3. A New Model System
So I’ve explained that we will be ready for government, and we will take back control of the Whitehall machine.
The third thing we’ll do is this. We’ll make sure the wider system – the institutions outside Whitehall – also respect the mandate of the government.
We expect opposition. Reform’s experience of local government is how a combination of ineptitude, misplaced deference to the way things have been done – often only for the last few years but now hallowed with tradition – and active malignancy, are powerful blockers against change.
Ministers from previous governments publicly and privately bewail the obstructions placed in their way by forces outside their control – or even the control of the civil servants who, as many do, want to see the government succeed.
So for Reform to succeed we need deliberate action beyond Whitehall too. Nigel Farage will not let established conventions, or vested interests, or bogus appeals to higher authorities than the will of Parliament, get in the way of the plan that has been approved by the public in a general election.
I can’t stress enough that the revolution Reform UK is planning is a conservative revolution, like all good revolutions – like 1688 and 1776, when the representatives of the people rose up against an executive that was failing to govern for the nation.
Those revolutions were restorations – and so will ours be. We want to restore the proper basis of our democracy, whereby public servants answer to ministers, who answer to Parliament.
A restorative revolution is not majoritarian. Yes, we will place maximum legitimacy in our mandate; yes, we will not let the establishment countermand the clearly expressed wish of the public.
But we don’t come with a chainsaw, or a wrecking ball. We respect the institutions of the country – the Armed Forces, the police, the church, the judiciary – and we respect the professionalism and expertise of the people who work in them, so long as those people respect in their turn the right of Parliament, and of ministers, to make the rules they work by.
As with Cromwell’s New Model Army, we need the professionals to do their job – running the institutions themselves – but we need them firmly under the supervision and authority of what since the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution we call ‘the Crown in Parliament’: the King’s ministers, arising from and working through the assembly of the people.
That means ensuring the House of Lords does not obstruct legislation passed by the Commons. It means stopping public sector unions sabotaging the reforms the public rightly demands.
And it means exiting international legal conventions, and changing the rules on judicial review, that allow judges to countermand the decisions of the government.
Obviously we need judicial independence. But we need courts to have a proper respect for the boundaries of their remit – to follow statute and precedent faithfully. The price of independence is that the courts should be genuinely non-political, without the power to apply their own notions of what the law should be, let alone to block or reverse decisions rightly made by the government. That is the real rule of law – the independent application of laws made by Parliament.
