Things that are bad…

…because they undermine(d) the legislature, i.e. parliamentary sovereignty, i.e. democracy 😞

• Increasing power of finance since the OPEC oil crisis (1973–)

• Treaty of Accession (1973)

• Trade union barons telling the government what to do in the 1970s

• Increasing power of the executive since the 1980s (‘elective dictatorship’, ‘kitchen cabinet’, ‘Henry VIII clauses’)

• The rise of the QUANGOs from the 1980s

• Including Next Steps Agencies (executive agencies) (1988–)

• The Maastricht Treaty (1993)

• The Human Rights Act (1998)

• Scottish and Welsh devolution (1998, 1999)

• Bank of England independence (1998)

• Expansion of judicial review (c. 2000–)

• Creation of the (UK) Supreme Court (2009)

• The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act (2010)

• The Fixed-term Parliaments Act (2011–22)

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John Gray, New Statesman podcast, 17 October 2025:

[To save liberalism requires] a strong state, and a relatively unfettered state of the kind we had […] in the time of Margaret Thatcher we had unfettered parliamentary sovereignty. […] the virtue of that was that it allowed radical changes in the ruling settlement without violence […] whether we can get back to that, as I hope we still might, is another question[.]