He has spent most of his career in business; for many years he ran the Strategy practice at PA Consulting Group. During this time, he began to explore whether the tools and techniques of business strategy could be applied to understanding the health and stability of countries. This research led him to the uncomfortable conclusion that many developed countries – including the US and the UK – are unwittingly pursuing economic policies which will result in the unwinding of 20th century civilisation before we reach the year 2050. Hearteningly, he also concluded that this fate is entirely avoidable.
Mark has a degree in Mathematics from Cambridge University.
Defensive Constitutional Reform
This is an approximate transcript of a speech given by Mark E Thomas at the Resilient Democracy event in London in September 2025.
Introduction
There has been a huge body of work on progressive constitutional reform over many years. Much of it remains to be enacted, and our political system is the worse for that. Most progressive reform is based on the “good chaps theory” of politics according to which, although politicians vary in their effectiveness and competence, they’re all working for the good of the country. What is happening in the United States today shows the power of abad actor, even when there is a constitution specifically designed to stop tyranny.
This poses a question: can we stop something similar from happening here?
We set up a project together with Open Britain, Unlock Democracy and academics from King’s College London and other institutions to explore that question. Our conclusion is that we can dramatically reduce the risks – but not eliminate them – if we move fast.
We believe that the warning signs have been clear for some time, and right now the warning signal should be flashing bright red. The consequences of doing nothing are unthinkable. Fortunately, therearethings that we can do, and we should do them as a matter of urgency.
Let me take each of those points in turn.
The warning signs
Lord Hailsham warned us of the risks of ‘elective dictatorship’ 50 years ago and, over the last 10 years, we have seen a lot of evidence that he was right:
After Brexit, the Intelligence and Security Committee highlighted a serious risk that Russia had meddled in the referendum and called for a full Inquiry; and Carole Cadwalladr exposed the roles of organisations like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in manipulating voters’ perceptions;
In Trump’s first term, he stacked the Supreme Court with loyalists, and of course refused to accept the result of Biden’s election and attempted an insurrection;
In the UK, Johnson and Cummings were not systematic in many things, but when it came to unwinding our checks and balances, they were very effective:
They removed the right to peaceful protest;
They reduced the powers of judicial review;
They purged their party and the civil service; and
they even attempted to prorogue parliament to avoid parliamentary scrutiny;
But the biggest warning sign is Trump’s current presidency, and his implementation of Project 2025 in which he has moved extremely quickly to remove the remaining checks and balances, he has built ICE into the largest law enforcement body in the country – bigger than the military of all but 15 countries – and his Budget has created the largest upwards transfer of wealth in U.S. history. Trump is a problem for many people around the world, but most of those who will suffer are U.S. citizens.
And right now, we see Musk and Trump pushing far right narratives, not just domestically but around the world and – and in particular in the UK. We have seen the largest far right rallies in the UK since the 1930s.
Farage has made clear his admiration for Trump’s programme and his desire to do something similar in the UK. There has been a new think tank set up to develop a Project 2025 equivalent for Reform – funded by US donors.
And, according to Electoral Calculus, if a general election were to be held tomorrow, Reform would win with a projected majority of 86 – that is large enough to push through the sorts of unpopular changes which such a plan would contain: scrapping the NHS and replacing it with a private insurance-based scheme; undertaking deportations on a scale the UK has never seen before; slashing public services and public spending to fund tax cuts for the wealthy; unwinding checks and balances and attacking ‘activist’ judges, lawyers, journalists and academics.
The consequences of doing nothing
Thingsmightchange without intervention. The UK economy might start to boom; people’s wages might rise ahead of inflation, easing the cost-of-living crisis; the NHS might start to operate as it did not so long ago, when it was ranked the best healthcare system among developed countries; the media obsession with immigration might pass, and Britain might again start to feel like a country at ease with itself.
We have two other major projects: one on the economics of national renewal and the other on the NHS. The first has concluded that with the fiscal rules we have today, economic renewal is close to impossible. Those rules also mean that planned funding of the NHS, while better than under the Conservatives, is far short of what the last Labour government provided and what the NHS needs. A turnaround in NHS performance is also unlikely.
Far more likely, doing nothing would result in Electoral Calculus finding that their analysis was not far from the truth.
If that happens, based on his own statements, we should expect many of Farage’s voters to be angry and disappointed – as with Brexit, the promised upsides would not materialise, except for the very wealthy, but the downsides would be catastrophic. The NHS policy alone would drive many people into bankruptcy as they tried to cover their own medical bills, while others would simply have to do without treatment. And we should not expect to have our human rights protected.
Economically, socially and democratically, Britain would be transformed for the worst.
We are currently playing Russian roulette with British democracy, but with two loaded chambers.
What can we do?
The most obvious thing is for the government simply to deliver the first half of the promised ‘decade of national renewal.’ Unfortunately, that would require a U-turn in some major policy areas; and even if it happened and succeeded, much of our mainstream and social media would exaggerate or even invent the problems while ignoring or denying those areas in which progress was being made. While delivery is vital for the good of the country, it is far from adequate to deal with the threats to our democracy.
The second thing is to prevent electoral distortions. We should take dark money out of politics and tackle disinformation. While both of these are obvious and in principle uncontroversial, in practice they’re both difficult to do to sufficiently well to materially reduce the risk of a populist far right party being elected with the support of foreign donors, hostile States like Russia, and compliant media.
The third thing is to entrench protections so that, if a populist far right party were able to come to power, there would nevertheless be checks and balances in place. This is also difficult in our system where a parliamentary majority permits virtually anything.
One option is to define a short list of legislation which is to be regarded as constitutional and require a supermajority in parliament to change that legislation. If all mainstream parties had subscribed to this, while a populist far right party with a sizeable majority could simply ignore the requirement, it would at least send a clear signal to the population at large that something untoward was happening.
A second option is what we call ‘Constitutional Prometheanism’ to protect the separation of powers. A populist far right party would be likely to erode the power of the courts, seek to take control of media and academia and politicise the police and the armed forces. It would be difficult for any one group to resist – as we are currently seeing in the States, but if these groups united to defend their independence, they would be at the least able to slow down the erosion of democracy.
Even with all these measures in place, our assessment is that the risk to the UK remains unacceptably high.
There is one other measure which would help enormously: the introduction of proportional representation. The Electoral Calculus projection suggested that Reform might win around 30% of the votes to take their 86-seat majority; under PR, they would have only 30% of the seats and would require coalition partners to enable them to implement anything like project 2025.
Conclusion
Without urgent action, Britain may well find itself going the way of the US and become a formerly-developed country with an increasingly impoverished population living in a flawed democracy.
Our next steps are to complete a report which details these arguments, highlight the risks and the remedies to ministers, hold a parliamentary launch and raise public awareness as far as possible.
