Britain’s creeping cronyism
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JVL
JVL Introduction
Senior officials in Whitehall has long played word games with the truth, writes Richard Norton-Taylor.
They have made themselves vulnerable by their arrogance, incompetence and bullet-proof job protection privileges.
The trouble is that Johnson is substituting the traditional Whitehall machine with something very different but equally bad.
Both share a complete lack of accountability and addiction to official secrecy.
This article was originally published by DECLASSIFIED UK OP-ED on Tue 1 Sep 2020. Read the original here.
Britain’s creeping cronyism
Coronavirus is diverting attention away from an unprecedented but under-reported threat. Official secrecy, incompetence and lack of accountability in Whitehall are combining with government cronyism to represent an assault on the rule of law and Britain’s parliamentary democracy.
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“Creeping”? Is the author having a laugh?
It’s rampant under Boris “Ubu Roi” Johnson.
It is sometimes useful to compare our constitution with that of USA, particularly with regard to “division of powers”. But when it comes to the “executive” the British constitution is at best confusing, at least deliberately obscure. The real executive is here the Civil (and Military) Service. They are (nominally) under the direction of the Prime Minister and her/his Cabinet. Yet, as this article ably exposes, this relationship has become increasingly fluid in recent years.
Using the paradigm of the “ruling class” within a capitalist class system, the underlying mechanism for this rule is necessary obfuscated within our “democracy” in order to hide the reality that there is no democracy.
Norton-Taylor demonstrates that perhaps the ruling class, with its once all-powerful grip of the machinery of power through the civil service is itself unable to prevent the “subtle and largely unnoticed corruption” of government.
Cronyism was writ large under Blair, who was supposed to be the new way forward, instead moved the goal posts further right enabling all those that follow their right of passage.
Starmer proves today that nothing has changed, until we remove Neo-Liberal politicians of all political persuasions from power it will just carry on getting worse.