Keir Starmer is having his chainsaw moment – but all he will slash is democracy | Simon Jenkins

4 hours ago 2

Every new prime minister has an Elon Musk moment. A sudden attack of frustration leads to a burst of machismo, a chainsaw response. The system stinks. Slash the bureaucrats. Smash the machine.

Thatcher had her “subversives”, Tony Blair his “scars on my back”, David Cameron his “enemies of enterprise”. Now Sir Keir Starmer claims to be haunted by the blockers, checkers, regulators, bloaters. All are ganging up against the cry of his new friend, Donald Trump, to grow, baby, grow. So get going, chainsaw, do your job.

Cuts on a scale mooted this week by Starmer, of NHS England and 25% in the administrative costs of regulation for businesses, have been achieved only once in modern times. That was under Cameron’s 2010 government, when almost 300 quangos were “bonfired”. But the chief cause was George Osborne’s savage austerity, cutting resources to local government by as much as a third. If that is Starmer’s intention, perhaps he should say so. As it is, the nearest he has got to Musk was to imitate his slashing of the US’s aid budget last month, which he did by drastically cutting the UK’s own. It was a classic example of slash fast, count the bodies later.

Whether the NHS cuts will prove as drastic as Starmer suggests remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Starmer has created a number of new quangos in the past year. We have Ed Miliband’s gargantuan GB Energy, the Independent Football Regulator and the surely satirical Regulatory Innovation Office. Also promised are more teachers, more carers, more border staff, not to mention more defence workers and soldiers. No chainsaw there, we assume.

But nothing Starmer is proposing can come near the bureaucratic explosion planned by his deputy, Angela Rayner. Anyone who has attended planning seminars for the past decade is aware that British planning needs reform – sensitive reform. Yet in order to stifle opposition to her favouring developers eager for houses in the countryside – no one objects to them in towns – she is proposing a revolution. This is nothing short of a whole new layer of regional government, similar to the one tried and abandoned by her predecessor John Prescott.

This is to take the form of what could be 30 “combined authorities” under elected “regional mayors”. These mayors will sit in headquarters over and above groups of existing local councils, merging with their neighbours into large ones. The intention is blatantly to eliminate mostly rural local councils that are most likely to oppose housing estates and developments such as pylons and solar arrays in the countryside. More than 164 district or borough councils seem likely to be abolished. I know of no country in Europe where such a crushing of individual village and town democracy could take place.

Rayner is not shy about this. She declares it “a completely new way of governing” and nothing short of a constitutional upheaval. Yet there has been no inquiry or commission, no public debate. The only document was published last December, one of the most unreadable white papers I have seen. It showed no feel for the country it was dismembering, let alone for its countryside or nature. It might have been written one night in an Islington attic.

Angela Rayner arrives at Downing Street for a cabinet meeting.

Rayner’s mayors will be answerable not to any directly elected assembly, but to a council composed of leaders of their subordinate authorities. This council, with majority voting and a mayoral casting vote, will head a new civil service, its existential purpose being to implement central government policy. Rayner’s mayors will be “in the lead” on all matters of housing and planning. They will be free to alter local council boundaries. They will even be free to act as “default delivery institutions” should the councils fail to meet targets. Leaders of local councils of 500,000 people will merely have a vote in matters of local policy and administration. The document reeks of contempt for local democracy. It reeks of power to the centre.

I wonder if Starmer knows the bureaucratic scope of this power. It will supposedly include a council of the nations and regions, a mayoral council, a national wealth fund and a mayoral data council. They will execute an integrated settlement, a spatial development strategy, a Get Britain Working plan and a universal system of strategic planning, to mention a few. Starmer may be abolishing NHS England, but clearly no NHS official need be without a job.

As for the reorganisation of the lower tier of local authorities, there is no evidence to suggest that big councils are more efficient or less bureaucratic than smaller ones. They are merely easier to control from above. The experience of recent changes in local government is also that reform costs millions and rarely delivers savings. Such costly upheavals must be the last thing local councils need just now, with about half of councils in England reportedly near to bankruptcy.

The superficial appeal of the Musk moment is that by breaking things it leaves room for renewal. That may be. But a civilised democracy subjects it to checks and balances. Dismantling the geography of English local government removes that check and replaces it with Whitehall. All Starmer’s chainsaw will slash is democracy.