It’s time for Boris Johnson to take on the cult of liberal technocrats

The Prime Minister is right to try to rid Britain of rigid and metrocentric consensus policy-making

Conspiracy theories are invariably nonsense. Russia didn’t cause Brexit. The BBC didn’t campaign for the Tories. Liberal-lefty crackpots – from the Observer’s Carol Cadwalladr to academia’s AC Grayling – will go mad before they prove the impossible.

Yet there is a deep cultural and intellectual bias across the top of British society. It is no conspiracy, but in the civil service, the media, business, courts, quangos and universities, there is a remarkable uniformity of opinion that has shaped our country and the decisions of our governments for the past few decades.

Market forces matter more than institutions. “Modernisation” – whatever that really means – matters more than tradition. Individualism matters more than community. Group rights matter more than broader, national identities. Legal rights trump civic obligations, personal freedom beats commitment, and universalism erodes citizenship. The only policy goal – measured strictly in net terms – should be to increase overall GDP, regardless of the effect on particular places or people, the social costs or even the long-term basis for future economic growth.

If this sounds partisan, consider the curse of government-by-impactassessment. These crude utilitarian calculations, often based on wild assumptions and spurious numbers, lead officials and ministers to approve policies if they generate net economic growth and block policies that appear to do the opposite. This is how we end up with governments pushing for evermore immigration, despite public opposition and the social and economic pressures it can cause. It is how we end up with trade deals that might improve the national figures very slightly, but wreak havoc in specific places, such as Grimsby or Redcar, that once relied on one particular industry.

For the liberal technocrats who promote these policies, those who lose out can be compensated cheaply and easily. This is why proponents of “managed” (note, not “controlled”) migration simply argue that places experiencing rapid change should receive greater public spending. It is why, in the Eighties, many who lost their jobs were parked on disability benefits. Real people, many miles from decision-makers’ desks, were treated merely as numbers on a technocrat’s spreadsheet.

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union – decided by millions of those invisible spreadsheet entries – drove a wrecking ball through the assumptions of the liberal technocrats. “Nobody voted to make themselves poorer,” the technocrats complained, as they tried to overturn or water down Brexit until it looked remarkably like EU membership. Yet, despite their protests, Brexit will go ahead. What is more, against the advice of Treasury technocrats, ministers have promised to establish 10 free ports, economic zones that will remain within British sovereign territory, but outside our customs rules, and with exemptions from certain taxes, rules and regulations, to win investment from around the world.

The Government is also promising to tear up the Green Book, the Treasury bible that sets the rules for publicspending decisions. The purpose of the Green Book is to ensure there is an evidence base and economic analysis behind fiscal policy. But in practice it kills infrastructure investment in the regions, where the money is most needed, and means more spending in the South East, entrenching Britain’s economic divide and hastening the North-to-south brain drain.

For anybody who cares about rebalancing the economy, making the regions more prosperous, and sharing opportunity across the country, this is encouraging news. But there are other ways in which the liberal technocrats retain many powers that should rightly reside with those whom we elect.

First there are the courts. Increasingly, quasi-constitutional laws such as the European Convention on Human Rights are used to shape policies and laws in ways that Parliament would never have permitted. And in certain members of the judiciary, the liberal technocrats have found willing allies. Judges now assess whether government policies are likely to deliver policy goals – on the environment, for example – and order ministers to change their programmes accordingly. We need to restrict the use of judicial review and leave the European Convention altogether.

Then there is the civil service. The outrage expressed in response to Brexit by former mandarins like Gus O’donnell and Peter Ricketts – not to mention the presumptuous resignation letters written to be leaked by more junior officials – reveals how they believe their world-view is above challenge. The civil service must be reformed, so there is greater accountability and more specialisation. The Treasury needs to be made less mighty, with its spending responsibilities transferred to a new Prime Minister’s Department. And the state itself needs to decentralise, with the UK moving to a fully federal system and more powers transferred to mayors and councils.

Then there are the committees, quangos and independent institutions which, regardless of elections, are dominated by Lefties and liberal technocrats. The biased Electoral Commission should be wound up, the ineffective Charity Commission should be abolished, and the incompetent Crown Prosecution Service should be reformed.

More importantly, the Committee on Climate Change is barely scrutinised, yet its decisions will undermine our competitiveness and increase the cost of living for decades. During the financial crash, and with hardly any discussion, the Bank of England created half a trillion pounds of new money through quantitative easing. This was vital emergency medicine, but it caused an asset bubble the consequences of which we are yet to confront. Both the Committee and the Bank should be more accountable to ministers and MPS.

Without having had to dirty their hands fighting elections, the liberal technocrats have risen a long way. Brexit was the first time in decades they tasted defeat. Then came the election, and now comes Boris. But their writ continues to run large. If ministers want to restore democratic government to Britain, they face a long fight ahead.