Lee Rotherham: Badenoch has a chance to rethink the reform of our broken system, Starmer can’t and won’t

Dr Lee Rotherham has twice been a Conservative parliamentary candidate, three times a council one, and is a good governance campaigner.

How do bad laws, and more widely bad government decisions, come about?

Some causes are doctrinal and intrinsic – socialism and pseudoliberalism for instance both foster particular excesses. But then there is the question of systemic corrosion – including what Kemi Badenoch, in her conference speech, styled the model of “politics of announcements without a plan”. She correspondingly pledged:

“No more making the announcement first and working out the policy detail second. No more thinking we can leave quangos and bureaucrats to their own devices and then wonder why we don’t see results. No more accepting that our laws can be used as a tool to subvert democratic decisions and basic common sense.”

These are good principles to paint in gothic script over the front door, though we can take issue with the ox cart speed in appraising the Strasbourg Court’s long-familiar failings.

The letters may need to be huge as the message does not seem to have been entirely embraced by colleagues. Take the pledged £5,000 national insurance rebate to first-time homebuyers. This is dusting off an old folder rather than freshly exploring a root problem at first principles, still seeing house prices as a bubble to be pumped up, and at taxpayer cost. It reminds one of the hollow supply side tinkering from when Cameron in 2015 pledged to force the housing industry to subsidise starter homes.

It is of course a far easier track in Opposition to pledge reversing known bad policy.

Binning Labour’s “family farm tax” for instance rows back on a dreadful decision and restores a known status quo ante. Largely lost to modern memory is the eclectic and class-laden example of the Armorial Bearings duty, which in 1869 introduced a tax of two guineas a year for anyone using a crest on their carriage and a guinea anywhere else, such as on a plate, or on pocket watches if it were not scratched out. By 1943 it had become “an unnecessary and vexatious burden that is not worth collecting”.

That is a petty example, if symbolic in its day.

You might also check Hansard for ideas WW2 backbenchers were casually mooting to help win us the war. You’ll find a proposal handing golfers rifles in case of parachutist attack; issuing free pyjamas to soldiers; an interest in the development of American shark repellent (prior to it appearing in Batman); and encouraging the general consumption of whale meat. One Liverpool MP was keen on dropping bombs into Vesuvius to make life a nuisance for Neapolitans, until enlightened on the practicalities by a colleague who had actually flown around inside the crater. And then there was the backbencher who suggested using V1s for peacetime postal deliveries.

Churchill himself of course was notorious for ingenious ideas that a permanently frustrated Alan Brooke had to process as papers even though most were clearly wildly undeliverable.

In our own day, the Mr Magoo school of lawmaking has most obviously given us the Assisted Suicide Bill, but it has also handed us the Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025, introduced to smuggle in photocopied EU regulations without giving anyone the opportunity to reflect on the fresh burdens and restrictions each in turn may bring.

The lesson from all this is that bad laws like to hide in shadows. Bad ministers like to put them there. To return to Badenoch’s point and take it a step further, we need to consign to history those situations where Downing Street telephones SpAds for quick policy announcements in order to plug a gap in the media grid.

Which takes us to the matter of diligent prep. Because that does mean a gargantuan task lies ahead for policy drafters, both within the Party and more widely across the Right.

Such is the context of my latest study, a major review of the great task of deregulation and reform ahead of us if we wish to fix the country. Gawain Towler’s substack explains the issues in play with commendable succinctness for the time-grappled reader.

I came up with a very large list across 15 example areas, where busted legislation needs repealing or recrafting. But more importantly, it stresses the need to comprehensively audit the state’s complex circuitry that keeps tripping, and the full ecosystem of societal failure.

Deregulation is only one facet of the response, dealing with reversing a localised process. The greater venture lies on a par with the landscape confronting John Hoskyns and Keith Joseph, the quarriers of the Thatcher Revolution.

That was task enough, even if distance of time dulls the public memory. Insights into the languor of that era can be found in Peter Ustinov’s autobiography, Dear Me. Perhaps the grimmest example was when in School for Secrets, Ustinov “committed the tactical error” of offering the film unit a cold lunch of salmon and strawberries at a fashionable riverside hotel. He was rewarded for his generosity by a toast of the union rep applauding his brotherly sentiments, at the same time reminding him officially that he owed them for the hot lunch that he had deprived them of.

The reaction is the bleakest aspect: “His statement was greeted with prolonged applause as the hock glasses were raised to drink my health.” As Ustinov summarised it all, “The arteries of liberty had hardened already; the careless dictatorship of privilege had been replaced by the careful dictatorship of regulations. Disobedience was the only escape road for men of good will.”

Arguably and contentiously though, I would suggest the Thatcherite revolution targeting this frightening and congealed mass was simpler to conceive than the one we need to plan for now. It was focused on the economic, and orbited the binary failings of state intervention and Samsonian trades unions.

While the enablers and vectors ahead of us today are as pernicious, they are also perhaps more varied and interconnected. The former creates the space for bad processes to develop; the latter then fuel them.

At the roots, then, are an enabling mass of permissive laws, public sector sponginess, can’t-do attitudes, managerial safety zones, cemented-in vested interests, politically correct doctrines, skewed training, biased recruitment processes, misjudged promotions, tolerated intolerance, litigation-phobia, cultures of blame and shame, national self-hatred, and resentment of traditional Christian beliefs: these need shifting.

But the damage is sustained and grows through shared networks of failure – Human Resources dicasteries, pseudo-liberal hierarchies, politicised lawyers, activist charities, busybody quangos, anti-Copernican academia, elitist snobbery, Whitehall maharajas, enfranchised compliance industries, and a range of other attitudinal ankle-breakers, alongside the funds released in bulk to support them.

The better we precisely identify and understand the causes and motivations, the more we can define the targeted measures that allow us to run the Big Fix.

It is not enough either, then, merely to follow the route of “politics of announcements with a plan”. Nor does The Big Fix preclude other policies being announced to address familiar problems in isolation, such as binning Stamp Duty. But the far bigger prize of comprehensively fixing what’s broken is more of a steeplechase than a short egg and spoon race. Some think tankers, thankfully, are already on the running track.

It’s no use just binning a couple of random items of egregious red tape or pain-inducing taxes that surf the wrong end of the Laffer Curve. The national problem is mountainous. Our task today is a daunting as that faced by Hannibal’s men when they gazed at the Alps. Nor must we waste our Cannae when it comes.

So let me simply lay the road map out on the bonnet since we are at a critical point with the Conservative Policy Forum’s new Member Expert Groups. The Conservative Party needs to empower these to dig wide, and deep, and innovatively – indeed, provocatively – engaging with frustrated practitioners and stymied reformers. We need the Boers not the blockhouses.

We know the alternative: stagnation and decline. We also know that Labour will promise the world but will deliver trinkets.

There is no hope for salvation except in ourselves. Keir Starmer is as credible a reformer as John Wayne was playing Genghis Khan.