Welcome To The Deep State

Hear the silence around the Forde Report. Jeremy Corbyn remains without the Labour whip, which for some reason he seems to want back, for having pointed out that claims of anti-Semitism were weaponised against his Leadership by his factional enemies. Martin Forde QC says exactly that, in those words. Forde also states, as some of us have always known, that due to its factional recruitment practices, the paid staff of the Labour Party was at least as far to the right as Corbyn's circle was to the left. It always will be.

That staff diverted £130,000 to the "campaigns" of its allies in safe seats, and thus away from the campaigns of the elected Leader's supporters in marginal constituencies, thereby deliberately throwing the 2017 General Election that Labour lost by a whisker. These people felt physically sick at that close result (there is of course television footage of Labour MPs having the same reaction), and they described it in writing as the opposite of everything for which they had been working for two years.

Their media outriders are already peddling the barefaced lie that Forde has dismissed their sabotage as a "conspiracy theory". Read the Report. It says the very opposite of that. It also details, and again this is not news to some of us, that it is the Labour Right that is racist to the core, while the hierarchy of racism is exactly as we have always said that it was. It is of course the Right that is back in charge of the Labour Party. Again, it always will be. Unless you have experienced the personal vileness of the Labour Right, then you cannot begin to imagine it. Horrible though some of the people in each of them are, no other faction in British politics comes close.

Why care about any of this now? The same interests that brought down Corbyn, who did not always help himself, have now brought down Boris Johnson, who never was suitable to be Prime Minister, but who has not been removed on any policy grounds, although there will indeed be policy changes under his successor, and not for the better.

Any MP who is now backing either Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss is stating frankly that Johnson is unfit for office, since neither of them would have him in the Cabinet even though Truss astonishingly remains in his. Apparently, she is indispensable to the war in Ukraine. Yes, she really does believe that.

The Lobby knew about the parties while they were being held, and the Police attended them, as a number of senior media figures will also have done on at least one occasion. Everyone in the Westminster Village will always have known about Chris Pincher, including Theresa May when she, too, appointed him as Deputy Chief Whip.

These stories have been brought out now in order to complete the job that had begun with the defenestration of Corbyn. Johnson also had to go, and with Keir Starmer in place, then Johnson had to be succeeded by someone "best placed to beat Starmer" by being as much like Starmer as possible. Starmer's blatant guilt had to be denied, incidentally by the only individuals who pretend to believe that I am guilty of anything. There can be no challenge to neoliberal economic policy, to extreme social liberalism, or to neoconservative policy.

Perhaps like Starmer, although it is more likely that Starmer has the zeal of a convert, Sunak may be slightly dodgy, but he would do. Like Wes Streeting, or like Yvette Cooper, or like David Lammy, or like Peter Kyle, or like Rachel Reeves of the Bank of England and of the British Embassy in Washington, Truss is the real deal, and in that regard she is entirely typical of Liberal Democrats. Contrast the economic and foreign policies of the Coalition with those of the years since, when austerity has been very slightly eased, and when there has at least been nothing comparable to the war in Libya.

Welcome to the Deep State. The Equality and Human Rights Commission is the most Deep State institution imaginable. Accordingly, it was known only for sacking its black and disabled staff first, until it sprang to life against Corbyn. Imagine what it would have said about Brexit. It is no wonder that Luciana Berger wants us to remember that either it or she ever existed, but very few will. Those were strange times, when someone who used to be in EastEnders, the glamorous assistant on a game show, and a blackface clown of yesteryear who had once made a novelty record about football, were all treated as political authorities. Them, and Berger. Not so much the Deep State, as the Shallow State.

Still, there very much is a Deep State. The economic, social, cultural and political hegemony of the liberal bourgeoisie must be defended and expanded by extreme military force abroad and by the closest possible approximation to it at home. Of course, the liberal bourgeoisie is the class least likely to experience combat even in times of conscription, but hey, that is the natural order for you. An order that seems to require an awful lot of hard power, if it is just the way of the world.

The media mostly agree with all of this, as well they might, being such obvious beneficiaries of it. To put it euphemistically, they also move in the same social circles as the politicians who inhabit this self-styled "centre ground". Their carefully cultivated contacts are entirely among those, and were rendered worthless by the Corbyn Leadership, as also very largely by the Johnson Government.

Perhaps they resented most of all that Corbyn and Johnson were both journalists. And yes, Corbyn is NUJ and everything. You have to be elected to that, in the manner of the old miners' lodges. You cannot just join. He is a proper journalist, all right. He and Johnson must both have struck the press pack as traitors, although Corbyn more than Johnson due to his practice of combining the oldest and the newest forms of campaigning, public meetings and social media, thereby going around the well-kept gates that had been constructed in the centuries in between. Johnson also had a touch of that, and as a Telegraph Group veteran, none of yer Morning Star, he should have known better.

Previous Governments have handed over jaw-dropping amounts of power to the Deep State, having of course been installed for the purpose. These people clearly never wanted to run the country. Again, that was why they were put in by the people who did. For example, while each generation presumably produces an obvious Astronomer Royal, why hand over the power to appoint Regius Professors, or certain Oxbridge Heads of House, or the Poet Laureate? Never mind the judiciary? Or 26 members of Parliament? And how entitled is the Liberal Establishment in the Church of England, to assume the right to appoint those 26 legislators over the rest of us?

But these powers have never been legislated away. Almost nothing in Britain ever is quite abolished or repealed. It falls into prolonged desuetude, but it is still there. A Corbyn Government would have made full use of the Royal Prerogative; there are no republicans in possession of the powers of a Medieval monarch. Disgracing Eton and Oxford, Johnson also showed tendencies in that direction. So the Deep State had to get rid of the pair of them. It has done so, even before either of them could turn his attention to reversing the statutory surrender of control over monetary policy.

One day, there may be something like the Forde Report into the coup against Johnson. Like the Forde Report, it would be utterly devastating. And like the Forde Report, aside from a few lies about it, it would be completely ignored. While I carry no candle for Johnson, he has been deposed by the forces and interests that were also behind Shrewsbury, Orgreave, Hillsborough, blacklisting, spycops, both the tragedy at Grenfell Tower and the cover-up that is being constructed before our very eyes, and so very much else besides, including the wars. Welcome to the Deep State. Or, as it is otherwise known, Britain.