Remaking the British state

THE YEAR was 1976 and revolution was in the air. Punk was destroying orthodoxies in the music business. Concorde was breaking the sound barrier. The economy was going down the tubes. And Lord Hailsham, a former Conservative Lord Chancellor and old boy of Eton, Oxford and the Rifle Brigade, urged the overthrow of what he called Britain’s “elective dictatorship”—the overweening executive, whose power, in Britain’s parliamentary model, was untrammelled by the checks and balances of the courts and legislature that restrict it in most democracies.Since then, the executive—made up of ministers and the people who do things on their behalf—has been constrained in many ways. The European Union’s powers have grown, and in the 1990s Tony Blair weakened the executive by strengthening other parts of government, creating a Supreme Court, starting a reform of the House of Lords, devolving power from Westminster and granting independence to the Bank of England.