02/10/2025
By the 1970s, a few generations of the brightest minds in Britain had been utterly flummoxed by our national decline, and felt that managing it was the best they could do in a situation that was inevitable. It took heroic thinkers from outside the Civil Service to diagnose the problems, and come up with the solutions.
John Hoskyns’ legendary wire diagram pinpointed the power of the unions, and the resultant inflation and stasis that came from them, as the sine qua non of Britain’s woes. It took Hoskyns, his colleague Norman Strauss and Terry Price (as far as I’m aware, we bear no relation) and collaborators like Alfred Sherman to convince first Keith Joseph, and then the blessed Margaret of both this fact, and then to work out what the detailed legislative and policy solutions might be.
This effort was hampered by the intransigence of the Wets like Jim Prior and Michael ‘Judas’ Heseltine, who stymied the kind of strategic thinking necessary, and almost cost Margaret Thatcher’s revolution its success.
This time around, the challenge facing the Right is different. There is already almost unanimous agreement as to what that central issue is, by all right-thinking people, from Kemi Badenoch to Nigel Farage, from Dominic Cummings to, I hope, you, dear reader. And that is the deracination of ministerial power and true Parliamentary scrutiny to the ‘Blob’ of civil servants, quangos, regulators and executive agencies, not to mention the thicket of bad law and bad faith lawyers and judges that dominate political decision making.
I complained about the Blob in my last column, no less. As we head into the Conservative Party Conference though, all eyes ought to be on who is actually coming up with the radical, yet detailed, answers to strip the hundred handed Briareus that is the modern Civil Service of its power.
✍️James Price
There are a few intellectual heavyweights to keep an eye on at Conservative Party Conference
