A poll showing Reform ahead of Labour among trade unionists is being treated as a bombshell. It should have been obvious to anyone paying attention. Anyone, that is, except the union leadership.
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Danny Kruger understood this before most. His public conversations with the leadership of the PCS and the National Education Union, in which he made perfectly plain to them that a Reform government would not be conducting its relationships with the civil service unions on the terms to which they had become accustomed. A Reform Government will not be bullied, and will apply the law. As we can now see he was directing his comments to people whose members, in significant numbers, might well vote for him. The officers sit there with their lanyards and their institutional memories and their absolute confidence that the working class would do as it was directed. The members, meanwhile, were doing something else entirely.
This is the structural problem that no amount of emergency press releases will solve. The union movement in Britain has, over the course of a generation, undergone a quiet transformation that its leadership has been careful not to notice. The headquarters of the major unions are populated, to a remarkable degree, by people who have spent their entire careers in the union movement. Many went straight from university to a union research department or political officer role and have not left. They are committed, intelligent, and hardworking. They are also, by inclination, temperament, and life experience, entirely disconnected from the people they purport to represent.
– Gawain Towler, who really has been blogging up a storm lately over on Fainting in Coils
The rule of officials and “experts” is all over the Western world – but it is particularly bad in the United Kingdom.
Of recent Conservative Party Prime Ministers (by “recent” I mean since the betrayal of Margaret Thatcher in 1990) only one seems to have fought against this subversion of democracy – the power of officials and “experts” (from the Bank of England to the judges) and that was Liz Truss – who lost, and who the establishment made sneer of, by one of the most vicious propaganda campaigns I have ever seen.
Will a Reform Party government do better? I do not know.
What do you do when, for example a minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg, asks Civil Servants (officials) to stop wearing political badges (something that would have been unthinkable when I was a Civil Servant – yes I was one once, Home Office) and they, for example, just carry on wearing their rainbow lanyards? Without the power to hire and fire officials (at all levels) there is little point in being elected – “personal are policy”.
And this most certainly applies to the independent agencies such as the Bank of England – which I can remember NOT being independent, indeed I can remember before many of these “Quangos” existed – and there is no reason for many of them to exist.
There is a lot of talk of ordinary union members, at least in unions whose membership works in the “private sector”, voting for the Reform Party – there is little need to speculate as we will soon know if they do or not (the by-election in the Manchester area).
Facts are stubborn things – even if a person ignores facts, the facts do not ignore them. The leadership of the Conservative Party, indeed of all political parties, must take that to heart – you do not, for example, put up a candidate in a by-election where the only effect of doing so will be to help the left – to help Mr Burnham. Edward Leigh (the Father of the House of Commons) was quite correct to say that the Conservative Party should not do this. And it works the other way as well – the Reform Party should not put up candidates in areas where the evidence shows they can not win – that all they are doing is helping the left, as they, unintentionally, did in the constituency I am in. The loss of a Member of Parliament who had voted, in the House of Commons, in a way that the Reform Party would approve of – was not good.
Reform at least know who the real enemy is and where the war needs to be fought, which Truss only realised in retrospect.
Civil “service.”
“Servants.”
Dishonest labels.
They want to make it appear that they have been dragged in from great lives and important jobs because we need them to labor in poorly-paid gov positions for our benefit. Soldiers, bravely helping their fellows through sacrifice.
We should start setting them free from their servitude.
Going back to Starkey’s comments about Disraelis and his one nation Toryism. Disraelis was supposed to have realised the most patriotic were the upper and lower classes. His idea was to unite the two against the “sneering” middle classes.
So who now are the least patriotic and most post nationalist? The working class were and probably still are quite culturally conservative.
bobby b – and it is just as bad with officials who are not classifies as Civil Servants, who work for the “independent agencies”.
Senator Roscoe Conkling, leader of the “Stalwarts”, was correct – if you do not control the staff (the personal) you, the elected person, do not control policy.
Indeed Roscoe Conkling was correct about most things (opposition to slavery, opposition to “Greenbacks”, and so on) – not just his opposition to creating a professional bureaucracy.
Thomas Fairfax – fair point Sir. Liz Truss (or Mary O’Leary) at first believed that the officials (including the Bank of England and the international corporations that depend on the drip feed of funny money from the Central Banks – via the commercial Credit Bubble banks) would not systematically sabotage everything she was trying to do.
Other people can learn by the unfortunate experience of the lady.
@bobby b
Dishonest labels.
This sort of thing drives me nuts. “I have dedicated my life to public service”. No you have been living off the public teat for the whole of your life and have never had a real job. As if consuming public money to boss people around somehow makes you better than people who make products and services that people like so much they exchange money for them. True public service is to provide a service for the public that they actually want and doesn’t require police power to force them to use it.
When you can use force to implement your will you are not longer a servant, you are a master.
Another thing that drives me nuts is this tradition of calling people by their highest previous office even when they have left. President Obama, Secretary Clinton, Speaker Gingrich, Senator Manchin, and so on. It is ridiculous. We gave up titles of nobility in our constitution. You see this a lot in senate hearings where some witness who has not managed to acquire himself the title of Senator, or Representative, or Director or Secretary, Viscount, or Marquis, they get the moniker “The Honorable”. TBH, I’d rather you let me judge if you are honorable or not. These things are jobs, not titles of nobility.
These people are so self involved and narcissistic it is a wonder that the pole up their arse doesn’t come out of their oral cavity.
Fraser Orr – sometimes people who come in from the “private sector” are just as bad, or even worse, in terms of government spending and regulations. However, yes, it is disturbing that (for example) only one member of the United States Senate, Ron Johnson (from Wisconsin), owned their own manufacturing business before going into politics.
Often even if someone declares they “had a real job” (meaning a highly paid job) it turns out they worked in banking, or finance, or medicine or law – all of which are joined-at-the-hip with the government. This does NOT mean they are bad people – but it does mean they are used to funding coming (indirectly) from the taxpayers – and the Central Banking system.
In some States members of the “legislature” (I hate that word – but there we go) only meet for a few days a year – so people have time to work their farms or whatever (Texas springs to mind – at least Texas as it WAS), or are unpaid (New Mexico), but all this does miss out a vital factor.
For example, the Constitution of Texas (1876) carefully limits the power of the Governor – but it does not limit the power of officials in the various public bodies (because most of these boards and agencies did not exist in 1876), and it is the officials (including the judges) who are often the real danger.
Remember it was a “court” (and a court supposedly made up of “Republican” judges – although they turned out to be Corporate State types) who took away Attorney General Ken Paxton’s ability to investigate and prosecute election fraud cases.
Without Paxton elections in Texas would be as bent (as rigged) as they in some other States – and it appears that the Corporate State likes rigged elections, for then the people (the ordinary voters) will not get to vote against “Globalization” – which turns out to mean production goes to the People’s Republic of China and ordinary people in the United States (and other Western nations) end up on welfare.
The Corporations (the corporate bureaucracies – which are much the same as the government bureaucracies) may have outsmarted themselves, for example they spent years (many years) winking at election fraud in King’s County (Seattle) Washington State – thinking they were “using” the left for their own Corporate agenda – but it turns out that the left were using-the-corporations – as there is now a socialist Mayor in Seattle (just like New York and other cities) who wants to confiscate the income and wealth of the Corporate managers – so they will have to flee.
Such attitudes already dominate the university educated Federal bureaucracy – so when the Democrats take control it will no longer be a case of “oh well I can go to Florida” – as the income and wealth of the Corporate managers (bureaucrats in all but name) will be confiscated where-ever they go.
The international corporations have been supporting world “governance” since at least the Rio Conference of 1992 – but that means that there will be no where on Earth that high Corporate people will be able to flee to.
They thought that statism would only apply to the little people – that they (the elite – the people who own the Economist magazine and so on) would keep their wealth.
But it turns out that they were not using the left – the left were using them.
Henri Saint-Simon is laughing – as it was always a trick, telling the bankers (and so on) that “under socialism” they would still be on top – when, in reality, they would be hanging with nooses around their necks.
As for the United Kingdom – we are told, by some dishonest sources, that we are the number 10 manufacturing power in the world – we are not, but even if we were number 10 in industry – it would not be enough to sustain a population bloated by mass immigration and the natural increase of these populations. So we import manufactured goods – as well as food and raw materials.
“But Adam Smith said we could just create money from nothing and use it to import stuff – this is Free Trade!” – no he did NOT, neither Adam Smith or any of the Free Trade economists said anything like that, this modern version of “Free Trade” was invented in the 1970s. No one before the 1970s argued that we should create “money” from nothing and use it to “pay for” the importation of food, raw materials (such as energy) and manufactured goods.
I suspect that the Reform Party, like most people, does not fully grasp just how bad the situation of the United Kingdom is.