So often in modern politics, last year’s manic conspiracy theorist is today’s vindicated Cassandra. Among those entitled to a victory lap are the American observers who, well before the Trump years, tried to alert their fellow citizens to the machinations of ‘the Deep State.’ This ominous-sounding concept is a catch-all term for the faceless network of unelected officials and permanent bureaucrats who, de facto if not de jure, act as an effective fourth branch of the U.S. government, working to obstruct the agenda of the elected President as and when they see fit to save democracy from itself.
While Britain’s constitution is more the result of organic evolution than rational design, we have not dodged America’s problem. On this side of the Atlantic, we can take pride in our very own version of the Deep State, often decried as ‘the Blob’ and stuffed with all manner of unaccountable actors, from civil servants and academics to lobbyists and charity directors. Whether we can cut this parasitic growth from the ailing body of our otherwise venerable constitution is another matter.
‘Who rules?’ might seem like a quaint question to ask in an advanced democracy like Britain, but the present context makes it unavoidable. To take the most salient issue of our time, a state that continues to import new immigrant voters not only without the consent of British voters, but in clear defiance of their wishes as expressed at the ballot box, has ceased to be democratic. King John and Charles I were innocent cherubs compared to Tony Blair and Boris Johnson. If the choice is between onerous taxes and mass immigration rates destined on current trends to turn the people of Britain into a minority in their own homeland, I pick the former. But even assuming the existence of a Conservative government intent on governing in a conservative way, the Blob with its politically ‘progressive’ outlook and mass distributed influence would be sure to frustrate it.
There is no grand conspiracy, still less a single guiding intelligence. Nevertheless, this nexus of intermediary institutions and public bodies contains more than enough highly motivated, like-minded mandarins to command significant influence over the government of the country. Prime ministers may come and go, but this class of permanent functionaries, mercifully protected from the five-yearly chopping blocks we call general elections, remains in place. As Alexis de Tocqueville understood, the lifeblood of any democracy is a culture of civic agency and active participation. Both get squashed under the might of the Blob. Thus does a public-spirited democracy corrupt into the form of government against which Tocqueville warned: the ‘soft despotism’ of a ‘tutelary’ elite.
The Conservative Party can be relied upon to pose as a heroic combatant against this unruly Leviathan, especially during election season. But since 2010 they have at best allowed and at worst enabled this giant to go about its monstrous business.
Far from being mere passive observers, the Conservatives stand condemned for their active facilitation of the Blob’s crowning agenda: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This ideology begins from the sinister assumption that pathologies like ‘systemic racism’ are so woven into the fabric of British society that formal equality before the law is just a mask for continued bigotry and oppression. Instead, we must subject ourselves to an authoritarian regime of identitarian communism, enforced across every level of society as part of a total curative transformation. Is it too much to expect the party of Disraeli and Churchill to stand against such utopian tyranny? Of course, most of the people acting within the Blob regard their DEI mission as the most pristine of self-evident goods, the moral equivalent of being opposed to kicking kittens in the face. But the Conservative Party is not obliged to adopt this eccentric perspective, let alone aid its capture of the public sector as indeed they have done, most damningly in 2017 when they imposed a duty on public bodies to produce measurable ‘equity objectives.’ Thanks in no small part to this, the number of DEI job roles sky-rocketed by 71% between 2015 and 2020, making Britain home to a higher per capita number of these talentless, bean-counting bureaucrats—many of them funded by taxpayers—than any other country in the world.
Quite apart from being wrong, the financial costs are considerable. According to a recent Conservative Way Forward report, public sector bodies have spent £212 million of tax money enlisting the services of DEI tsars across all kinds of institutions, from the NHS to Warwickshire County Council.
The same report found that £880 million of public money has been put into the coffers of charities which, hilariously enough, then spend it campaigning against the government’s own policies on immigration, transgenderism, and climate change. This part of the Blob has been emboldened by David Cameron’s policy of inviting every species of fanatic and ideologue to register as a charitable do-gooder in the mould of John Wesley or Mother Theresa, entitling them to legal tax breaks and generous grants. Indeed, Section 3(1)(h) of the Charities Act (2011) redefined “charitable purposes” to include “the advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation or the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity.”
Daniel Hannan is much too kind in his assessment of the Conservatives’ record. “If you’re asking why this is happening after 13 years of Tory government,” he writes in the Daily Telegraph, “you haven’t grasped how Whitehall works.” It might have occurred to him to ask why Whitehall works like this. Physical necessity? History’s inexorable laws? The will of God? Even if, as he goes on to plead in defence of his friends, “Conservative ministers are not ordering that public money be spent on woke lobbying,” nor are they exercising the powers with which voters have entrusted them to prevent such insanity.
There are worse things that a genuinely patriotic government could do to sap the power of the Blob than take away their best-loved legal weapons. Chief among these is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), frequently used by left-wing lawyers and open borders activists to prevent deportations of illegal immigrants—people whose very first act in relation to this country is to break our laws and disrespect our sovereignty. In June 2022, the first and last deportation flight of illegal immigrants to Rwanda was grounded by an “interim measure” hailing from the Strasbourg court, which ruled that the Convention rights of the deportees could not be guaranteed away from European soil. Why this implied dig against an African country did not qualify as a grotesque instance of ‘racist Eurocentrism’ for the kind of people who normally care for such asinine language is something of a head-scratcher. In any case, there was jubilation among all the usual suspects, while the Conservative government looked on in helpless puzzlement.
The Tories are evidently cautious about leaving the Convention altogether, arguing that there is no contradiction between passing a new British Bill of Rights to “curb bogus human rights claims” and keeping our “fundamental commitment” to the ECHR. The problem is that while “interim measures” of the kind issued in the Rwanda case could possibly be sidestepped by a change in the law, the Convention makes it clear that its “final judgement” is absolute. According to Article 46, signatories must “abide by the final judgement of the court in any case to which they are parties.” Plans for an updated Bill of Rights offer no way around the fact that ultimate rulings by the ECHR have unambiguous binding force in UK law.
Depriving the Blob of its power and influence is a necessary precondition for national renewal. But is it enough? Forget the democratic ethos of our age: the unpopular truth is that politics is a struggle between elites. As George Bernard Shaw once put it, “Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.” Given this rough breakdown, politics is bound to attract the most ambitious, highly motivated individuals within the first two categories (and more often, it must be said, the slightly higher number of people who think they think than the few who really do). No national elite—including our lamentable Blob—can exist without such people, the genuine visionaries and the deluded chancers alike. In one sense, this is encouraging. It means that we do not need to convert every person in the land, one by one, to the cause of national renewal. Given the centrality of elites, it is enough to cultivate—and where possible, convert—a small set of determined people who, given their predilections and regardless of their own particular political outlook, are bound to be influential at any period of history. Our responsibility is to make sure that they are influential in the right way.
Assuming a successfully bulldozed Blob, how do we foster the patriotic elite that will be required to replace it? First, we should not dissuade conservative-minded youngsters from entering our most pivotal institutions. Rather than bemoaning the existence of the modern administrative state and the vast complex of intermediary bodies that feeds into it, we should marshal them to our purposes.
However, this will take more than a few courageous spirits willing to swim against a hostile tide. Eric Kaufmann has suggested that we would benefit from the equivalent of the U.S. Federalist Society, an organisation designed to ‘nurture conservative talent’ and encourage young right-wingers into the government bureaucracy, into schools, into universities and so forth. Better still, we should look east to the example set by Hungary. The governing Fidesz party has been willing to employ the commanding heights of political power. It has donated €1.7 billion to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), an educational institute based in Budapest but now expanding across the rest of the country and beyond, most recently setting up an office in Brussels. The MCC offers fellowships, stipends, and networking events as part of a far-sighted strategy to cultivate a future elite of Hungarian patriots. It is not an indoctrination factory; there are teachers and students from both Left and Right, as I have seen for myself on various visits. What they share is a commitment to the kind of old school values, like freedom of speech and love of country, that we used to cherish ourselves.
In Britain, we should be sponsoring homegrown institutions which, following the MCC model, work to give the next generation a spiritual stake in the future of their own society. It is no use complaining about ‘wokery’ among the kids if money that should be spent transmitting better values to young people with the talent to add to their nation’s flourishing is instead earmarked to feather the nests of DEI bureaucrats and fund the shenanigans of activist groups operating under the guise of their Tory enabled charitable status.
The UK also faces the problem that our otherwise world-beating educational heritage creates conditions in which university start-ups are unlikely to thrive, still less outperform the established institutions—or at least not for centuries. They are forced to compete instantly with Oxford and Cambridge, along with the other illustrious places of higher learning founded in the 19th century and thereafter. There is little point in challenging the hegemony of these established titans. Yet this is where the MCC enjoys a special edge, for it is not a university but an institute which, in its dealings with degree-level students, provides “supplemental” academic teaching and intellectual stimulation rather than trying to outdo the universities at their own game. An ideal state of affairs would be one in which the MCC, or something like it, forged links with the few conservative and heterodox professors to have survived the cultural onslaught at our universities, building an in-house presence on British campuses rather as the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution has done at Stanford in the United States.
For democracy to work, it is more important that the people should feel able to identify with the values of their elite class than that they should possess a de jure freedom to participate in the affairs of government. Without this spirit of identification, the technical right to vote every five years amounts to very little. The outsized influence of our decidedly elite but unelected Blob, committed to remoulding the people rather than serving them, sees to that.
Populists, then, must reconcile themselves to pursuing a kind of elite standing, despite the fact that this will mean giving up the insurgent underdog status, with all its exhilarating qualities, that the word ‘populism’ evokes. This was true of Julius Caesar. He was transgressive when crossing the Rubicon, but by the time he had triumphed over Pompey in the Battle of Pharsalus (48 BC), Caesar was in a powerful enough position to show clemency towards his former opponents in the Senate and have them install him as the effective dictator of Rome. This is not to say that we should be clamouring for a British Caesar, but his breathtaking success—until his assassination, at least—goes to show that populists in the Caesarean mould cannot be indulgently and forever outside the mainstream if they want to get anything done.
In almost every respect, the counterrevolution of 2016 has been wasted. What Britain needs is a second populist moment. This time, it would be aimed not at the remote, grey-suited bureaucrats who once ruled us from Brussels, but the homegrown, swamplike creatures who dictate even more of our national life from Westminster. However, mere populism sooner or later burns itself out, for it is more of a negative force than a creative one. Populists may steal the headlines in an election year, but they lack the vision to define a century. Bulldozing the Blob will not in itself achieve anything of enduring value. We must replace it with an alternative in which the average citizen sees his own values and priorities reflected back to him. This is a long-term project. The result need not be another Bloblike organism that hides from the electorate and pulls levers from behind the scenes. If successful, our reward will be a patriotic guardian class only too happy to show its face among the people. Populism is either the prelude to a new and better elite or it is a lone, forgettable crescendo in the grand score of history.
This essay is an abridged version of a chapter written by Harrison Pitt in the latest New Culture Forum publication, State of Emergency: A Voice for the Silenced Majority. You can read Harrison Pitt’s full essay, along with six other chapters aimed at addressing the crisis of British politics, by purchasing a copy here.
