Rule by the blob is this election’s elephant in the room, says Radomir Tylecote

This elephant in the room sat on the Tories for fourteen years and is now waiting for Labour – the overwhelming might of the blob.

Britain increasingly lacks a functioning democracy. Nominally, elected politicians are in charge, but when they try to enact their programme of government, they are checked at every turn by bureaucrats, challenged by righteous quango executives, and overruled by an activist judiciary.

Take the Home Office. Officials have dragged their feet on any government attempt to crack down on migration and border security.

When, earlier this year, the independent chief inspector for borders and migration tried to alert the Home Secretary to lapses at London City Airport and about small boats, senior department officials obfuscated the findings through their “factual accuracy process”.

Or last week, when the Supreme Court ruled that Surrey County Council’s decision to grant planning permission for a new oil well was unlawful because its Environmental Impact Assessment had only considered the emissions that would be produced by the project’s development (construction, transport etc), rather than the cumulative emissions produced by the eventual combustion of all the oil extracted from the well over its lifespan.

That activist judges now pursue absurdly wide interpretations of the law to overrule democratically elected councillors shows how our body of laws is moving away from a simple set of rules governing conduct in the UK, to a state in which judges and regulators decide what is best for everyone.

The disastrous spread of DEI ideology across the public sector compounds this, cemented by the public sector equality duty in the Equality Act (2010). Simplify Britain’s tax system? I’m sorry Minister, we’re having a struggle session to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the death of George Floyd.

It would be a mistake to assume that because the blob is obsessed with left-leaning causes, it will bend over backwards to enact a Labour government programme.

An unwillingness to cede power and a byzantine network of quangos and regulators with varying statutory obligations will bog down any Government’s plans for reform – except where they involve minting new regulators and further transfer of power away from elected politicians.

The Equality Act and the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), committing the state to the cause of social engineering, have effectively ordered the bureaucracy to go about remaking our nation in its own ideological image. The state now funds armies of NGOs to pump a divisive DEI agenda into every corner of society.

As major corporates adopt the same ideology, the blob and its cadres are the wellspring of a new totalitarianism which sees our country resemble East Germany in its early stages: private companies and institutions still exist, but they know their job is to toe the state’s ideological line. A free society itself is rapidly on the slide.

This election season, there is an eery silence about all this. The story of the last political decade is that politicians elected with clear mandates from the electorate were unable to fulfil them: the Blairite legacy is the dominance of our national life by an empowered public sector that, in reality, has the final say.

Civil servants treat elected Ministers like just another “stakeholder group”. Anyone who has been a minister or Spad can attest that civil servants have developed a set of techniques to circumvent even direct orders.

There is the threat of the Equality Act to render any philosophically conservative course of action potentially illegal, Minister; the habit of kicking every initiative into the long grass of “review”.

This legacy of power in the hands of quangos, out of public reach, is unchallenged. Remember, we are talking here about a state machine that kills people through infected blood and sends innocent people to prison with no one ever held accountable.

The public is waking up to this. Election campaigns seem increasingly flimsy, the electorate asked to connive in something like a charade. People pull the lever of elections to find that the democratic machine is broken, that little really changes and the same ideologies permeate national life. Politicians of any party about to be elected to office will find they have little power over the institutions of state.

Yet no one trying to form a government is willing to face up to the phenomenon that prevents them actually governing. Politics must be ready to make the case for the wholesale reform of our bureaucracy. Rule by the blob is the elephant in the room of this surreal election.

Dr Radomir Tylecote is managing director of the Legatum Institute