The case against

Objection I

Rights law protects real people, not abstractions

The thesis treats human rights law as a brake on government. Its defenders, the barrister Conor Gearty among them, answer that this is the point. The same law that frustrates a deportation also stops the state detaining people without trial, taking children from parents without cause, or ignoring the vulnerable. A right that can be overridden the moment it is inconvenient is not a right. "Counter-majoritarian" is not a flaw in the design, it is the design, because majorities are exactly what individuals sometimes need protection from. Strip out the brake and you do not get a nimble state, you get an unchecked one.

Objection II

Courts checking ministers is the rule of law, not a coup

Starkey reads judicial review and the 2019 prorogation ruling as judges seizing power. The opposite reading is at least as strong. When the Supreme Court found the prorogation of Parliament unlawful, it did not put itself above Parliament, it protected Parliament from the executive. Holding a minister to the limits of the law is the oldest function of the English courts, older than the reforms the thesis blames. What looks like judicial overreach from Whitehall looks, from the bench, like the constitution doing its job.

Objection III

The decline has causes the thesis barely mentions

Blame the constitution and you can quietly skip the 2008 financial crash, a decade of austerity, the shock of Brexit, an ageing population and the lowest business investment in the G7. These are enormous, measurable forces, and most economists rank them well above anything constitutional. The reforms may have made a stagnant country harder to govern without being the reason it stagnated. Correlation is not cause, and a single elegant explanation for a whole nation's troubles should always invite suspicion.

This objection is taken on directly on the Cause and Effect page →

Objection IV

The golden age is doing a lot of unexamined work

The restoration story needs a "before" worth returning to: a high-trust, self-governing, cohesive Britain that the reforms destroyed. Historians would push back. The mid-century settlement excluded a great deal, the "crowned republic" coexisted with an empire built on force, and social trust was never evenly shared. If the baseline is romanticised, the sense of a fall from grace is inflated with it, and a diagnosis built on nostalgia will misread the disease.

Objection V

Where the argument meets the man

An argument should stand on its own, but its messenger shapes how it is heard, and Starkey's record is part of the record. In 2020 he made remarks about slavery that drew very wide condemnation and cost him several positions. In 2023 a speech at a National Conservatism conference, framing the reforms as a threat to what he called the country's historic majority, was read by many as tipping the cultural half of the thesis from constitutional into ethnic terms. Defenders say he is deliberately provocative and was misrepresented. Critics say the pattern is the point. Either way, a reader is entitled to ask where a diagnosis of "the nation against an alien elite" can lead, and to weigh the constitutional argument on its merits while keeping that question open.