The quiet counter-revolution: why Britain needs a Great Repeal Act

Britain’s crises are no longer merely economic or political. They are constitutional. For years, ministers have promised bold reforms—from immigration to energy, housing to crime. Yet again and again, ambition dissolves into paralysis. The cause is not just cowardice or incompetence, though there’s been plenty of both, but the legal infrastructure that governs government itself.

Rupert Lowe and Robert Jenrick’s call for a Great Repeal Act might sound like a slogan. In truth, it is one of the most serious and necessary ideas in British politics today. Because behind the gridlock of the modern British state lies a deeper problem: the people we elect no longer have the power to govern.

This wasn’t always so. As historian David Starkey reminds us, Britain’s constitutional tradition—Magna Carta, habeas corpus, the 1689 Bill of Rights—vested ultimate authority in a sovereign Parliament. That model endured for centuries. It worked. Until 1997. That year marked the beginning of what Amar Johal, writing in The Critic, rightly calls Labour’s “constitutional vandalism”. In the name of modernity and rights, Blair’s government embedded a managerial framework designed to constrain political will. That framework remains largely intact—and largely untouched by Conservative successors.

The Human Rights Act 1998. The Equality Act 2010. The Climate Change Act 2008. These are not neutral laws. They encode a worldview. Together, they require ministers to navigate a labyrinth of obligations before making almost any decision. Public bodies must “act compatibly” with ECHR rights, “foster good relations” between identity groups and adhere to vague environmental principles. These aren’t mere safeguards. They are veto points. And above them all hovers a judiciary increasingly comfortable striking down policy that fails the tests of the new orthodoxy.

The result, in Johal’s words: “process, process and more process.” Governing becomes lawyering. Policy becomes compliance. Political mandates are stifled by judicial review. Parliament passes laws; the administrative state ensures they don’t mean what they say. Britain today is governed not by elected officials but by a dispersed clerisy of lawyers, regulators, and rights-bearing veto-holders.

Hence the urgency of the Great Repeal. But it must be done right. The goal is not Year Zero deregulation or chaos for its own sake. It is a serious, legally literate effort to restore the primacy of Parliament. That means triage, not tantrum. Many EU-era regulations on food or product standards remain useful. Some provisions of the Equality Act protect against genuine discrimination. But the ideological spine of these laws—the parts that mandate equality of outcome, make mass migration legally irreversible, or empower activist litigation—must be removed.

Preparation matters. The last attempt at a “Great Repeal”—Brexit—saw the civil service preserve far more than it repealed. The lesson: don’t wait until power is won. Begin drafting now. As in the US, where Trump 2.0 is preparing policy and personnel in advance, Britain’s legal restoration must be pre-loaded. The Right cannot rely on Whitehall to dismantle the structures it has spent decades defending.

Above all, repeal is not destruction. It is restoration. To repeal the Blairite legal order is not to return to some anarchic past. It is to restore the fundamental balance of the British constitution: Parliament sovereign, ministers accountable, law clear and limited. As Johal puts it, the aim is a state in which a citizen can understand the plainly expressed rules that govern them—not navigate an opaque tangle decipherable only to compliance officers.

There will be pain. There will be howls of protest. But there is no alternative. Britain cannot be reformed until it is re-legislated. The Great Repeal is not the revolution. It is the quiet counter-revolution. And it is long overdue.