Matt Smith: Starmer’s phony war against the quasi-autonomous state is doomed to fail

Matt Smith has stood as a Conservative and Unionist candidate for Parliament and the Senedd. He was a Policy Analyst at Vote Leave.

Andrew Marr, the New Statesman’s political editor, wrote up Labour’s election victory as “Britain’s shock of the new” which brought in its wake the “sharp, invigorating reek of change”. A less starry-eyed view was that it consolidated for the status quo; the bureaucratic and political will are now fully aligned.

Superficially the Prime Minister’s speech promising “fundamental reform of the British state” reads of a piece with the transatlantic vibe shift emanating from Washington. Ministers will no longer “hide behind a vast array of quangos, arm’s length bodies and regulators”, nor will they defer to “a cottage industry of checkers and blockers”.

Wes Streeting has called out the “hundreds of bodies cluttering the patient safety and regulatory landscape”. NHS England has been abolished and Whitehall departments will identify arm’s-length bodies for a wider cull.

A supposedly ‘mission-led’ government does need to declutter the institutional landscape lest Labour’s ‘five missions’ gets quagmired in the immobilism of quangoland. Angela Rayner had declining government capacity in mind when she warned about Labour getting ‘bogged down in the weeds’, whilst in a signal article entitled ‘The Government does not run this country‘, Labour MP Jonathan Hinder argues that “the policy options available have been artificially narrowed” by the rising quangocracy.

Yet there are good reasons to doubt the sincerity of Labour’s Muskian overtones, however agreeable they may seem, not least that the ‘bonfire of the quangos’ rhetoric is belied by the rate of quango formation since July. But the best evidence that the quangocracy is likely to remain one of the key power structures of Labour Britain is in Cardiff, where the Welsh Labour administration is an extreme manifestation of quango-driven government.

The permanent state is accelerating under Labour, despite the quangocidal rhetoric of ministers. Not for nothing did Downing Street dismissed the label “project chainsaw” as “ridiculous and wrong”: a new quango, task force, or advisory council has been created every week in the first six months of the Starmer regime. At this rate, Labour would add nearly 250 organisations to the government’s institutional landscape by the end of this Parliament.

It will hobble the quest for growth, too. A New Zealand-style ‘office for health responsibility’ will override cost of living and growth considerations in any trade-off, whilst four new energy-focused quangos, including GB Energy, will place a ratchet under any concerted attempt to reduce energy costs; whilst a more powerful Office for Budget Responsibility will further constrain counter-cyclical demand side stimulation as well as fiscal reform.

Despite Starmer’s earlier ‘Plan for Change’ speech which suggested too many civil servants are “happy in the tepid bath of managed decline” and wider briefings about ‘barriers within the state’ against reform, central government headcount increased by 105,000 in the last year. Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, distanced himself from briefings that 10,000 civil services posts were to be scrapped. The bureaucraticy preserves its power, whatsoever the politicians’ rhetoric.

Secondly, this is a government of regulators rather than rat-catchers with an instinctive cringe toward bureaucracy. Nothing demonstrates this more than the canvassing letter sent in December by the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, and the Business Secretary asking regulators for ideas on how to boost growth. In February, Rachel Reeves announced a supposed cull of regulators on the same day as creating one.

Matt Ridley described the Prime Minister appositely as “a knighted quangocrat” with a predilection for technocracy. Starmer himself invokes the idea of “government unburdened by doctrine”. This is doublespeak for shifting the Overton window leftwards. It is tactically easier to turn the ratchet of progressivism when quangocrats are garbed in a sheen of independence; the absurd ‘two-tier justice quango’ Sentencing Council is only the most recent (and egregious) example.

Policy Exchange’s Getting a Grip on the System notes that before 2010, appointments to arm’s length bodies were closely aligned with the outgoing Labour government and worryingly “continued to be more Labour aligned than conservative for most of the following ten years”. Inertia from zombie Blairites in public bodies against supply side reform, and subsequent Conservative frustration about being in government but not in power, attest to the scope of this ‘shadow government’.

To paraphrase Ed West, Conservatives win elections and lose everything else. Out of power for a decade and a half, Labour will not be slow to embed themselves anew through careful planting of the quasi-autonomous garden.

But if you think Britain has it bad, quango-driven government is of an order of scale worse in the Labour-run political microclimate of Cardiff Bay, where public disengagement, overlong incumbency, and ‘team devolution’ tribalism has enabled extensive institutional cultivation by successive Welsh Labour administrations.

In the 1990s, the pro-devolution campaign (which dubbed itself the ‘quango-busters’) channelled nationalist arguments about a democratic deficit arising from electoral asymmetry between the majority party in Wales’ parliamentary constituencies and the Conservative-controlled Welsh Office and its supposed quango state.

Yet The Quango State We’re In, a new paper from the Prydain Centre think tank, argues that instead of more participatory democracy and enhanced accountability promised by devolutionists, Welsh government now oversees a devocrat quangocracy of 255 unelected organisations (including 175 advisory bodies), creating a new democratic deficit and powerful inertia against political delivery.

A decade ago Sir Paul Williams’ Commission on Public Service Delivery and Governance noted that the complexity of Wales’ public sector meant “organisations within it spend far too much time having to manage relationships with each other rather than on improving services”; one member noted there are ‘twice as many public bodies in Wales as supermarkets’.

Meanwhile a widely-read letter to the Senedd Public Accounts Committee penned by the previous Auditor General noted that for a nation the size of Wales ‘the complex organisational structure of public services hampers co-ordinated service design and efficient delivery’. The current Auditor General notes that “More than five years on’ the landscape ‘has become even more complex”.

A plethora of 29 unelected Welsh government bodies concerned with health, social care, and the NHS form a backstop against public pressure, including 18 advisory bodies falling over themselves to tell the minister what to think. Despite this all seven Welsh NHS boards are in breach of their break even duty with two (Swansea Bay and Powys health boards) facing enhanced scrutiny while North Wales’ Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board remains in special measures.

Starmer once described the Cardiff government as “living proof of what Labour in power looks like”. He has since declined to repeat his previous claims that the Welsh Labour government was a blueprint for British Labour.

Paradoxically, Starmer will want to insulate the Labour brand from Cardiff Bay’s boulevard of broken promises, while Welsh Labour’s electoral fortunes in 2026 increasingly hinge on voters continuing to treat Senedd polls as second-order elections in which they vote along national lines – rather than on the track record of devolved rule.

Prime ministers have lost elections on the question of ‘who governs Britain’. If Labour’s belated bid for definition turns out to be mere political triangulation, and a quangocracy of progressive good chaps enmires Starmer’s ‘mission-led government’, a disillusioned public will again answer “not you”.