The Starkey Thesis: Why Britain can’t move on until it undoes 1997

At a lecture in Witney this month, historian David Starkey set out what he calls The Starkey Thesis. It is not a modest claim. Britain, he argues, has been crippled by the Blairite reforms introduced under New Labour, and nothing meaningful can be done until they are undone. The lecture was part historical sweep, part constitutional polemic, part warning. It was also an attempt to provide the Right with something it has long lacked: a coherent account of what went wrong and how to reverse it.

Conservatism’s founding flaw

Starkey begins with the charge that British conservatism has always been weak because it lacks a foundational doctrine. The Conservative Party, born with Sir Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto of 1835, started by conceding the Great Reform Act of 1832. In other words, the party that claimed to resist change was founded on acceptance of it. From that moment on, conservatism has risked being nothing more than a series of compromises.

Friedrich Hayek made the same point in The Constitution of Liberty, famously ending with a chapter titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative”. For Starkey, only Benjamin Disraeli found a way to square the circle. His 1867 Reform Act expanded the vote to skilled workers, but Disraeli’s justification was telling: “In a progressive country, change is inevitable. The question is, what sort of change?” That distinction between organic, tradition-rooted change and abstract, imposed reform is the closest thing Britain ever had to a conservative doctrine.

Blair’s slow-burn revolution

The core of The Starkey Thesis is that Tony Blair’s 1997 victory amounted to a constitutional revolution. Parliament ceased to be sovereign in practice. Power was shifted to unelected bodies and the courts.

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee began setting interest rates. A forest of quangos - English Nature, the Climate Change Committee, hundreds more - took control of large parts of public spending and regulation, beyond the reach of voters. The Human Rights Act of 1998 and judicial creativity turned judges into arbiters of policy. Post-war European constitutions, Starkey notes, had been designed to restrain majorities, scarred by memories of Nazism. Blair imported the same mentality: the people could not be trusted.

The result, Starkey told the Witney audience, is a state that binds itself “like Gulliver in Lilliput”. Political parties talk of growth or reform, but judges and committees hold the veto.

Dysfunction by design

Covid, in Starkey’s telling, exposed the failure starkly. Government by a single-issue expert committee - SAGE - optimised for one outcome (minimise Covid deaths) while sacrificing everything else. Schools were closed, debt exploded, other health needs were sidelined. It was rule by technocrats, not rule by government weighing trade-offs.

Human rights law, he argues, has had the same effect. By elevating universal entitlements over democratic legislation, it replaced consent with legalism. The Equality Act of 2010 compounded the problem, pitting protected categories against one another and inviting endless litigation. Local government finances, energy policy, even gender debates now end up in court.

Thatcher, Scruton and the narrowing of the Right

The lecture was not simply a hymn to Thatcherite revival. Starkey credits Margaret Thatcher with rescuing Britain in the 1970s, but faults her for reducing conservatism to free-market economics. Thatcher dismantled nationalised industries and broke union power, but in doing so de-industrialised swathes of the country and left the deeper constitutional inheritance - the habits of self-government, local institutions, and civic association - untended.

Roger Scruton fares little better. He gave conservatism intellectual style and moral seriousness but, Starkey argued, never turned it into a concrete political programme. Conservatism became either economic rationalism or aesthetic feeling. Neither was enough.

The remedy: a Great Repeal

The Starkey Thesis concludes with a prescription: undo the Blairite settlement. That means a Great Repeal of the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, and the enabling statutes for quangos. Parliamentary sovereignty must be reasserted, local self-government revived, and the legal order stripped back to the pre-1997 model.

Without that, Starkey insists, cultural polemic is just noise. “The reason woke is so powerful in Britain,” he told the Witney audience, “is that it’s entrenched in the legal structure.” The only way to break it is to dismantle the laws and institutions that sustain it.

A programme for restoration

The comparison he offers is with Thatcher in 1979 or Attlee in 1945: governments that arrived with detailed legislative programmes and the will to force them through. A future right-of-centre government, whether Conservative or Reform, would need the same. Day one would require draft bills ready to go, a majority large enough to stare down resistance, and a public mandate to restore the old constitutional settlement.

This, then, is the heart of The Starkey Thesis: Britain does not need novelty, it needs restoration. Undo 1997, repeal the Blair settlement, and rediscover the English principle of self-government - law made by the people, not imposed by judges or quangos. Until then, talk of what comes next is pointless.