By the time I reached the position of Prime Minister in 2022, it was clear that the situation was unmanageable. But even I was shocked by the extent to which the bureaucracy would deliberately undermine the policies of an elected government. It is imperative that the Prime Minister who comes to power in 2029 deals with all of this, otherwise Britain will continue in its downward doom loop.

You were expecting an angry, hostile face with the words “fights back”?

No, no, no! That’s not how this works at all. Herewith some stories from the bowels of the modern world of Sir Humphrey.

The Spectator article, Whoever you vote for, the Blob wins, by Matt Ridley, even makes reference to the show, but points out that back then Minister Hacker was on equal terms with Humphrey. Things are much worse now:

In my nine years in the House of Lords, I saw this at first hand. No matter how cogent my argument in the chamber, or even in a select committee, and no matter how polite the minister’s reply, most of the time she or he might as well have just been saying: Sir Humphrey says no. Who was the monkey and who the organ grinder? Parliament was mostly an elaborate charade. It was one of the reasons I decided to retire.
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MPs are little more than human shields whose job is to take the blame for decisions made by bureaucrats. The ever-growing reach of parliamentary standards rules, implemented by appointed outsiders, keeps them in line… Even ministers are scapegoats. The job of the health secretary is to apologise for waiting lists and scandals, not fix them.

He tells the story of how Rory Stewart had an argument (about stopping aid to Jihadis in Syria) removed twice by his civil “servants”, who then simply refused to deliver to the PM his own letter. And yet the writer of that article argues that these are not the acts of evil people, that there is no grand plan of opposition, that it’s more of a cultural thing:

If you talk to quangocrats, it quickly becomes apparent that the thing that annoyed them most about Liz Truss – and boy did they hate her – was that she criticised the Bank of England and fired a senior Treasury civil servant. The effrontery! The Bank of England could not believe its luck when its own disastrous mistakes over interest rates and liability-driven investments were blamed almost entirely on her.

Ms Truss is well aware of this and even as she notes that nothing has improved since Labour got into power, she points in the same direction as Ridley:

The British state is unaccountable and opaque…..The “impartial” civil service and “independent” bodies that were variously brought in to stop corruption and outsource decisions to experts have now become the masters, not the servants…This deep state has reams of procedures and processes at their fingertips, and are only too quick to use legal advice, the civil service code, and the ministerial code – amongst other devices – to delay, disrupt, and thwart the plans of elected politicians. 
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It’s better to have a transparent system where politicians have the freedom to deliver as they see fit, and can be voted in and out accordingly, rather than a system where so much power is in the hands of the unelected that voting becomes pointless.

Also, just like Rory Stewart’s experience, Truss not only found herself stymied by the bureaucracy as a junior minister but this didn’t change even as she rose in the Cabinet rank (do read the whole thing):

In Ten Years to Save the West, I outlined my experiences as a Minister for a decade – eight years of which were in Cabinet. I assumed that the situation would improve as I took on more senior roles. It didn’t. …. It is hard to explain, to those who have not experienced being in government, the difficulties of keeping election promises when so much of the core architecture is controlled by those with an opposing view.

A group that has an almost perfect set of self-reinforcing processes within Britain:

The bureaucracy also has its own sizeable lobby in the House of Lords; which is populated by far too many former permanent secretaries, judges, and others revered by the Institute for Government. Former civil servants also revolve around the corporate circuit. This status quo is reinforced by a supine media which relies on officialdom for leaks and information. They shield this powerful cabal from public scrutiny with terrible reporting, perpetuating the myth that Ministers are all-powerful pantomime villains.

Plus, in the age of globalisation, processes external to Britain:

They are often plugged in internationally – such as the Bank of England with fellow central bankers, Foreign Office officials and counterparts at the U.S. State Department, government lawyers and their associates at the International Criminal Court and the European Court of Human Rights, and so on. More broadly, there is a web of Davos-inspired internationalist globalist groupthink, which Keir Starmer has further empowered, with his open preference for the WEF over Westminster.

Starmer is one of them, very much Establishment, but you have to wonder how much power and control they’ve allowed him to exercise. Looking at the last year I can’t help wondering if the malaise of unpopularity that British Labour is mired in is down to the bureaucracy? But the Spectator article offers one ray of hope, and it’s the Harold Macmillin one:

Brexit was the one victory of the Tories over the bureaucracy – and that was forced on them by events. When David Cameron made a referendum promise he thought a coalition would prevent him having to keep, democracy sneaked through. The democratic deficit in Brussels had grown too obvious to be ignored: the euro-clerisy had overreached. For me, it was the three years of frantic efforts of the establishment to stop, reverse, water down, deflect and delay Brexit that brought home just how bad the democratic deficit has become at home as well as in Brussels.

Efforts that continue under Starmer.

As Bloomberg reported last night, the government plans to accept ‘dynamic alignment’ of regulations on some products including agrifood goods, and reportedly will accept EU rulings from the European Court of Justice on the sanitary and phytosanitary elements of its new deal with Brussels. All of which means that basically the EU will be setting rules for British businesses, but without the UK having any say…

That’s a lot more doable than poor Ms Truss’s recommendations for a post-2029 Tory government:

First and foremost, through substantial legislative changes, we must return to the situation where once again Parliament is sovereign and the Executive is able to govern. That means repealing all of the laws that have created and cultivated the unelected state, including the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act, the Bank of England Act, the Equality Act, the Constitutional Reform Act, and the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act. We need to restore the role of the Lord Chancellor to that which existed prior to Blair’s constitutional vandalism, and abolish the Supreme Court he created. There must be a radical overhaul of Judicial Review, to restrict its ability to block the mandate of elected Ministers. We also need to leave supranational bodies which impinge on the sovereignty of elected governments, like the International Criminal Court and the European Convention on Human Rights.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

I’m sorry to have to express cynical laughter, particularly about policies that I would fully support, but what are the odds of Truss’s proposal succeeding vs Starmer and the Bureaucracy’s incremental development of Big Brother?

The real joke here is that ultimately this Deep State approach, while winning in the short-medium term, will fail in the long term just as it did in the old communist nations. People who don’t want to live in such a world will leave, along with their talent and money, and the system will consume itself in the face of an exhausted population that feeds off it unto death.