Demise Of The Leviathan

The breach of the social contract and the rise of judicial governance.

Lars Møller | July 9, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: Sir Thomas More, his father, his household, and his descendants (Rowland Lockey, 1593) 

While historically defined as the guarantor of ordered liberty and the embodiment of a sovereign people’s will, the British state has evolved into an adversary of its own citizens. This inversion is the deliberate outcome of a constitutional coup, executed with velvet resolve by Tony Blair’s New Labour after 1997. As the historian David Starkey has argued, what masqueraded as “modernization” was in truth a surreptitious revolution: the systematic dismantling of parliamentary sovereignty and its replacement by a judicial and expertocratic regime fundamentally hostile to the instincts and interests of the British people.

Contemptuous of Old Britain, but equally disillusioned with left-wing traditionalism, New Labour bred a polity in which democracy is reduced to ritual, borders dissolve under legalistic sophistry, and the ancient constitution—forged in the fires of common law and parliamentary assertion—lies in ruins. The pessimism pervading Starkey’s analysis reflects not so much the indulgence of a curmudgeon as the clear-eyed recognition of an existential crisis. Replacing Sir Keir Starmer with another Labour figurehead (i.e., Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Manchester) offers no salvation; it merely refreshes the personnel of a system structurally inimical to national self-government.

At the heart of Starkey’s criticism lies the indictment of Blair’s institutional revolution. The scope of the post-1997 reforms went far beyond tinkering with the machinery; they shattered the delicate, evolutionary balance of the British constitution. Parliamentary sovereignty, that hard-won doctrine whereby the elected representatives of the people stood supreme, was subordinated to a new legalistic architecture. Judges, liberated from their traditional roles, assumed the mantle of “guardians”—not of law as historically understood, but of abstract rights drawn from European and international conventions. This shift empowered the unelected at the direct expense of the electorate.

Starkey’s voice cuts through the complacent chatter of the metropolitan commentariat: the British state has ceased to serve “Alarm-Clock Britain”; it is subject to the ideology of the “Blob,” that loose but potent alliance of activist lawyers, NGOs, human rights lobbyists, and liberal officials who view popular sentiment as a threat to be judicially contained.

The creation of the UK Supreme Court in 2009 exemplifies this rupture. Starkey has characterized it as an entirely unnecessary American import, severing the judiciary from the House........

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