The UK Conservative Party’s illiberal statecraft since 2016: Sliding Back the Frontiers of Democracy?

The extent to which the Brexit-era UK Conservative Party has engaged a style of politics identified as populist or illiberal has been much debated in recent years. This article argues that it has used power to roll back the frontiers of liberal democracy through deploying policy interventions drawn from an ‘illiberal playbook’ encompassing the (legal in letter and spirit), ‘forging’, (legally dubious but admissible) ‘bending’, and (illegal and extra-legal) ‘breaking’ of the institutions which undergird the rule of law (Stanley and Pirro, 2022). Following a reflection on the deeper rooted authoritarian tendency in Conservative Party politics, the article uses a policy tools approach categorise the relevant interventions, such as (non-exhaustively) weakening Freedom of Information laws, placing onerous burdens on the rights to vote and protest, favouring political allies in procurement, and illegally shutting down parliament to avoid scrutiny. It concludes by sounding the alarm as to the possible shape of things to come due to the flexibility and therefore vulnerability of the UK’s constitutional system, and the Conservatives’ apparent authoritarian trajectory.