I haven’t heard of it, but given Breathanarians and so on, it seems pretty certain to have existed at some point.
For now. I have no doubt Cummings wants rid of it, given his political background (and that of his sidekick Mizra), but BoJo isn’t likely to be happy with any direct approach to that, nor most older Tories. May was actually the least pro-democracy, most pro-authoritarian person we’ve had for a while in as PM (with an interestingly bizarre dislike of oppressive, racist policing, but I sometimes feel that was more about griefing the Met than a genuine conviction).
The thing we have to watch out for with the UK though is that stuff could change very fast post-Brexit.
Right now, the Tories aren’t pulling the “fascist” levers of power, because there are a ton of checks and balances, and re-writing laws to give themselves more power, especially the PM, would be hard, and require the party to vote for it, and the party has shown little appetite for the more fascist side of things. Once Brexit happens, though, there will essentially be a few years when the ruling party, which will be the Tories with a massive majority, can essentially re-write laws to their liking, and a lot of it can be done without parliamentary scrutiny, due to various unfortunate loopholes. Of course the Tories have sworn blind that they won’t do this. But they’ve done countless things they’ve sworn blind they wouldn’t do. I know Cummings has muttered stuff which amounts to wanting to replace parliamentary sovereignty with government sovereignty, which is a very different thing, and much narrower.
The other major threat in the UK is to the judiciary. There’s a sizeable part of the Tory party, and a smaller one of the Labour party (very centrist nuLabour types) who are extremely angry about the fact that the judicial branch is genuinely independent of the executive (parliament, in the UK’s case), and whilst parliament is clearly and unquestionably sovereign, the judiciary frequently hold them to account, by pointing out when they break their own rules/laws, or when rules/laws are simply not fit for purpose, or just don’t work. The latter is a bigger problem in the UK than the US because we have far fewer lawyers in parliament than the US does in congress and the senate. As such, laws in the UK are often written by people who have zero understanding of how to write a law, and successive Tory governments (unlike nuLabour ones) have refused to listen to their own lawyers (who they spend a lot of money on!), instead putting into law just giant piles of bollocks.
Eventually the giant pile of bollocks get tested legally, and is found to be a giant pile of bollocks by the courts, and then the courts have to either interpret it, or basically kick it back to parliament to fix, or just order that it be ignored.
This is not what the current Tories (nor May’s lot) want to happen. Instead, and Raab and others have outright said this, they want a situation where if they pass a giant pile of bollocks, then the courts can’t do anything, and instead, the government (not parliament, note), can, with no oversight, democratic element, or anything of the sort, simply decide what it means after the fact. This might not sound huge, but it’s the sort of thing where one badly-drafted passage can ruin hundreds of thousands of lives (especially on immigration, employment, or welfare), and the fact that they can get parliament to vote on something, saying it means one thing (or saying nothing), and then decide actually, it means something else, is horrifying and anti-democratic (especially as they’re not bound by the same rules, codes, and systems of appeal as the judiciary is).
Specifically they want to basically entirely get rid of, or limit to the hyper-rich, judicial review. This would be devastating to freedom and justice in the UK, and especially to government accountability. And they’re quite likely to try this during Brexit - again Raab has outright said they want to try to do it during Brexit (guy has a big mouth), and BoJo did, though then backpedaled and said he didn’t mean it.
Plus there’s human rights. The Tories used this as false issue for years to try and win votes, May lied about it endlessly, constantly outright lying and saying the ECHR was preventing her from doing this and that, when in virtually every case, it was actually UK rules (not even human rights ones in many cases) which prevented her doing what she wanted. The papers were almost totally ineffectual on calling her out on this, despite straightforward lies, because “EU judges protect terrorists!” and so on is a great headline. All the current Tory leadership have said that they want to change our human rights laws, and the only way they could go is down. Again Brexit is the ideal time for this.
And as @Vandelay points out, they’re also after the Civil Service, in part because Cummings likes wanking at windmills, and the Civil Service is a big windmill for him, but also because doing things in an orderly, honest way, with checks, balances, clear paper trails and so on could potentially present a problem for his plans. So he basically wants to do what Trump has, and fire anyone and everyone competent, and strip every department down to nothing. They’ve started on this by using straightforward bullying and abuse, relying on the fact that the primary malefactor is a non-white woman (though an incredibly obvious crook who should be jail for treason, which is not something I say lightly), to try and make out that it’s just a “clash of personalities” (and paying out as quietly as possible in lawsuits, because they’re fine with wasting public money to also damage the Civil Service).
So basically they’re not going hell for leather for it yet, because they’re saving that up for Brexit. COVID has been a pretty big setback for them, because whilst they can use it to bury stuff, it’s changed public opinions, particularly re: the role of the government, and made Cummings and BoJo look like dumb twats. They are apparently planning to try and blame everything on the scientists in the inquiry (BoJo basically outright said this, amazingly, a week or two ago, claiming they always did what scientists said - a demonstrable lie - and it’s that advice which was wrong, not government actions), but that’s a fucking stupid plan that’s already failed once (when they tried to throw the NHS under the bus). All that has to happen is someone puts a picture of Cummings’ hideous visage on TV and any scientists are instantly forgotten, and his shitbirdery remembered. The vast majority of the British public, including a narrow majority of Tories, things he’s a fucking scumbag, and it’s well known how involved he was in all this.
TLDR - When Brexit comes, expect Cummings and pals to make an all-out assault on parliamentary sovereignty (in favour of government sovereignty), judicial review, human rights, and the civil service.
