Who governs? Who runs Britain? Every so often, the electorate gives a mandate to politicians to govern, as it did a few weeks ago. But increasingly, general elections are becoming a charade, a veneer, a husk.
The Labour Party wants you to believe that politicians are in control, but if Sir Keir Starmer gets his way, politicians will be there merely to take responsibility for decisions made by anonymous, unelected and unaccountable quangocrats.
While I was in government with Liz Truss, we tried to take on the bureaucracy. We wanted to take radical action that was necessary to revive the struggling British economy.
That meant cutting taxes, reducing the size of the state, unleashing Britain's growth, and crucially, returning power of democratically elected politicians from the blob. It turned out we paid quite a high price for this.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has hit out at the new Labour government
GB NEWS
And then the erroneous narrative followed, that it was Liz who trashed the economy.
But this turns out to be untrue, and it's not people like me who are saying this. It's not people who are partisan, except in the other direction.
Rachel Reeves has confirmed the date of the Budget PABecause the Bank of England has admitted that it not only failed to inform the executive of the looming pensions crisis, but it also began a round of quantitative tightening just as the mini budget was announced.
Labour has seized upon the narrative and made it the basis for its economic policy, so called “secureonomics”.
Today, Parliament debated the second reading of the Government's budget responsibility bill. While on the face of it, this may sound sensible in reality, it gives more power to the bureaucrats of the Office of Budgetary Responsibility, effectively putting future governments into a bureaucratic, fiscal straitjacket.
Soon, economic policies will only be pursued if they adhere to the liberal groupthink narrative that dominates the OBR. And this is an institution that gets almost all of its forecasts wrong.
Since 2010 the OBR, according to its own assessment, has on average, misjudged the UK's public sector net borrowing by £52.5 billion, which makes Rachel Reeves’ £20 billion look like a drop in the ocean, and miscalculated the UK's growth by £46.5 billion per year.
But the point is that this is just one move of many in Labour's agenda that undermines democracy. Soon, democracy will be but a facade, a manipulation, a way of continuing the illusion for the electorate.
You may elect a new government that won't matter, because the bureaucrats will make the real decisions behind the scenes, and they will remain the same. Nobody can vote to remove Andrew Bailey, however wrong he gets it.
Although this may sound like a technical point, we are facing a slow demise of democracy.
