member, the publicity of true deliberation, the separation of powers, the slow filtering of decision through argument—appears, from the standpoint of consistent democracy, as an aristocratic obstruction interposed between the people’s will and its realisation. Why should an independent representative substitute his judgement for the expressed will of those who elected him? Why should a balance of powers be permitted to frustrate a majority? The classical answers to these questions were liberal answers, grounded in the discussion-principle. Mass democracy has no use for them.
Schmitt shows that modern mass democracy did not so much abolish the classical parliamentary rules as hollow them out, leaving the form standing while the substance fled. His metaphor is poignant:
“Many norms of contemporary parliamentary law, above all provisions concerning the independence of representatives and the openness of sessions, function as a result like a superfluous decoration, useless and even embarrassing, as though someone had painted the radiator of a modern central heating system with red flames in order to give the appearance of a blazing fire.” (Schmitt 1988, p.6)
Take the four classical features in turn. Public debate, first. Under mass democracy, Schmitt observes, the parties “do not face each other today discussing opinions, but as social or economic power-groups calculating their mutual interests and opportunities for power, and they actually agree compromises and coalitions on this basis.” The masses, meanwhile, “are won over through a propaganda apparatus whose maximum effect relies on an appeal to immediate interests and passions” (Schmitt 1923/1988, p.6). Argument in the genuine sense “ceases.” The floor debate survives as theatre while the real decisions migrate to the back room. Schmitt’s mordant summary deserves quoting in full, because it could be a description of any modern legislature, Westminster included:
“Today parliament itself appears a gigantic antechamber in front of the bureaus or committees of invisible rulers. … the real business takes place, not in the open sessions of a plenum, but in committees and not even necessarily in parliamentary committees, and that important decisions are taken in secret meetings of faction leaders or even in extraparliamentary committees so that responsibility is transferred and even abolished, and in this way the whole parliamentary system finally becomes only a poor facade concealing the dominance of parties and economic interests.” (Schmitt 1988, pp.7, 20)
The independence of representatives, second. The maxim that the member represents the whole people and is bound by no instruction is, Schmitt says, “still recognized constitutionally, although practically hardly still believed in today.” Mass democracy, organised through disciplined parties, proportional lists, and the whip, converts the independent deliberator into a reliable party foot soldier. The representative is now neither a Burkean trustee following his conscience nor a pure democratic delegate of his constituents; he is an agent of the party machine. Both principles—the liberal and the democratic—are simultaneously betrayed.
The secret ballot, third, withdraws the citizen’s decisive act into the sphere of the private and irresponsible. Here the tension becomes stark: parliamentarism requires the publicity of the representative’s reasoning, while mass democracy’s characteristic instrument, the secret ballot, protects the privacy of the voter’s will. The reasoning that ought to be exposed is hidden in the back room; the willing that constitutes “the people” is atomised into a hundred million isolated and unaccountable acts and then reassembled by “the statistical apparatus” into a number. Neither pole any longer answers to the discussion-principle. I shall draw on this below, because it bears on how a population’s political will is in fact formed and managed—a question Bagehot faced with more honesty than we permit ourselves.
The separation of powers, fourth and finally. We have already seen that for Schmitt the separation is a liberal, not a democratic, device—“the antithesis of a democratic concept of identity.” Consistent democracy has no reason to tolerate a balance of powers obstructing the people’s will; the Jacobin tradition rejected it outright, and Rousseau’s general will “cannot be divided.” Bagehot, from the opposite direction, showed that the English constitution had already fused the powers in the Cabinet for reasons of efficiency. From both sides, then—the democratic and the efficient-executive—the classical liberal separation was under pressure. The Blairite settlement, as we shall see, completed a paradoxical movement: it strengthened the executive’s fusion with the legislature even as it dispersed vast areas of decision to bodies outside the elected system entirely.
Schmitt’s analysis of democracy proper—as distinct from parliamentarism—supplies the second pillar of my argument, and it is the one most likely to provoke. His claim is that democracy is not, and cannot coherently be, the rule of an undifferentiated humanity. Every actual democracy rests on a substance of equality, which means it rests on a corresponding inequality—a boundary between those who belong and those who do not:
“Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity. … A democracy demonstrates its political power by knowing how to refuse or keep at bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity.” (Schmitt 1988, p.9)
Schmitt’s point is here analytical, not a programme: the equality that makes democratic self-rule meaningful must have substance—civic virtue in the classical vertu, or shared religious conviction among the English sects, or, since the nineteenth century, national homogeneity. “Equality is only interesting and valuable politically so long as it has substance, and for that reason at least the possibility and the risk of inequality.” From this follows his striking thesis that universal, equal suffrage of all human beings as such is not a democratic but a liberal idea, and an incoherent one:
“Universal and equal suffrage is only, quite reasonably, the consequence of a substantial equality within the circle of equals and does not exceed this equality. Equal rights make good sense where homogeneity exists. But the “current usage” of “universal suffrage” implies something else: Every adult person, simply as a person, should eo ipso be politically equal to every other person. … It replaces formerly existing democracies, based on a substantial equality and homogeneity, with a democracy of mankind.” (Schmitt 1988, pp.10–11)
Schmitt then states and laments the consequence that I - as a libertarian who wishes to shrink the political - in contrast to him embrace. When political equality is stretched to an abstract, substanceless universal equality, the political sphere does not thereby become more genuinely democratic; it becomes hollow, and substantive decision migrates elsewhere:
“Under conditions of superficial political equality, another sphere in which substantial inequalities prevail (today, for example, the economic sphere) will dominate politics. This is completely unavoidable and any reflection on political theory recognizes it as the real grounds for the much-deplored dominance of economics over state and politics. Wherever an indifferent concept of equality, without the necessary correlate of inequality, actually takes hold of an area of human life, then this area loses its substance and is overshadowed by another sphere in which inequality then comes into play with ruthless power.” (Schmitt 1988, p.13)
Schmitt intends this as a lament, or at least a warning, about the “dominance of economics.” But read with libertarian eyes—and detached from Schmitt’s own appraisal—it points in a wholly different direction. If a hollow, substanceless political equality inevitably cedes the substance of human affairs to the spheres where genuine differentiation operates—the economy, science, the professions, voluntary association—then the right response is not to mourn the loss of political substance but to welcome and complete it. The migration of decision out of the hollow political sphere and into the functionally differentiated subsystems of a free society is not a pathology to be reversed but the very movement a libertarian seeks to accelerate. Where Schmitt sees a homeless political will that ought to be re-grounded in a homogeneous demos capable of decisive collective action, I see a political sphere that is rightly shrinking because the matters it once arrogated to itself are better handled by markets and discourses. I shall make this argument fully in Section 7.
The crisis, Schmitt concludes, is in fact two crises that aggravate each other: a crisis of parliamentarism (the discussion-principle has become an empty formality) and a crisis of democracy (the substance of homogeneity cannot be supplied by an abstract equality of mankind). “It is, in its depths, the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.” My contention is that the United Kingdom, in the Blairite settlement and after, has been living through exactly this double crisis—and that the Starkey Thesis is its constitutional post mortem.
Schmitt presents the contradiction between liberalism and democracy as, in the last analysis, irreconcilable—“the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.” It is worth pausing on the most influential twentieth-century attempt to dissolve that very contradiction, because it both clarifies what is at stake and, in its limits, points toward the position I shall ultimately defend. Jürgen Habermas, in Between Facts and Norms (1992), confronts precisely the tension Schmitt identified, though he names its poles differently: not parliamentarism versus democracy, but liberty (the system of individual rights, “private autonomy”) versus popular sovereignty (the self-legislation of the people, “public autonomy”). I rehearse his argument here rather than evaluate it critically, because its very structure illuminates the constitutional disorder the Starkey Thesis describes.
The two ideas, Habermas observes, “have determined the normative self-understanding of constitutional democracies up to the present day,” yet they have never been satisfactorily reconciled. The liberal tradition, descending from natural-rights enlightenment, treats individual liberties as primary—pre-political, inalienable, a constraint set around the sovereign legislator. The civic-republican tradition, emphasizing popular sovereignty, of which Rousseau is the great exponent, treats the self-organisation of the political community as primary and recognises no prior limit on the people’s sovereign will. Habermas states the conflict sharply:
“Liberals invoke the danger of a “tyranny of the majority” and postulate the priority of human rights that guarantee the pre-political liberties of the individual and set limits on the sovereign will of the political legislator. The proponents of a civic republicanism, on the contrary, emphasize the intrinsic, non-instrumentalizable value of civic self-organization, so that human rights have a binding character for a political community only as elements of their own consciously appropriated tradition.” (Habermas 1996, p.100)
This is recognisably Schmitt’s antinomy in a post-metaphysical register. The liberal pole corresponds to Schmitt’s parliamentarism—the rights, the independence of the representative, the separation of powers that constrain the popular will. The republican pole corresponds to Schmitt’s democracy—the identity of rulers and ruled, the sovereign will that brooks no external constraint. And Rousseau, whom Schmitt invoked to expose democracy’s drive toward homogeneity, is for Habermas too the purest and most problematic statement of the popular sovereignty pole: “There neither is nor can be any kind of fundamental law binding on the body of the people—not even the social contract itself.”
Habermas’s ambition is to show that the two principles do not merely coexist in tension but presuppose and require one another—that they are, in his term, co-original. His route to this conclusion runs through a prior and, for my larger argument, decisive insight: the critique of the atomistic individual that underwrites the liberal social-contract story. Habermas’s objection is not merely that the contract is a historical fiction; it is that the picture of the human subject on which it rests—the cognitively self-sufficient agent with autonomously formed ends—is false. Subjectivity, self-conception, and one’s very understanding of one’s own interests are not given prior to society; they are formed and continuously reproduced in communicative interaction.
What we recognise as human subjects, Habermas argues, are always already inherently social, and our self-conceptions—including everybody’s conceptions of their own interests and self-realisation—depend not only on inherited language and initial socialisation but on continued communicative interactions that are crucially required to continuously confirm, reproduce and update our very self-conceptions and orienting understanding of the world. From this it follows that individual instrumental reason is secondary to and dependent upon communicative reason—a thesis I take up in the next chapter, because it reaches far beyond the political and supplies, I shall argue, the deepest justification for the markets-and-discourses order. For the present purpose its constitutional consequence is what matters: if interests themselves are constituted in communication, the system of rights cannot be grounded on prior individual interests in the manner the contractarian liberal supposes. The polity is a constitutive condition of the very individuals, interests, and rights it is said merely to protect.
How, then, are individual liberties to be grounded at all, if not as pre-political natural rights? Habermas’s answer is the hinge of the whole reconstruction. The system of rights is justified as the necessary enabling condition of the very formation of the people’s will. A people that legislates for itself rationally must do so through a process of opinion- and will-formation that is free, inclusive, and repression-free—through discourse in which, as he puts it, “the only thing that counts is the compelling force of the better argument based on the relevant information.” But such a discursive process is impossible unless the participants are already constituted as free and equal legal persons, with secured freedoms of speech, assembly, conscience, association, and political participation. The liberties are not an external fence around democracy; they are the internal precondition of democracy’s own rational exercise. He states the conclusion with precision:
“The sought-for internal connection between popular sovereignty and human rights lies in the normative content of the very mode of exercising political autonomy, a mode that is not secured simply through the grammatical form of general laws but only through the communicative form of discursive processes of opinion- and will-formation. … Consequently, the sought-for internal relation between popular sovereignty and human rights consists in the fact that the system of rights states precisely the conditions under which the forms of communication necessary for the genesis of legitimate law can be legally institutionalized.” (Habermas 1996, pp.104–128)
Thus, public autonomy requires private autonomy, and private autonomy requires public autonomy; the addressees of the law must be able to understand themselves as its authors. Habermas calls this the “co-originality of private and public autonomy,” and with it he claims to have achieved a post-metaphysical reconstruction of the dual foundation of modern constitutional democracy. The system of rights is “not given to the framers of a constitution in advance as a natural law”; it is the explication of what a people necessarily presupposes the moment it resolves to regulate its common life through legitimate positive law.
Habermas’s achievement, taken on its own terms, is to show that Schmitt was right about the tension but wrong to think it terminal. Liberty and popular sovereignty need not be set against one another in a fight to the death; they can be understood as two readings of a single underlying discourse-principle, the principle that legitimate norms are those to which all possibly affected could agree under conditions of free and equal argument. This is, I want to stress, a deepening of exactly the discussion-principle that Schmitt located at the origin of parliamentarism and that I endorsed in Chapter2. Where the classical liberals—Burke, Bentham, Guizot, Mill—grounded parliament in the conviction that truth emerges from the open contest of argument, Habermas generalises that conviction into a comprehensive theory of legitimacy: the validity of law itself rests on the communicative form of its genesis.
And yet—here is the pivot toward my own position, which I register now and develop in the chapters that follow—Habermas, having shown that the discourse-principle is the true ground of legitimacy, retains the assumption that this discourse must terminate in universally binding collective decisions issued by a sovereign people through the medium of centralised political power. He has emancipated legitimacy from natural law and re-grounded it in communication, but he has not asked whether the discursive opinion- and will-formation he rightly prizes requires the apparatus of sovereign, one-size-fits-all command at all. It is possible, as I have argued elsewhere, to imagine a society that operates “without the medium of a centralized political power, not without legal systems but without universally binding collective decisions, where free contracting assumes a much larger role and where multiple legal systems interpenetrate,” and in which “political discourse does not disappear but indeed remains a crucial steering arena for societal developments, without presuming that the purpose of all discourse is to result in one-fits-all majority decisions.”
In other words: I accept Habermas’s demonstration that the discourse-principle is the genuine ground of legitimacy and that liberty and the public formation of will reciprocally require each other. What I question is the inherited reflex—shared by Rousseau, by Schmitt in his diagnosis, and by Habermas in his resolution—that the public formation of will must be cashed out as the sovereign command of a demos over the whole of a society bounded by a nation-state. The reciprocity Habermas establishes is between liberty and public discourse; it is a further, unexamined step to identify public discourse with majoritarian sovereign decision. Sever that step, and the discourse-principle is liberated from the apparatus of command—which is precisely the move that the markets-and-discourses order makes, and toward which the remaining chapters build.
The discussion-principle that animated the classical parliament is, I now want to argue, not a peculiarity of the political system at all. It is a particular, highly reflective instance of something far more general and far more important: the dependence of all modern achievement—scientific, technological, economic, legal, moral, political —on a mode of human interaction (action type) that classical liberal and libertarian social theory has almost entirely overlooked. Here I draw on Habermas’s distinction between communicative and instrumental (or strategic) action, because it supplies the missing foundation beneath everything said so far, and because it shows why the recession of political command need not—must not—mean the recession of public reasoning.
Classical liberal and libertarian social philosophy recognises essentially one type of action: instrumental action—the individual’s pursuit of his own ends by suitable means, including strategic action, which is instrumental action directed at other people whereby other people become the means to actor’s ends. Ludwig von Mises, in his 1949 ‘Human Action’, speaks for the whole tradition: “A man’s ends are always his own. They are guided by his own valuations, his own will, and his own interest.” This is an impoverished model of human action. Habermas’ sociology adds the decisive further type: communicative action—interaction oriented not toward strategic success but toward mutual understanding, dialogical, aimed at reaching consensus through argument, presupposing a shared life and often having no explicit individual goal at all. In communicative action, unlike strategic action, “all motives except that of finding a mutual and consensual understanding are suspended,” and participants treat one another never as mere means but always also as ends in their own right.
The point that matters most for the present argument—and the one I want to place at the centre of this chapter—is Habermas’s thesis that instrumental reason is parasitic on communicative reason. This is not a pious sentiment about the value of dialogue; it is a hard claim about the conditions of possibility of instrumental action itself. Instrumental and strategic calculation requires knowledge—knowledge of available means, of the relevant facts, of the constraints in play, and indeed of one’s own ends. And all such knowledge is itself the product of a prior communicative achievement. As Habermas puts it in his ‘Theory of Communicative Action’, “the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which … the instrumental use of language in general is parasitic” (Habermas 1981).
Consider what this means for the very negotiation and bargaining that the classical liberal takes as the paradigm of social interaction. Even the interests and the constraining facts presupposed in any instrumental or strategic transaction must first be formed, ascertained, and confirmed in communicative action. The businessman who bargains has an eye on his profit—but his very conception of where his profit lies, his grasp of the relevant market facts, the technological possibilities, the legal constraints, the reliability of his counterpart, the meaning of the contract he signs: all of this is the sediment of countless prior communicative interactions in which the truth was sought cooperatively rather than strategically. Strip away the communicative substrate and the bargainer would not know what to bargain for. “Means-end calculations,” as I have already argued elsewhere, in my Markets and Discourses’, “must be reassured and empowered by the knowledge of possible means that could only be gained via prior communicative interaction.” The market actor cannot remain in strategic isolation for long “without going astray”; he needs “continuous guiding correctives that flow from sincere and sincerely probing and confirming communications in order to remain a competent rational agent” (Schumacher 2025).
This is the deepest answer to Schmitt’s own most striking observation—that the discussion-principle of parliament and the competition-principle of the market are “exactly the same” liberal metaphysic, i.e. part of the same system of beliefs. They are indeed two expressions of one trust in spontaneous, decentralised discovery; but communicative reason is the more fundamental of the two, because the market’s discoveries cannot even be recognised as discoveries except through discourse. Hayek rightly called the market a discovery procedure, and the libertarian rightly expects a free market to unleash an unprecedented volume of experimentation. But “it is never trivial to attribute the success of a complex venture to specific features or aspects of the effort” (Schumacher 2025). To learn from market experimentation—to convert its results into transmissible knowledge—requires the complementary, non-strategic domain of scientific and scholarly discourse. Trial-and-error in markets alone is insufficient; “the competitive search for truth, embedded in open-access discursive practices, becomes indispensable” Schumacher 2025).
The achievements of modern civilisation—and this is the burden of the chapter—rest at their highest level on the most reflective and demanding form of communicative action: critical-reflective public discourse. Discourse in the strict sense arises when the smooth routine of taken-for-granted understandings “fails, fractures or breaks down,” and the implicit validity claims of ordinary speech—truth, truthfulness, rightness—must be made explicit, questioned, and redeemed through argument. This is the mode of science, of jurisprudence, of moral and political reflection. It is governed by a strict ethic: it aims at consensus and truth, not profit; it proceeds by evidence and argument, not preference or power; it requires sincerity, openness to criticism, and repression-free inclusiveness. “Any knowledge claim becomes suspect or even void, if the originating social/communicative process significantly deviates from the regulative ideal of an open, non-strategic, sincere, critical, repression-free discourse” (Schumacher 2025). Science’s very criterion of universal reproducibility is a demand for open critical access—for the exposure of every claim to everyone’s independent testing and possible refutation.
Two consequences follow that are essential to the argument of this essay. First, critical-reflective discourse is not confined to the political system. It is the constitutive medium of the economy’s rationality, of scientific and technological progress, of the evolution of law, of moral self-correction—of every functionally differentiated subsystem of modern society. “In our sophisticated knowledge economy, nearly all economic work and consumption choices depend on discourse. Medical therapy choices, legal frameworks, engineering, and finance all rest on discursive validation” (Schumacher 2025). The reflex that identifies “public reasoning” with “parliamentary debate” mistakes one historical vessel for the thing itself. The discussion-principle that the classical parliament embodied lives on, vastly amplified, throughout the varied discourses of modern civil society, including discourses of general public concern we might still call political — and it lives on quite independently of whether any sovereign chamber deliberates at all.
Because modern knowledge, science, and rationality depend on the sincere, open, repression-free discourse of free and equal participants, they depend on a liberal morality and liberal social relations—and they are corrupted alike by relations of bondage and by “the ideological domination or censoring of individual dissenters by a politically empowered majority opinion” (Schumacher 2018). This is a result of the first importance for the relation between discourse and democracy. The very thing Habermas prizes—the discursive formation of opinion and will—is endangered rather than secured the moment it is fused with majoritarian sovereign command, because the power to issue binding collective decisions is also the power to suppress the dissenting voice whose contribution “might have come closest to the truth”—the danger that, as Schmitt noted, set even the positivist Mill “in an inexplicable uproar.” Genuine discourse needs liberty from command, not subordination to it. This is why the markets-and-discourses order does not abolish public reasoning but liberates it: it retains discourse—indeed expects it to intensify—while withdrawing from it the coercive power to terminate inquiry by collectively binding decree.
I come now to what I regard as the most consequential consideration of all, and the one that most decisively settles the question of where the powers drained from Parliament ought to go. It is a consideration that neither Bagehot nor Schmitt could fully have grasped, because the phenomenon was not yet before them: the sheer complexity and dynamism of contemporary post-Fordist network society, and the barrier this complexity erects against any attempt to address the affairs of such a society through an all-purpose political debating chamber—however deliberative, however well-constituted, however faithful to the discussion-principle.
Bagehot wrote in 1867, at the apex of mechanical industrial capitalism, of a national economy and a national polity whose principal business could still, in large part, be surveyed and debated by an “educated ten thousand.” Schmitt wrote in 1923, amid the consolidation of Fordist mass production and mass democracy, and already discerned that “great political and economic decisions on which the fate of mankind rests” could no longer “result … from balancing opinions in public debate.” But the complexity that defeated the deliberative chamber even in Schmitt’s day was a fraction of what now obtains. Since the 1970s the convergence of computation and telecommunication has driven a socio-economic restructuring—the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism—whose character is defined precisely by an explosion of differentiation, dynamism, and innovation-density that no prior epoch approached.
The contrast is structural, not merely quantitative. The technologies of Fordism were rigid without agile adaptivity and without the ability to quickly absorb and utilize innovations. In contrast, the new numerically controlled systems like robotic fabrication, 3D printing as well as the massive new field of software-as-a-service … are capable of absorbing unlimited numbers of innovations. This in turn dynamizes business and business organisation and pulls workers away from assembly lines into R&D, marketing, finance etc. All work becomes innovative and project-like rather than routine. A society in which all work becomes innovative and project-like is a society whose relevant states of affairs multiply, differentiate, and change faster than any central body could hope to register, let alone deliberate upon and command. The number of distinct technological possibilities, business models, employment relations, financial instruments, contractual forms, and modes of dispute resolution that are simultaneously live, and simultaneously evolving, is now of an order that simply has no analogue in 1867 or 1923.
This is the complexity barrier, and it is the same barrier, generalised and amplified, that Mises and Hayek identified in their critique of socialist planning. Mises showed that without competitive bidding and price formation there can be no economic calculation, and hence no rational allocation; the central authority is “groping in the dark.” Hayek showed that the knowledge required for rational coordination is irreducibly dispersed, local, and often tacit, and cannot be centralised in any planning agency. The Marxist dream of conscious collective control over the social life-process falters as it increasingly meets an insurmountable complexity barrier. My contention is that the all-purpose political chamber—the sovereign deliberative-legislative assembly that the restorationist would re-empower — faces exactly this barrier, and faces it more acutely with every advance of post-Fordist differentiation. To ask a single chamber to deliberate authoritatively over monetary arrangements, medical practice, environmental trade-offs, technological standards, financial instruments, employment relations, and the evolution of law across a hyper-differentiated, fast-mutating society is to ask of public deliberation precisely what Hayek showed central planning could not deliver. It is the knowledge problem and the calculation problem in constitutional form.
Note that this is not an objection to the discussion-principle. It is an objection to centralising the discussion-principle in a single all-purpose forum and arming its conclusions with sovereign command. The deliberation that complexity defeats is the deliberation that must issue in one binding answer for the whole of a society. Discourse itself thrives on complexity — it differentiates into specialised scientific, legal, technological, and commercial discourses, each operating by its own code, each capable of absorbing unlimited innovation. What cannot absorb that complexity is the attempt to funnel all these differentiated discourses through the bottleneck of a single chamber and out the other side as uniform, coercively enforced, one-size-fits-all decisions. The complexity barrier is fatal to the singular, not to the plural. It points unambiguously toward decentralisation—toward markets and discourses, in the plural, each handling the slice of complexity proper to it, rather than a market and a discourse, in the singular, subordinated to a sovereign decision.
There is a second dimension to the complexity barrier that bears directly on the constitutional question, and that neither Bagehot’s national constitution nor Schmitt’s homogeneous demos can accommodate. The reproduction and progress dynamics of contemporary society are not contained within the boundaries of any nation-state. The supply chains, capital flows, scientific and technological discourses, communication networks, and innovation ecologies on which modern prosperity depends are constitutively world-societal. The convergence of computation and telecommunication has given “a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption,” in Marx’s prescient phrase; “the intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.” Modern world society is, as has been argued by the social systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, a single, densely interconnected web of functionally differentiated subsystems—the global economy, world science, transnational law—whose operations cross every political frontier and answer to no national chamber.
This is decisive against both Schmitt and the restorationist, though in different ways. Against Schmitt: his account of democracy as resting on the substantive homogeneity of a bounded people, capable of “refusing or keeping at bay something foreign and unequal,” presupposes that the relevant unit of collective self-determination is the nationally homogeneous state. But the processes that actually determine the reproduction and advancement of modern civilisation overflow that unit entirely. A homogeneous national demos deciding sovereignly within its borders is structurally incapable of governing a world-societal process that does not respect those borders—it can only obstruct its own participation in that process. Against the restorationist: to repatriate decisive power to the Westminster chamber is to lodge authority over world-societal dynamics in a body whose competence stops at the national frontier, and whose deliberations cannot reach the transnational subsystems where the real coordination occurs. The nation-state chamber is not merely too undeliberative for the task, as earlier chapters argued; it is too small and too bounded for it. The European attempt to recuperate state power at the supranational level of the European Union has been a failure and has – with the exception of the EU Internal Market that guarantees the free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons (labour) - hurt most member economies via over-regulation. Free trade does not require a super-state, and in any event, the EU is also too small and too bounded.
Markets and discourses, by contrast, are intrinsically scale-free and borderless. A market coordinates across frontiers without requiring a world-state to convene it; a scientific or legal discourse spans the globe without requiring a world-chamber to authorise it. “The future progress of human civilization within a stateless world society will be ordered via markets and steered via discourses” (Schumacher, 2025) —and the deep reason is that markets and discourses can match the scale, the complexity, and the dynamism of world-societal reproduction in a way that no territorially bounded sovereign chamber, however reconstituted, ever could. The complexity barrier and the world-societal character of modern reproduction together form, in my judgement, the strongest single argument for the position toward which this essay has been building: that the powers drained from Parliament should not be dammed and returned to a chamber that cannot, in principle, handle them, but should flow onward into the plural, decentralised, scale-free institutions of a free civil society.
We can now state the Starkey Thesis in Schmittian terms and see how much sharper it becomes. Starkey’s historical claim is that the Blair governments effected a constitutional revolution: incorporation of supranational human-rights norms into domestic law with judicial supremacy attached; the creation of a separate Supreme Court; the establishment of operational independence for the central bank in monetary policy; devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; the proliferation of regulators, agencies, and “quangos” exercising vast delegated powers; the entrenchment of an administrative state whose decisions Parliament cannot readily reverse (Starkey 2024a, 2024c, 2025). The sovereignty of the Crown-in-Parliament—Bagehot’s (and Dicey’s) sovereign—was on this account fragmented and parcelled out among bodies that neither deliberate publicly in the classical sense nor answer to an electorate.
Schmitt allows us to see that this was not an aberration but a culmination. Recall his image of parliament as “a gigantic antechamber in front of the bureaus or committees of invisible rulers,” and his observation that “the real business takes place, not in the open sessions of a plenum, but in committees and not even necessarily in parliamentary committees.” Written in 1923, this is an exact anticipation of the quango state. The independent central bank is the purest instance: a matter—monetary policy—of the gravest consequence for “the fate of millions” removed entirely from the chamber and entrusted to an unelected committee precisely on the theory that it is too important to be left to the deliberation of representatives. The regulatory agency is the same structure generalised. The supranational rights-norm administered by a supreme judiciary is the arcana returning in a new robe: decisive determinations made in a forum the public sphere cannot effectively reach or argue with.
Schmitt’s further point—that responsibility is thereby “transferred and even abolished”—is the precise grievance of the Starkey Thesis. The genius of the classical constitution, on Bagehot’s telling, was the locatability of responsibility: a Cabinet that could be turned out, a minister who answered at the dispatch box. The quango state dissolves this. When a regulator fails, when a court reads a new policy into a rights instrument, when the central bank misjudges, there is no accountability except — as in Bagehot’s phrase about Congress — “a vast miscellaneous body difficult to punish” (Bagehot 1867/2001, p.13). The “efficient secret” of fused, accountable, locatable power has been replaced by a diffusion in which, as Schmitt put it, “responsibility is transferred and even abolished” (Schmitt 1923/1988, p. 20).
There is, moreover, a Bagehotian irony that Starkey’s account sometimes underplays and that the present framework brings out. Blair did not weaken the executive vis-à-vis Parliament. On the contrary, the fusion Bagehot praised was intensified—the modern Prime Minister commanding a disciplined majority is, if anything, a more dominant “efficient” actor than Bagehot’s. What Blair did was to use that executive dominance to export whole domains of decision beyond the reach of the electoral system altogether, while leaving the dignified facade—and indeed the dignified facade of Parliament itself—in place. This is why the chamber increasingly resembles Bagehot’s prologue without a play: the executive remains strong, but the matters over which sovereignty is exercised have been narrowed, and the most consequential of them placed in unaccountable hands. The form of parliamentary sovereignty persists; the substance has been redistributed.
So far, I am in full agreement with Starkey: the transformation was radical, it was largely unannounced, and it has produced a constitution in which the locus of real decision is systematically obscured and removed from public deliberation and democratic accountability alike. The frustration is justified. The question is what to do with it.
The Starkey Thesis can remain abstract—a claim about “powers” migrating to “quangos”—unless it is given a sense of scale, and the official figures supply one. The Cabinet Office’s Public Bodies 2024 return records 305 arm’s-length bodies in the United Kingdom; together they spend over £220 billion a year and employ more than 300,000 people, and the largest ten alone account for roughly ninety per cent of all arm’s-length-body funding (Cabinet Office 2025; Modern Civil Service 2024). These are not, for the most part, the advisory committees of caricature. They are the working machinery through which a great part of the British state now actually operates—and the concentration of nearly all the money in a handful of giant bodies is itself the shape the argument of this essay would predict.
The official taxonomy distinguishes three kinds of arm’s-length body by their distance from ministerial control, and the gradient is instructive in its own right. Executive agencies remain legally part of a department and answerable to its minister, but are administratively hived off to deliver specified outputs—amongst them HM Prison and Probation Service, the Met Office. Non-departmental public bodies—the largest category—operate at arm’s length from ministers and discharge advisory, regulatory, or executive functions: the Environment Agency, the Health and Safety Executive, the British Council, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and the vast NHS England among them. Non-ministerial departments are the purest constitutional case: full departments of state that operate without a minister at their head, accountable to Parliament only at one remove through a sponsoring minister—HM Revenue and Customs, Ofgem, the Food Standards Agency. The sequence executive agency → non-departmental public body → non-ministerial department traces a steady widening of the distance between the decision and the ballot box; and beyond it lies a further category the official count does not even capture—the public corporation, the class to which the Bank of England belongs, and with it the single most consequential exercise of delegated power in the land.
Naming the largest and the most interventionist bodies brings the scale home. By sheer magnitude, NHS England, HM Revenue and Customs, and Network Rail are among the giants that dominate the funding totals. But magnitude and constitutional significance are distinct axes, and some of the most consequential bodies are modest in budget: the Office for Budget Responsibility, whose fiscal forecasts now effectively police the room for manoeuvre of any Chancellor; the Climate Change Committee, which superintends the legally binding carbon budgets discussed above; the central bank, whose Monetary Policy Committee sets the price of money for the whole economy; the regulators—Ofgem, Ofcom, Ofwat, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Competition and Markets Authority—each governing the economics of an entire sector; and the rights-and-equality apparatus that administers, beyond the reach of ordinary majorities, large tracts of what may lawfully be said and done. These are the bodies in which Starkey’s dispersed sovereignty actually resides. A handful of them, none headed by an elected representative, between them determine the fiscal envelope, the cost of energy, the rate of interest, and the boundaries of permissible speech—the very parameters within which the elected chamber is then invited to debate.
One objection must be met directly, because it appears to refute the whole picture. Was there not a “bonfire of the quangos”—the much-trumpeted programme under which the number of public bodies was cut by roughly a third between 2010 and 2015, falling from over 460 in 2016 to under 300 by 2019? There was; and it is one of the more misleading episodes in recent constitutional history. The count of quangos fell, but the power, money, and personnel lodged in the arm’s-length state did not. Over the same span in which the number of quangos was being pruned, gross resource spending rose—from some £195 billion in 2016 to over £220 billion by 2023/24—and staffing rose with it, from around 266,000 to over 300,000. The bonfire consumed the small and the visible—minor advisory committees, bodies whose abolition made a headline and saved little—while the great executive and regulatory bodies grew. Consolidation reduced the number of quangos even as it increased the quantum of delegated power (Cabinet Office 2019; 2025), which is precisely why ninety per cent of the funding now sits in the largest ten bodies. The bonfire was a reduction in the number of institutions mistaken, then and since, for a reduction in the reach of the unelected state. It was nothing of the kind. The “fire” left the house standing—and the figures, properly read, are not a refutation of the Starkey Thesis but its quantitative confirmation.
There is a further mechanism, and Starkey states it with characteristic force: the modern settlement, he argues, “gives judges and single issue fanatics executive powers” (Starkey 2026). The complaint is not merely that power has migrated to the unelected, but that it has migrated to bodies and persons constitutionally incapable of weighing the financial cost of their decisions. A single-issue regulator, or a court vindicating a single-issue right, is by its nature relieved of the duty of trade-off that defines responsible government.
His examples are vivid. On the side of the single-issue agency, Starkey points to the conservation requirements that have descended upon major infrastructure: the “bat tunnel” built to shield a colony of rare bats on the route of the now-curtailed HS2 rail project, whose cost passed £100 million, and the fish-protection systems imposed on the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, running to several hundred million pounds, to spare fish from the warmed water of its cooling outfall. The precise authorship of these costs is, it should be noted, contested — English Nature (now called ‘Natural England’), the conservation regulator, maintains that it did not mandate the HS2 structure but merely advised that the promoter’s own proposed design would satisfy the law — but the contest over authorship in fact reinforces the structural point. The cost is real and enormous; it flows from a regime of single-issue statutory mandates enforced through bodies and courts none of which is charged with weighing the safeguarding of bats or fish against the hundreds of millions of pounds of foregone infrastructure; and responsibility for it is so thoroughly diffused that the very body at the centre of the affair can truthfully disclaim it. No one decided that bats should cost £100 million; the statutory ratchet produced the figure, and no hand is answerable for it. Starkey observes that “nothing can be done anymore” (Starkey 2026). This is Schmitt’s abolition of responsibility in its purest administrative form.
On the side of the judiciary, Starkey’s example is the economic damage wrought by litigation under the Equality Act 2010, the principal anti-discrimination statute. The bankrupting of Birmingham City Council — the largest local authority in Europe — is the starkest case. Successive equal-pay claims, brought predominantly by women in roles such as teaching assistants, cleaners, and catering staff, argued that they had been unlawfully denied bonuses and premium payments routinely paid to predominantly male roles such as refuse collectors and street cleaners. Once the Supreme Court in 2012 permitted such claims to be pursued through the High Court, with its six-year limitation window, rather than the Employment Tribunal’s six months, the accumulating liability reached an estimated £650 to £760 million—on top of roughly £1.1 billion already paid out over the preceding decade—and in September 2023 the council issued a section 114 notice, the local-government equivalent of a declaration of bankruptcy. As Starkey puts it, a precedent has thereby been established that the payment of market wages is no longer a legitimate defence against a charge of gender discrimination (Starkey 2026).
Starkey’s deeper point reaches past any single statute to the structural incompatibility between justiciable rights and budgetary constraint. “Political power,” he argues, “was handed to experts and judges and the effect has been catastrophic” (Starkey 2026), because “matters of justice do not weigh costs.” Once a positive right is created—a right to a particular provision, enforceable in a tribunal or court—it cannot be adjudicated against a budget constraint, for the court’s office is to vindicate the right, not to balance the public finances. Positive rights, once established, can bust all budget constraints. The body that confers the entitlement and the body that enforces it are different from, and unaccountable to, the body that must find the money; the cost is, once again, externalised across the boundary between mandates.
The crisis of special educational needs provision is Starkey’s illustration, and the official figures bear him out with precision. The Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014, creates a legally binding entitlement to specified support, enforceable against the local authority through the First-tier Tribunal. The Institute for Fiscal Studies observes that such plans “create legally binding entitlements to specific forms of support—with little regard for affordability” (Institute for Fiscal Studies 2025), which is precisely the rights-against-budgets structure Starkey describes. The consequences are exactly as the analysis predicts. The number of pupils with such plans has more than doubled in a decade; high-needs spending in England rose from £7.5 billion in 2016 to £12 billion in 2025; appeals to the tribunal reached 21,000 in a single year, of which families win some ninety-five per cent; and the accumulated deficit of local authorities, held off their books only by a temporary accounting override, is forecast to reach around £8 billion by 2027 — a trajectory the National Audit Office has called financially unsustainable (Institute for Fiscal Studies 2025; National Audit Office 2024). Here is a positive right, conferred by statute and enforced by a tribunal against which the local authority wins one case in twenty, busting the budget constraint of council after council exactly as Starkey’s argument anticipates. The point is not that children with genuine needs should go unsupported; it is that a system in which an unaccountable tribunal allocates an open-ended call on the public purse, while an entirely separate body must somehow find the money, is structurally incapable of the trade-offs that any sustainable provision requires—and is therefore driving the councils that bear the cost toward insolvency, the SEND provision toward crisis, and the children themselves toward outcomes that the spending conspicuously fails to secure.
Perhaps no other domain illustrates the abstract claims of the Starkey Thesis — the dispersal of power among single-issue bodies, the abolition of locatable responsibility, the ratchet of expanding intervention — more vividly and more disturbingly, than the UK’s child-safeguarding system. It is worth dwelling on at length, because it is the case in which the expansion of state power reaches into the existential, private sphere of the relationship between parents and their children. The forcible removal of a child from its parents is perhaps the most drastic intervention into a person’s life that a state can perform, and the apparatus that performs it has grown, since around 2010, in a manner that exhibits every pathology this essay has anatomised.
Consider first the institutional architecture, for it is a textbook instance of the multi-body arm’s-length state. Statutory responsibility for child protection rests with each council’s Children’s Services department under the Children Acts 1989 and 2004, operating within guidance — chiefly Working Together to Safeguard Children — issued by the Department for Education. But the practice is shaped, inspected, regulated, and interpreted by a constellation of arm’s-length and independent bodies, no one of which is answerable to the families it affects. Ofsted inspects local-authority children’s services, children’s homes, and fostering and adoption agencies, and its inspection frameworks powerfully shape practice on the ground. The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, an independent national body working with the Department, commissions reviews of serious cases. Social Work England regulates the social-work profession: registration, standards, fitness to practise. The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) appoints children’s guardians and advises the family court once safeguarding concerns reach proceedings. The Children’s Commissioner for England promotes children’s rights as an independent statutory office. The Care Quality Commission governs the points at which safeguarding meets the health service. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman adjudicates complaints of maladministration. A body called ‘Foundations - the What Works Centre for Children and Families’ is steering safeguarding practice by via research, evaluations, evidence reviews, toolkits and practical guidance for policymakers, commissioners and practitioners.
Here we thus see an example of the typical disaggregated structure: a statutory power exercised by local authorities, framed by a department, and then inspected, regulated, reviewed, advised, and adjudicated by at least eight further bodies, each pursuing its slice of the mandate, none bearing responsibility for the cumulative result. The interdependencies — which are the substance of any family’s actual situation — fall through the cracks between the mandates.
Now consider the scale, which has expanded in exactly the ratchet pattern referred to above and to be elaborated below. As I have documented in my Substack article Thesis on Government Disruption of Families (Schumacher 2026a), the number of children looked after by local authorities in England rose from around 59,000 in 2008 to over 72,000 by 2017, and to 84,000 by 2025. Moreover, the use of court-issued care orders — the most coercive mechanism available under the Children Act 1989 — rose by roughly forty per cent between 2012 and 2017; by 31 March 2025 some 55,000 children, around sixty-five per cent of all those looked after, were under a care order, having been forcibly removed from their parents. As I argue in my article, “these are not marginal changes at the edges of the system; they represent a qualitative expansion in the routine use of coercive state power over families” (Schumacher 2026b). And crucially, the increase cannot be explained by demography or by any evidenced surge in severe maltreatment: “there is no convincing evidence of a corresponding explosion in abuse that would justify such a dramatic increase in removals” (Schumacher 2026b). The pattern points not to changed conditions in families but to changed incentives and procedures within the apparatus.
Those incentives are the now-familiar logic of the insulated single-issue body, operating as what I have called “a one-way ratchet.” The mechanism deserves to be set out as I have described it, because it shows the agency pathology at its most granular:
It often seems as if the safeguarding priority is not to keep the children safe but to safeguard the children services department, i.e. mitigate risk to the department and to social workers … Once concerns have been raised the institutional dynamics seems to be like a one-way ratchet. … Professionals are encouraged to “err on the side of caution”. For parents any contact with child-related public services carries latent risk. (Schumacher 2026a)
This is Schmitt’s abolition of responsibility wearing its cruellest face: the body that registers the concern, the body that inspects, the body that regulates the social worker, the body that advises the court, and the court itself each discharge a partial function, while no one is accountable for the destroyed family that is the system’s aggregate output.
Exactly as the ratchet thesis predicts, the expansion has become economically entrenched — self-sustaining quite apart from any child’s welfare. A whole “cottage industry of private assessment firms and contact providers has emerged in the wake of the growth of safeguarding interventions, frequently staffed or founded by former Local Authority social workers, creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem around care proceedings” (Schumacher 2026b), much of it publicly funded through legal aid, which “embeds rising intervention rates into a stable, state-financed service economy.” The fiscal magnitude is now of national significance: children’s social-care expenditure in England reached an actual net cost of around £15.6 billion in 2024–25, the equivalent to 13% of the UK’s total national education budget (including universities), with a single child in residential care costing the taxpayer upward of £300,000 a year, and half a million in London. That this vast and rising sum is, as I note, “spent on ‘services’ imposed and (for the most part) resented by parents” (Schumacher 2026a) is the final mark of a system that has detached its own growth from the human good it was created to serve.
That the system is dysfunctional is not a heterodox discovery; it has been authoritatively diagnosed, repeatedly, and to no avail — which is itself the most telling evidence that the dynamic is structural rather than corrigible by reform. The ‘Care Crisis Review’ of 2018, facilitated by the Family Rights Group in direct response to the then-President of the Family Division’s warning that “we are facing a crisis … and we have no very clear strategy for meeting [it],” examined the rise in care applications and a looked-after population that had reached its highest level since the Children Act 1989, and set out twenty options for change (Family Rights Group 2018). More comprehensively still, the government’s own ‘Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’ — the MacAlister Review of 2021–22, the most important national review of the system in a generation — found in its final report that children’s social care had “outcomes for children that continue to be unacceptably poor and costs that continue to rise,” and concluded that “a radical reset is now unavoidable” (MacAlister 2022). The trajectory of rising costs, rising removals, and failing outcomes was thus identified, in official terms, years ago. Yet the figures above — 84,000 looked-after children and £15.6 billion by 2025 — show the trajectory continuing undeflected. A system that absorbs its own most authoritative critiques and carries on expanding is not suffering from a remediable defect of policy; it is exhibiting the self-propelling institutional logic that this essay has identified as the signature of the system of insulated, single-issue, unaccountable bodies. What we witness since 2010 is that child safeguarding in the quango-state is running amok, breaking up families against all common sense and incurring costs that spiral out of all common sense proportions.
The child-safeguarding apparatus is therefore the Starkey Thesis in concentrated form, and a refutation in advance of the restorationist reply. The powers at work here did not merely migrate from Parliament; they expanded, behind the insulating language of “safeguarding” and “risk,” into a domain the Victorian constitution would never have dreamed of entering. They are exercised by a dispersed array of single-issue bodies none of which answers to the families it intervenes upon. And the remedy is plainly not to repatriate the power to Parliament — which legislated the duties and would only re-legislate them — but to withdraw it: to restore to families the presumption of competence and the sphere of private self-determination that the safeguarding state has progressively confiscated, returning to civil society the supportive, voluntary, and genuinely protective functions that the coercive apparatus has both displaced and failed to perform. The case makes the general argument unavoidable. When the most intimate relationship in human life has been drawn into the antechamber of the unaccountable agency, the reduction of the scope of political control is no longer an abstract preference but an urgent necessity.
To this point I have used the Starkey Thesis chiefly as a constitutional datum to be explained by Schmitt. It is time to credit it as an original contribution in its own right, and then to extend it in a direction Starkey himself does not take. David Starkey’s achievement—developed not in a single treatise but across a series of lectures, interviews, and broadcasts (Starkey 2024a, 2024b, 2024c, 2025)—is to have located, with a historian’s eye for the longue durée, the constitutional mechanism behind a whole catalogue of contemporary governmental failures that the daily commentary treats as unrelated misfortunes. His signal insight is that these are not so many separate policy mistakes but symptoms of a single structural transformation: the dispersal of the sovereignty of the Crown-in-Parliament among a constellation of unelected, single-purpose bodies, each pursuing its remit without answering to the electorate or bearing the costs it imposes elsewhere.
The list of failures Starkey assembles is worth setting down, because its very heterogeneity is the point. Uncontrolled immigration into a welfare state that cannot absorb its fiscal consequences; a housing crisis that successive governments prove structurally incapable of addressing; energy costs driven upward by a decarbonisation target written into law and placed beyond ordinary political revision; a general cost-of-living crisis compounded by monetary and asset-price inflation; NHS waiting lists that defy every reorganisation; a media culture – both state media and established corporate media - widely perceived as ideologically uniform; expanding restrictions on lawful speech; the capture of universities, professional bodies, corporations, and cultural institutions by an activist orthodoxy; and presiding over all of it an unaccountable permanent civil service—the “blob”—that is at once unresponsive to ministers and obstructive of the electorate’s expressed preferences. A government nominally responsive to voter expectations finds itself unable to deliver on almost any of the things voters most insistently demand. Starkey’s contribution is to explain why: the levers the voter imagines connect to the machine have, for the most part, been disconnected and handed to bodies the voter cannot reach.
Starkey’s sharpest analytical point—and the one most congenial to the framework of this essay—concerns the structural pathology of the single-issue body. A quango, regulator, or statutory committee is, by design, charged with one objective and insulated from the discipline of having to weigh that objective against the others a society must simultaneously pursue. It is constituted precisely so that it will not trade off its mandate against competing goods. The independent central bank pursues its inflation target; the climate body pursues its emissions target; the public-health authority pursues the suppression of pathogens like COVID19 at any cost; the rights regulator pursues its protected characteristics—and each does so, in Starkey’s telling, without being accountable for the costs and side-effects its single-minded pursuit inflicts across the rest of the social system. This is the institutional embodiment of what an economist would call the externality and what Schmitt, in a different register, called the abolition of responsibility: the body that makes the decision does not bear, and is not answerable for, its consequences elsewhere.
Starkey’s most compelling illustration is the Covid-19 lockdown, and it repays examination because it exhibits the entire mechanism in miniature. The lockdowns were imposed, for the most part, not through primary legislation debated and amended in Parliament but by ministerial regulation under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984—statutory instruments frequently made and brought into force before they were laid before Parliament, with members permitted only to approve or annul, never to amend (Hansard Society 2021; House of Lords Constitution Committee 2021). The decisive advice issued from a public-health apparatus charged with one variable—the suppression of viral transmission—and structurally indifferent to the vast costs its prescriptions imposed in every other domain: the foregone cancer diagnoses and untreated illnesses, the lost schooling of a generation, the destruction of small businesses, the monetary emission required to fund the furlough, the mental-health toll, the sheer fiscal magnitude of the whole. A body optimising a single objective, insulated from the duty of trading it off against the others, will rationally drive that objective to a degree that is collectively ruinous—because the ruin is, from its institutional standpoint, someone else’s department. The lockdown was the single-issue agency’s logic bulldozing everything in its way with devastating effect.
Notice how precisely this vindicates the complexity argument of Chapter 8 from the opposite direction. There I argued that no all-purpose chamber can master the differentiated complexity of modern society. Starkey’s point is the complementary danger: that carving the single social system into single-issue jurisdictions, each sovereign within its silo, does not solve the complexity problem but disaggregates responsibility for it, so that the interdependencies—which are the very substance of a complex society—fall through the cracks between mandates. The all-purpose chamber cannot handle the complexity; the array of single-purpose agencies handles each strand while severing it from the others. Neither institutional form can do what only a decentralised order of markets and discourses can do: register the trade-offs continuously, at the margin, through the dispersed knowledge and existential feedback of those who actually bear the costs.
Here I extend the Starkey Thesis beyond its author. Starkey describes the Blair settlement as a transfer of power—a redistribution of sovereignty from Parliament to the agencies. I want to argue that the same move was simultaneously, and not incidentally, a vast expansion of the total quantum of state intervention and control. The dispersal did not merely relocate a fixed stock of power into unaccountable hands; it manufactured new power. Delegation, on this account, is not a zero-sum reshuffling but a ratchet.
The mechanism has several strands, each independent and each compounding the others. First, delegation lifts the throughput ceiling that scarce parliamentary time imposed. Parliament is a single congested chamber; the volume of rules it can originate and scrutinise is capped by its own finite attention—a cap that was, in effect, a natural limit on the total quantity of state direction. Distribute rule-making among dozens of specialised agencies operating in parallel, each with its own staff, budget, and statutory remit, and that ceiling is pushed much further. The production of binding rules is parallelised, and output multiplies accordingly. Second, each agency acquires an institutional interest in the expansion of its own jurisdiction. Insulated from electoral feedback and from the market’s existential discipline alike, it faces no countervailing force against the steady enlargement of its remit, its guidance, and its budget—the dynamic that the public-choice theorists, following William Niskanen, identified in the self-aggrandising bureau. Third, the agency form generates a vast domain of “soft law”—codes of practice, regulatory guidance, supervisory “expectations”—that carries quasi-binding force without ever passing through the legislature at all. This is not relocated parliamentary power; it is newly created governing power for which there was no prior parliamentary analogue.
The fourth and subtlest strand is the most important. Depoliticisation lowers the political cost of new control, and thereby makes possible expansions that an openly political government could never have carried. When a contested judgement is vested in an “independent expert” body, it is removed from the arena of partisan contestation and reclothed as technical necessity. Opposing it then reads as opposing expertise rather than opposing a policy—a far higher barrier. Depoliticisation does not shrink the state; it launders the expansion of the state, rendering palatable a degree of control that naked political imposition could not have achieved. The independence is not a brake on the growth of intervention; under this analysis it is the very technology of its growth. Here Schmitt’s observation from Chapter 5 returns with full force: when the political sphere is hollowed of substance, “another sphere comes into play with ruthless power.” The agency is the vehicle through which substantive control expands behind the screen of a hollowed, merely formal, democratic politics.
This extension does more than enlarge Starkey’s indictment; it strengthens the central caveat of this essay. If delegation had merely moved a fixed stock of power, the restorationist reply—bring it back to Parliament—would at least restore a prior equilibrium. But if delegation expanded the total quantum of control, then repatriation cannot undo the expansion. It would hand a now-enlarged scope of intervention to the chamber which would thereby be utterly swamped. The real disease is not misplaced power but multiplied power, and only a reduction in the scope of control—not its relocation—can be a remedy. The ratchet thesis thus converts the Starkey diagnosis into an argument for the libertarian conclusion rather than the restorationist one. I see here a real positive opportunity: The abolishment of the rightly criticized quangos could be politically a popular move and could thereby lead to a serious reduction of state intervention in economy and society.
The expansion is not merely constitutional; it has a measurable economic counterpart in the productivity stagnation that has gripped the advanced economies, and Britain especially, since the financial crisis of 2008. I do not claim mono-causality. But the proliferating apparatus of insulated, single-issue intervention is, I contend, a substantial and under-acknowledged contributor to that stagnation, and a few concrete instances show the mechanism at work.
Consider monetary policy, the most powerful instance. The independent Bank of England—precisely the body I conceded in our discussion to be preferable to a politically manipulated central bank—expanded its balance sheet through quantitative easing from nothing in 2009 to a peak of £895 billion by late 2021, equivalent to over forty per cent of annual GDP (Bank of England 2021; 2024). The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, in a report pointedly subtitled A Dangerous Addiction?, found that the policy had become poorly understood, hard to reverse, and had fed “perceptions that the Bank of England has become politicised” (House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee 2021). The salient point for the present argument is distributional: a decade of suppressed interest rates and asset purchases inflated the prices of assets—housing, equities, bonds—held disproportionately by the already wealthy, while doing little for the productivity of the real economy. The asset-price inflation that figures in Starkey’s catalogue of grievances, and the cost-of-living and housing crises that accompany it, are in substantial part the work of a single insulated committee optimising a single target, its vast side-effects falling on a society that had no means of contesting them. This is the result of decisions made in an independent quango: a transfer to asset-holders, effected by decree, for which no one stands accountable at any dispatch box.
Consider energy and the net-zero framework. The Climate Change Act 2008 created a statutory duty and an independent Climate Change Committee to advise on legally binding five-year carbon budgets; the 2019 amendment converted the original eighty-per-cent target into a one-hundred-per-cent “net zero” obligation by 2050, making Britain the first major economy to inscribe such a commitment in law (House of Commons Library 2026; Grantham Research Institute 2024). Whatever one’s view of the climate science, the constitutional and economic form of this settlement is precisely the pathology under examination: a decarbonisation trajectory placed beyond ordinary political revision, binding governments of every complexion in advance, and pursued by a dedicated body structurally indifferent to the energy costs, industrial competitiveness, and cost-of-living consequences that its single mandate imposes across the rest of the economy. Energy-intensive industry contracts or relocates; electricity prices embed a structural premium; and the body charged with the target bears none of these costs, which fall—again—on a public that cannot vote them down because the target is a matter of law, not of policy. A society cannot achieve dynamic prosperity while one of its most fundamental input prices is governed by a legally entrenched, single-issue mandate insulated from the trade-offs it generates.
Consider, finally, the wider regulatory and administrative thickening that the proliferation of agencies represents in aggregate. Each of the bodies surveyed in the contemporary arm’s-length state—the conduct and competition regulators, the sectoral regulators in energy, water, communications, and rail, the health, environmental, education, and equality regulators—generates its own accreting stratum of rules, guidance, reporting requirements, and compliance obligations. The cumulative effect is the diversion of an ever-larger share of managerial attention and capital from production to compliance: the firm staffed increasingly with officers whose function is liability-containment rather than value-creation, the investment decision deferred pending regulatory clearance, the innovation never attempted because the permitting cost is prohibitive. This is the microeconomic texture of the macroeconomic stagnation. The post-Fordist economy, as I argued in Chapter 8, is defined by its capacity to absorb unlimited innovation—but only if the institutional framework permits the rapid, decentralised, trial-and-error experimentation through which innovation proceeds. The thickening regulatory apparatus is precisely a tax on that experimentation, and its proliferation since the constitutional settlement of the late 1990s tracks, and substantially helps to explain, the productivity slowdown that followed.
The convergence of the three cases is the argument. In each, a power was removed from the elected chamber and lodged in an insulated body; in each, the insulation permitted an expansion of intervention—monetary, regulatory, climatic—beyond what open political contestation would have tolerated; and in each, the single-issue body pursued its mandate without bearing the diffuse, system-wide costs that its pursuit imposed. The Blair settlement did not merely move the levers out of reach. It multiplied them, insulated them, and set each to pulling in its own direction, with no hand responsible for the resultant. That this should manifest as economic stagnation is exactly what the analysis predicts: a society whose productive energies are progressively constrained by a growing thicket of insulated commands can be expected to lose its dynamism, and it has.
Here I part company with the seemingly natural conclusion of the Starkey Thesis. The envisioned remedy in the restorationist constitutional critique is repatriation: bring the powers home, restore the sovereignty of Parliament, re-subordinate the quangos and the courts and the central bank to the elected chamber. I do not accept this remedy, and the foregoing analysis is precisely what licenses my rejection.
Consider what the restorationist programme actually proposes. It proposes to return decisive power over monetary policy, over vast tracts of economic and social regulation, over the adjudication of rights, to a chamber that Schmitt has shown us is no longer — and under the conditions of mass democracy cannot again be — a genuine deliberative assembly in the classical sense. The discussion-principle that gave parliamentary sovereignty its moral and intellectual title is, on Schmitt’s demonstration, defunct. To repatriate power to the modern Commons is therefore not to restore government by discussion; it is to hand that power to the very apparatus of party discipline, propaganda, and interest-brokerage that Schmitt diagnosed — to the “social or economic power-groups calculating their mutual interests,” to the party soldiers under the whip and under the influence of lobbyists, and to the manufacture of mass opinion. The restorationist mistakes the form of the old constitution for its lost substance. He would repaint the radiator and expect heat.
My alternative follows from Schmitt’s deepest insight, the one I flagged in Section 2 and developed through the intervening chapters. Recall that the discussion-principle of parliament and the competition-principle of the market are, in Schmitt’s analysis, versions of the same liberal idea: “That the truth can be found through an unrestrained clash of opinion and that competition will produce harmony … it is exactly the same.” The classical liberal trusted spontaneous, competitive, decentralised processes—of argument and of exchange—to discover truth and to coordinate action, against the pretension of any single will to command the result. We have since seen, with Habermas, that the discussion principle, i.e. non-strategic communicative reason, is the more fundamental of the two; and we have seen, with Luhmann, through the complexity barrier, that no all-purpose chamber can match the differentiation and dynamism of post-Fordist world society. The tragedy of the modern state is that the trust in decentralised discovery was honoured in the chamber and the marketplace while being progressively dishonoured everywhere else, as the scope of political command expanded against all these grounds at once. The frustration the Starkey Thesis mobilises is, rightly understood, frustration at command displacing discovery.
The remedy, then, is not to relocate the command back to Parliament but to dissolve the command. The powers that have drained out of the chamber should not be dammed up and returned; the channel should be opened wider, so that they flow past the quango and past the regulator and out of the political system altogether—into the functionally differentiated subsystems of a free society, into markets and into the open discourses of an accomplished public, into private self-determination. Monetary policy need not be returned to Parliament or left with an unaccountable central-bank committee; the deeper question is why the production of money should be a political monopoly at all. Vast tracts of regulation need not be repatriated to the Commons or administered by agencies; the deeper question is why these matters should be settled by command rather than by competition, contract, and voluntary self-regulation. The adjudication of countless disputes need not be a contest between Parliament and a supreme court; much of it can be returned to the polycentric, contractual, and arbitral institutions that a free civil society generates.
It is worth following one case all the way to its conclusion, because it exhibits the whole movement of this essay in nutshell and because it is the case where the libertarian completion is at once most radical and most easily misunderstood. Take money — the function discharged by the most powerful quango of all. The progression has three steps. The first is direct political control: the central bank as an instrument of the elected government, its rate-setting hostage to the electoral cycle and to shifting parliamentary majorities. I reject this, and I reject it on precisely the Schmittian and Bagehotian grounds developed above—the popular will, formed and managed as it is, cannot be trusted with a decision whose costs are dispersed, deferred, and largely invisible to the voter. The second step is independence: the decision lifted one remove out of direct political contestation and lodged in an expert committee. I willingly concede that this is an improvement. I much prefer an independent central bank to one under continuous political pressure; the depoliticization of the money supply, the removal of the printing press from the immediate reach of vote-seeking ministers, is a genuine improvement, and nothing in what follows denies it. On this aspect, monetary policy is special: this policy lever should definitely not be in the hands of party politicians. (In most other cases of quangos one can say that the farming out of decision making to single issue arm’s length bodies, away from parliament where these issues can be debated and connected with all the other issues that need to be considered, was a deleterious mistake.) However, while in the case of monetary policy the removal from parliamentary party politics was a move in the right direction, it was certainly not enough to prevent central monetary planners to damage the economy.
Bank of England independence is only a halfway solution, and a still detrimental one. It is the monetary form of exactly the quango settlement this essay has anatomised: the decision has been moved one step out of politics and then stopped there, lodged in an unaccountable expert body rather than carried through to its proper home. The independent central bank is the monetary OBR. And as Chapter 10 argued, this insulation does not really discipline the expansion of monetary intervention; it still licenses it — witness the growth of the balance sheet to 40% of GDP under the cover of supposed technical necessity. Independence cures a defect of political incentive while leaving wholly untouched the deeper, Hayekian defect of knowledge: an independent monetary authority is still a central planner of the price of money and the quantity of credit, and it faces the same epistemic impossibility as any planner. The committee, however expert and however insulated, cannot possess the dispersed knowledge that only a competitive process can mobilise. The independence reform improves the planner’s motives; it does not solve the planning problem, because the planning problem is not a problem of motive but of knowledge. That is why the very fact that the monetary decision had to be removed from democratic control in order to function tolerably is a quiet confession that it was never suited to political determination at all — and the natural question is therefore not “which unaccountable committee should set it?” but “why is this a collective political decision rather than a price discovered in a market?”
The third step — the completion of the movement the independent central bank only begins — is the removal of money from state control altogether. There is no need for a state monopoly here. This is Hayek’s radical proposal in The Denationalisation of Money (1976): strip the state of its monopoly on the issue of currency, permit private issuers to offer competing monies, and let the choices of those who use money determine which survive. The rationality here is the same competitive discipline that the classical liberal trusted in the chamber and the marketplace alike: an issuer who debased his currency would see it abandoned for sounder rivals, so that competition would select continuously for stability of value in a way no politically appointed committee, insulated from that feedback, ever can. Money would cease to be an instrument of political command and become, once more, a discovered institution — results of human action but not of human design.
Hayek gave us the mechanism but, characteristically, declined to predict its product; he expected competition to select for stable-value money without forecasting which form would win, and was himself wary of the gold standard’s automatic, quantity-driven rigidity. I am willing to supply the prediction he withheld, though on structural rather than metallurgical grounds. Money is subject to powerful network effects: a medium of exchange grows more useful the more others accept it, and a unit of account more useful the more prices are quoted in it. Monetary competition is therefore genuinely open at the level of issue, but it does not dissipate into a permanent babel of rival units; it tends to converge upon a dominant standard. My expectation is that free competition would converge upon a politically uncontrollable hard money — one whose supply cannot be manipulated by any authority — of which a gold or gold-backed money is one plausible form, though by no means the only one. The decisive property is not the metal but the immunity from political debasement and the multi-millennial Schelling-point status (after Thomas Schelling) that makes coordination upon it self-reinforcing. Across thousands of years and disparate cultures, gold has repeatedly been settled on as money. That long track record is itself the coordinating signal. Still, whether the convergent standard proves to be metallic, a digital bearer asset of algorithmically fixed scarcity, or some hybrid or basket, is an empirical question for the competitive process itself to settle. What the argument commits to is the structural prediction—convergence upon a scarce, non-political standard—not the particular substance that instantiates it.
The obvious advantage of such convergence would be the supersession of the present system of politicised national monies, whose floating exchange rates impose a vast and largely unrecognised deadweight upon economic rationality. Consider the scale of the cots the current system imposes. Foreign exchange is, by turnover, the largest market in the world: average daily trading reached some 7.5 trillion US dollars in April 2022. The greater part of this colossal activity is parasitic — it exists to hedge and arbitrage a volatility that is itself the artefact of there being multiple, politically-managed national currencies in the first place. Under a single convergent global money the overwhelming bulk of that turnover would simply have no reason to exist. The largest market on earth is, on this view, a standing measure of the deadweight cost of monetary nationalism, much as the size of a vast pharmaceutical bill measures the extent of a disease. (As an entrepreneur selling services globally, I painfully recognize the scale of the distortion myself: How do you manage and motivate your staff when the annual bottom line used for bonus allocations turns from a measure of skill and effort to a gamble based on exchange rates?) Mises’s calculation argument operates here at planetary scale: exchange-rate noise corrupts the very price signals on which the rational coordination of a world economy depends, and the resources consumed in trying to manage that noise are resources withdrawn from production. The prosperity costs are as devastating as they are unseen, because the more stable and more integrated counterfactual world is never observed.
An objection presents itself immediately, and it is the right one to anticipate, because it appears to turn this essay’s own argument against it. Does not convergence upon a single dominant money reintroduce, through the back door, exactly the singular that Chapter 8 condemned — a monetary monopoly to replace the all-purpose chamber? It does not, and the distinction is the same Hayekian nomos–thesis distinction that governs the whole libertarian case. What was objectionable in the central bank was never the singularity of the standard but the coerciveness of the monopoly and the discretion of the command. A unit of account that emerges from, and is continuously disciplined by, free choices is categorically different from one imposed and manipulated by a state. The convergent money is a standard, not a sovereign: no committee sets its quantity, no authority can debase it, and exit into competing monies remains permanently available as the disciplining threat that keeps the standard honest. It is “singular” in the way the metre, the second, or a dominant language is singular: a convergent coordination equilibrium, an evolved nomos, not an imposed thesis. The plurality on which this essay insists is preserved precisely where it matters — at the level of issue, process, and the standing possibility of exit — while convergence occurs only at the level of the shared standard, which is the mark of a healthy spontaneous order rather than its negation. A converged standard that anyone may abandon for a sounder rival is the opposite of a monopoly that forecloses exit; the difference that makes a difference here is permanent contestability.
The historical gold standards invoked by critics — blamed, not without reason, for transmitting deflationary shocks and deepening the Great Depression — were state-managed gold standards, fractionally backed and suspended by governments the moment convertibility constrained them; that suspension is itself the tell, the proof that they were instruments of political discretion rather than the freely-chosen, fully-disciplining commodity money the present argument envisages. In a free system the creeping inflation prior to the rapid deflationary contraction would not have existed.
The question of form remains genuinely open: since 2009 the live empirical instance of denationalised, network-effect-driven, scarce money competing against state currencies has been digital rather than metallic, and a thesis that committed itself to gold specifically, against a programmable and costlessly-transmissible alternative, would be taking on a far heavier burden than my argument and purpose here requires. The structural claim—that free monetary competition converges upon a scarce standard, dissolving the deadweight of exchange-rate volatility—stands whichever form prevails. This is the monetary instance of the general thesis: the decision drained from the chamber should not be repatriated to Parliament, nor left in the antechamber of the independent committee, but carried through to its proper home in the discovery procedures of a free, global civil society.
This is where Schmitt’s diagnosis of the hollowing of political equality becomes, against his intention, contributes to my libertarian project. He observed that when political equality is stretched to a substanceless universal, “this area loses its substance and is overshadowed by another sphere in which inequality then comes into play with ruthless power.” He meant the economy’s dominance over politics as a deplorable usurpation. But the “inequality” that comes into play in the economic and discursive spheres is the legitimate, productive differentiation of competence, achievement, and contribution—the hierarchies and discriminations that emerge endogenously within markets and within disciplined discourses, and that are entirely compatible with the formal equality of participation. The right inference from Schmitt’s observation is not to re-substantialise the political so that it can reconquer the place of prominence from the economy, but to let the political recede so that the differentiated subsystems, in accordance with Luhmann’s insight, can operate according to their own codes — profitable or unprofitable in the economy, true or false in science, legal or illegal in the legal system, pass or fail in the education system etc. — without a master political code overriding them by command.
On this reading, the quango is a transitional form, and a revealing one. By removing decisions from the chamber on the explicit ground that they are too important, too technical, or too long-term to be entrusted to electoral or party-political determination, the architects of the Blairite quango state have already half-conceded the libertarian premise: that political command is a poor instrument for coordinating complex matters. They have merely stopped halfway, lodging the decision in an unelected, unaccountable public body instead of releasing it to the genuinely decentralised discovery procedures of civil society. The libertarian completes the movement the quango begins. Where the restorationist would drag the decision back into the political system, and the technocrat would leave it in “expert” hands, the libertarian carries it through to its proper home in a decentralized voluntary order. The frustration Starkey names is the energy and motivational force; the reduction of the scope of political control is the direction in which I want to channel and discharge it.
It remains to address, with the candour that the subject demands and that Bagehot exemplified, the awkward matter of the population and its political will — for it is here that my reservations about mass democracy and universal suffrage are most exposed, and here that the restorationist appeal to “giving power back to the people” is at its most seductive and most dangerous.
Bagehot, writing before universal suffrage, could say plainly what we now circle around: that the mass of the population does not conduct, and largely cannot judge, the efficient business of government; that it is governed with its consent but not by its participation; that its reverence is won by the “dignified” parts of the constitution - then the Royal spectacle - while the efficient parts are worked by a competent minority. Schmitt, writing after the arrival of mass suffrage, supplies the mechanism by which this older reality was not abolished but industrialised: the mass will is no longer simply deferential and dormant, as in Bagehot, but is actively, in Schmitt’s words, “won over through a propaganda apparatus whose maximum effect relies on an appeal to immediate interests and passions.” The “statistical apparatus” of the secret ballot then reassembles a hundred million private, irresponsible acts into a number that is presented as “the will of the people.” Put Bagehot and Schmitt together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but, I think, undeniable: in mass democracy the political will of the population is far less expressed than it is formed, managed, and hedged — formed by the propaganda apparatus, managed by parties and the media-administrative complex, and hedged by the very quangos and courts whose insulation from the electorate is defended on the ground that the popular will cannot be trusted with certain decisions.
Once this is admitted, the restorationist case loses much of its moral force. “Return power to the people’s elected representatives” sounds like a demand for democratic accountability, but under the conditions Schmitt and Bagehot jointly describe it amounts to returning power to the apparatus that manufactures and manages the very “will” it claims to obey. The honest libertarian response is not to pretend that a purer mass democracy lies on the other side of repatriation, nor to indulge the fantasy that the chamber can be made deliberative again by procedural reform. It is, rather, to reduce the stakes. The more that is settled by command — whether the command issues from Parliament, from a quango, or from a court — the greater the prize for whoever can capture and manufacture the mass will, and the more ruinous the contest to control it. The more that is left to private self-determination — to markets, to voluntary association, to the friendly societies and mutual aid institutions that civil society generates when the state withdraws, to the open discourses of an accomplished public — the smaller the prize, the lower the temperature, and the less the population’s will needs to be manufactured at all, because less hangs upon it. A free people is not one whose every preference is aggregated and commanded; it is one most of whose life is removed from the reach of command in the first place.
I am, accordingly, less than enthusiastic about mass democracy and universal suffrage as the solution to the constitutional disorder the Starkey Thesis describes — because they are closer to being its cause. This is not a brief for any authoritarian alternative; Schmitt’s own later drift toward the decisionist and ultimately the dictatorial is precisely the wrong turn, and I reject it even more firmly as I reject the restorationist one. I am not principally opposed to democratic decision procedures. Far from it. I am fully endorsing that democratic decision making might be an appropriate means to coordinate collective action or rule-making in voluntary associations like clubs, the cooperatives, and shareholding companies. Here democratic procedures are wholly unobjectionable, indeed often very valuable, valuable, exactly because its scope is bounded and its membership self-selected and, according to Schmitt’s insight, substantively homogeneous in the relevant respect. There is no hard and fast rule whether and how a voluntary association will be democratically constituted. This is largely a question of expediency, and of what members prefer. What I reject is the default projection of democratic command or majoritarian dictates over the whole of society – where membership is not a choice but lock-in prevails - through a coercive state apparatus, and the consequent manufacture of a mass will to legitimate that command. To be sure, our standard model of ”liberal democracy” we largely take for granted now, did indeed function rather well for over 150 years, especially in comparison to most older models (although some monarchies are still doing reasonably well also), as well as in comparison to the failed left-utopian models. However, past performance is not indicative of future results, and the recent performance of this model, in most of its most advanced versions, has been very disappointing indeed. Our democracies are facing an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy. They are not performing anymore. Since 2008 they became increasingly illiberal, controlling and interventionist at a time when control and intervention are increasingly bound to do more damage than good. Following Carl Schmitt’s insight into the tension between liberal and mass democratic principles, we can see that this tension is now revealing itself increasingly as contradiction. “Liberal democracy” is increasingly becoming an oxymoron, and we need to explore what lies beyond. We need to explore how, going forward, this contradiction can be sublated in a new type of politics, a libertarian politics, building upon the discussion principle, not aiming at collectively binding decisions, but as guiding pendant of voluntary market relations.
Schmitt closed the principal argument of his book with a sentence that has lost none of its force: “If in the actual circumstances of parliamentary business, openness and discussion have become an empty and trivial formality, then parliament, as it developed in the nineteenth century, has also lost its previous foundation and its meaning” (Schmitt 1923/1988, p.50). The Starkey Thesis points, in effect, to the British constitutional history of that loss of meaning — the record of how an institution whose moral title rested on genuine deliberation, embedded in a wider public sphere of accomplished stakeholders, was first hollowed by mass democracy and then dismembered by an executive that exported its substance to unaccountable bodies.
In my Schmitt-inspired engagement with the Starkey Thesis I accept three things and refuse one. I accept Schmitt’s account of what parliament was for—discussion as a principle, embodied in the independence of the member, the publicity of proceedings, the freedom of the press, and the separation of powers, and embedded in a deliberating educated public. I accept that this principle stands in genuine contradiction with mass democracy, and that the contradiction generates the pathologies — the antechamber parliament, the back-room decision, politics as spectacle — that Schmitt named in 1923 and that we inhabit in 2026. And I accept Starkey’s contention that the Blairite settlement carried this disintegration to a new and graver stage by transferring decisive power out of Parliament to quangos, regulators, and courts, draining Parliament’s substance, leaving theatre, and abolishing responsibility in the process, thus going further along the line Schmitt had already clearly seen.
What I refuse is the restorationist conclusion. The powers should not go back to Parliament, because the Parliament to which they would return is no longer the deliberative assembly whose principle once justified its sovereignty, and cannot be made so under mass-democratic conditions. The frustration the Starkey Thesis so rightly mobilises should be turned outward, not backward: toward the reduction of the scope of political control over society as such. The quango, by conceding that great decisions are ill-suited to electoral deliberation, has already taken the first step of a journey it lacks the courage to complete. The libertarian completes it. The decisions that have drained out of the chamber should continue their course — out of the political system altogether — into the markets, the voluntary associations, the mutual institutions, and the open discourses through which a free civil society discovers truth and coordinates action without command. That is the same competitive, spontaneous discovery-process that Schmitt identified as the shared underlying principle of the marketplace and the classical parliament alike. Parliamentary discussion, in its great age, was civil society reasoning with itself about the public good. When the chamber can no longer perform that office, the answer is not to pretend that it can, but to return the reasoning to the agile multitude of discursive arenas that are currently proliferating, and the deciding, to the self-responsible market participants, and the multitude of voluntary associations flourishing within civil society.
The hour in which Britain finds itself is, in this respect, a Schmittian hour of decision—though the decision is not the one Schmitt offered between liberal parliamentarism and a homogenising dictatorship. It is the decision between continuing to shuttle sovereignty between a hollowed-out chamber and an unaccountable quango-state on the one side, and gradually, deliberately discharging that sovereignty back into the private and voluntary order from which the modern state had progressively confiscated it on the other side. The Starkey Thesis diagnoses the disease with great precision. Carl Schmitt explains why the patient was always susceptible to it. Walter Bagehot shows us both the constitution that was lost and the candid truth about the population that the lost constitution managed so much more honestly than ours. The remedy, however, belongs to neither Starkey’s restoration nor Schmitt’s decisionism, but to the libertarian completion of the movement that the quango-state, in its half-hearted way, has already begun.
There remains the hardest question of all, and it would be dishonest to close without facing it. In my 2025 ‘Pathways’ article I posed the question as follows: “How plausible is then the expectation that the coercive ordering of social life via states could be overcome and be substituted by a spontaneous social ordering without coercion?” My answer was and remains: “This might happen within current democracies through a discourse-led political activism that gradually convinces the demos, including parts of its elites, to risk more degrees of freedom. Such a political activism includes the build-up of political parties aiming at electoral success” (Schumacher 2025).
The libertarian revolution I advocate can succeed only if it first wins political power within the very compromised parliamentary democracy whose deep flaws this essay has spent its length anatomising. There is no road to the reduction of political power that does not pass, at least initially, through the existing political system. The reduction of the scope of the state must itself be legislated; the dismantling of the apparatus must be commanded by those who have won the command. Is there any hope in such a project? Can there be, at this point, any realistic prospect that a demos formed, managed, and hedged as we have described it could be brought to vote for less of the very political control that flatters and provides for it?
Two features of the present juncture give more ground for hope than the bare description would suggest. The first is the ongoing economic stagnation — experienced, by now, by a great many not as mere slow growth but as outright decline: stagnant real wages, a housing market now closed to most, rising taxes purchasing visibly deteriorating services, and the rapid erosion of the expectation that tomorrow will be more prosperous than today. A demos content with its provision will not risk the unfamiliar; a demos that has begun to experience the managed decline of the state-administered economy is a demos that may, at last, open up to the argument that the apparatus of control is the cause and not the cure of its predicament. The stagnation and decline this essay has attributed in part to the thickening arm’s-length state is also, dialectically, the condition that makes the case against that state politically audible.
The second is the political disillusionment that the stagnation has bred, and the new political formations it has called into being. The monopoly of the established centre - now routinely referred to as the “uniparty” – is in dissolution. New players have emerged —Reform UK and Restore Britain among them — each carrying libertarian ingredients that are, at present, mixed with statist and nationalist currents, but that could be strengthened, clarified and distilled by sustained discursive work. The Conservative Party, in opposition and chastened, has undergone something of a reinvention in a more libertarian direction — a party in which, it should be remembered, libertarian currents have always found a more receptive context than anywhere else in the British mainstream. Stalwart libertarian think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) – who were already crucial contributors to the Thatcher revolution and to which the present author has been contributing – are gathering momentum. And at the furthest, principled edge of this landscape stands the — so far admittedly tiny — UK Libertarian Party (LPUK), which is at present building up its capacity and its policy apparatus, and to whose programme the present author has contributed as author of its Urban Development and Housing Policy. None of these is, today, a vehicle equal to the task. But their very emergence is evidence that the political consciousness is no longer frozen, that the broadly libertarian direction of travel has constituencies, research organisations, voices and parties forming around it, and that the discursive space in which a libertarian argument can be made and heard is wider than it has been in a generation.
I want to close with considering a recent historical precedent, the Thatcher revolution. This is pertinent as we are still inhabiting the same socio-economic epoch engendered by the revolutionary computational technologies which currently make yet another leap forward via AI. Here is how I appraised the plausibility of a libertarian revolution in my Pathways article written two years ago:
“This probably seems a very remote and far-fetched prospect given current political reality and mainstream political consciousness. Yet, historical dynamics, crisis-fuelled and steered by determined activism, can get under way that make the improbable suddenly possible and probable. Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberal revolution in Britain was a precursor of what might happen. Thatcher, inspired by the work of F.A. Hayek, started to roll back the state by initiating a wave of privatization and deregulation. Thatcher’s election victory with a radical libertarian-inspired project was possible due to the crisis ridden sinking of the UK economy and an increasingly desperate demos during the preceding decade. After the worst excesses and failures of leftist interventionism had been reversed, the damage repaired, and growth restored, the revolution stalled, and the statist paralysis gradually returned. The next crisis-fuelled opportunity will arrive soon enough, and then, wherever the break-through happens, the revolution must be more swift and decisive, showing early promising results and leaving less chance to backsliding. On the basis of initial, successful steps of liberalisation, society can be enticed to proceed further and further in the roll back of the state and in the substitution of its functions by non-coercive actors and voluntary institutions. The most important task is to commence this turn of political direction away from the current tendency to increase state interference in the economy thereby loading up the state with ever more unmanageable responsibilities. The libertarian hypothesis is that once this increasingly paralysing current process can be reversed and a process of liberalisation is under way, the prosperity gains that will be unlocked in each step will spurn the process on further. The prospect of such a process might be termed—borrowing a phrase from Karl Marx—‘the withering away of the state’, albeit not under communism but under capitalism.” (Schumacher 2025)
This appraisal of the prospects of a libertarian revolution still stands, and indeed stands invigorated.
Alexander, James. 2024. “David Starkey is Right That Blair Destroyed the British Constitution But Wrong About This.” The Daily Sceptic, 2 December. https://dailysceptic.org/2024/12/02/david-starkey-is-right-that-blair-destroyed-the-british-constitution-but-wrong-about-this/
Bagehot, Walter. 2001 [1867]. The English Constitution, ed. Paul Smith. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bank for International Settlements. 2022. Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and OTC Derivatives Markets in 2022. Basel: BIS, 27 October. https://www.bis.org/statistics/rpfx22.htm.
Bank of England. 2021. IEO Evaluation of the Bank of England’s Approach to Quantitative Easing. Independent Evaluation Office, January. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/independent-evaluation-office/ieo-report-january-2021/.
Bank of England. 2024. “Quantitative Easing.” https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/quantitative-easing.
Burke, Edmund. 1774. “Speech to the Electors of Bristol.” In The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 1. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854–56.
Cabinet Office. 2019. Public Bodies 2018/19. London: Cabinet Office.
Cabinet Office. 2025. Public Bodies 2024 (data for 2023/24; published 29 May 2025). London: Cabinet Office. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/public-bodies-2024.
Guizot, François. 2002 [1851]. The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, trans. Andrew R. Scoble, ed. Aurelian Craiutu. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–530.
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1976. The Denationalisation of Money. London: Institute of Economic Affairs.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1984–87 [1981]. The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996 [1992]. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Grantham Research Institute. 2024. “What is the 2008 Climate Change Act?” London School of Economics. https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/what-is-the-2008-climate-change-act/.
Hansard Society. 2021. Coronavirus Statutory Instruments Dashboard. London: Hansard Society.
House of Commons Library. 2026. Net Zero in the UK (Briefing Paper CBP-8590). London: House of Commons Library.
House of Lords Constitution Committee. 2021. COVID-19 and the Use and Scrutiny of Emergency Powers (3rd Report, Session 2021–22, HL 15). London: House of Lords.
House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. 2021. Quantitative Easing: A Dangerous Addiction? (1st Report, Session 2021–22, HL 42). London: House of Lords.
Modern Civil Service. 2024. “Understanding Arm’s Length Bodies: A Fresh Look at Britain’s Public Sector.”CabinetOfficeblog,18December. https://moderncivilservice.blog.gov.uk/2024/12/18/understanding-arms-length-bodies-a-fresh-look-at-britains-public-sector/.
MacAlister, Josh. 2022. The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care: Final Report. London (published 23 May 2022). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-childrens-social-care-final-report.
Mill, John Stuart. 1861. Considerations on Representative Government. London: Parker, Son, and Bourn.
Mises, Ludwig von. 1949. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Schmitt, Carl. 1988 [1923/1926]. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schumacher, Patrik. 2018. “Habermas on the Reciprocity between Liberty and Popular Sovereignty.” Paper delivered at the Academy of Ideas, Academy 2018, London. https://patrikschumacher.substack.com/
Schumacher, Patrik. 2024. “Pathways towards a Stateless World Society.” In C. H. Hoffmann, S. Grell, and M. Otto (eds.), Was tun? Wie Freiheitsentrepreneure unser Zusammenleben revolutionieren. Berlin: Edition Wissenschaft & Praxis. https://patrikschumacher.substack.com/
Schumacher, Patrik. 2025. “Markets and Discourses — Politics after the Libertarian Revolution.” (Thesis on Discourse Capitalism.) https://patrikschumacher.substack.com/
Schumacher, Patrik. 2026a. “Thesis on Government Disruption of Families: In the Name of Safeguarding — Coercive Over-intervention in UK Family Life.” Patrik Schumacher THESES (Substack), https://patrikschumacher.substack.com/
Schumacher, Patrik. 2026b. “Facing the Hour of Decision: Spengler’s Faustian Virtues in a Libertarian Order.” London. (not yet published)
Starkey, David. 2021. “800 Years of Democracy is Unravelling Before Our Very Eyes.” Mail on Sunday (reproduced by the Bow Group). https://www.bowgroup.org/.
Starkey, David. 2024a. “The Sixth English Revolution.” Address summarised at devilslane.com, 20 May. https://devilslane.com/starkey-explains-the-sixth-english-revolution/.
Starkey, David. 2024b. Interview with Laurie Wastell, “David Starkey: Tony Blair Destroyed the Old Britain.” The Sceptic (podcast), 17 October.
Starkey, David. 2024c. Interview with Hannah Gal, “A Time for Restoration.” The Critic, 28 April. https://thecritic.co.uk/a-time-for-restoration/.
Starkey, David. 2024d. “The Strange Death of Conservative England.” Oakeshott Lecture, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford.
Starkey, David. 2025. Interview on The Peter McCormack Show, ep. 73, “Why Britain is No Longer a Democracy.” https://www.petermccormack.com/episodes/073-david-starkey-britain-is-no-longer-a-democracy.
Starkey, David. 2026. Interview on Triggernometry, 21st June 2026
Note on the sources for the “Starkey Thesis”: Starkey has developed his account of the Blairite constitutional revolution primarily in public lectures, broadcast interviews, and podcast appearances rather than in writing; The entries above are accordingly to the spoken and journalistic venues in which the thesis is actually articulated, together with one sympathetic critical summary (Alexander 2024, listed above).
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