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In his own words
A short, sourced selection of his key lines, with the context around them. The full lectures and interviews are on the sources page.
Starkey describes the New Labour reforms as a constitutional revolution carried out largely in the open but barely noticed. He has called the author of that change, Tony Blair, in one interview, “a calculated vandal”, and argues the reforms eroded parliamentary democracy itself.
At the centre of his case is a simple idea. He describes the sovereignty of Parliament as “the living expression of the sovereignty of the British people”, and argues that people obey the law because they took part, through their representatives, in making it.
His conclusion is deliberately stark. He argues that once power moves to judges and unelected bodies, Britain stops being, in the full sense, a democracy. The claim is examined on is Britain a democracy.
His answer is drawn from history, the model of 1660: a great repeal of the changes, then a restoration of the older tradition, with elected politics on top. The sequenced version is on the plan.
A note on these quotes
These are short extracts, given with their context and drawn from his lectures and interviews. The full sources, where you can hear him make the argument at length, are on the sources page, and a fuller account of the man is on David Starkey.
That Britain's decline is constitutional: power moved from elected politics to law and unelected bodies, and only reversing that will fix the country.
In an interview he described Blair as a calculated vandal, arguing that his constitutional reforms deliberately dismantled an inherited settlement.
On his lectures and interviews, collected on the sources page, including his YouTube channel David Starkey Talks.
