Raab’s resignation has triggered quite a few comments about the civil service, with some on the right thinking it means Britain has somehow become ‘ungovernable’. Whilst little in politics surprises anymore, I think this is way off the mark. Civil servants are not some bloc with uniform opinions, let alone left-leaning saboteurs intent on bringing cabinet ministers down. This daft notion was given a new lease of life by rumours that health secretary Barclay is now being accused of bullying.
What we are actually seeing is perhaps another malign impact of Brexit. Ministers are becoming frustrated by the absence of any benefits and a slump in the polls. They are casting around for someone or something to blame. I suppose a brainstorming session at the end of 2017 or so might have predicted it. Reality was always bound to muscle in to ruin the fantasies of Brexiteers.
It’s the equivalent of throwing a tantrum and upsetting the chessboard when you’re clearly losing.
Johnson didn’t help by promoting Brexit-supporting ministers and ejecting moderates from the party in 2019. What we got was a Conservative parliamentary party that was already half-mad.
Andrew Levi tweeted a long thread that put the problem bluntly:
Not even wrong: Dominic Raab, the Civil Service and failureThat Mr. Raab was ever made a minister, let alone cabinet minister, is gut-wrenchingly symptomatic of the depths to which UK leadership has sunk, and the peril the country is now in.A 🧵/1.— Andrew Levi (@AndrewPRLevi) April 22, 2023
Later in the thread, he says:
"A crop of grotesquely incapable, morally (and not infrequently, it seems, financially) corrupt politicians can only remain a massive part of the problem. They have neither the knowledge, skills nor intent to make the necessary changes.
"Like legions of failures before them, they are so ignorant of the realities that their bizarre “solutions” to the challenges which genuinely exist are - as the physicist Wolfgang Pauli once acidly commented about a paper authored by a young researcher - 'not even wrong'."
Allister Heath, editor of The Sunday Telegraph is among the equivalent of these 'grotesquely incapable' politicians in the Brexit-supporting media. His latest column is surely close to peak derangement: Britain is being impoverished by a Remainer institutional mind virus.
I fully expect Heath to be stretchered away very soon, sedated and under close medical supervision, a padded cell having been made ready at the funny farm. What is a 'mind virus' anyway?
Anyone thinking that our current problems are in any way connected to Brexit is dismissed.
He starts with this sarcasm:
“We [Brexiteers] have sinned, and deserve to be punished. We voted for the Tories, and then, horror of horrors, to leave the EU: we are the 52 percent, the guilty men and women of Brexit. We were warned, and didn’t listen: it is us who brought poverty and pay cuts upon the nation, or so the “grown-ups”, the “sensibles”, that whole useless army of “experts”, civil servants, central bankers and assorted technocrats of all parties are desperate for us to believe.”
Having voted for the impossible, after first being explicitly warned it was impossible, Heath puts the blame squarely on the poor innocent saps who have failed to deliver it. No, Brexit remains unsullied by failure in his mind.
The truth, he says, is “a delusional indictment of an intellectually bankrupt, wretched elite afflicted by a hopeless Remainer institutional mind virus. Overwhelmed by our national problems, they find it easier to see everything through the prism of our departure from the EU, and cannot imagine a solution to our woes that doesn’t involve rejoining.”
We are getting back to the middle ages when anything that couldn't be rationally explained was put down to various maladies or something mystical and beyond human knowledge. Nowadays, Brexiteers rely on the blob, the elite and now mind viruses.
He also ignores the unpalatable fact that the 52% in 2016 is now a minority of 39% in 2023.
Our cultural and economic elites apparently "don’t understand that lower taxes, deregulation, a larger, more competitive private sector, and greater entrepreneurship boost growth." And these elites "are obsessed with mining every piece of data to 'prove' that we are doing less well than other EU countries, and thus – illogically – that Brexit was a failure. Many of these claims are wrong, as the economist Julian Jessop keeps demonstrating."
In fact, Mr. Jessop is forced to keep using false figures to 'prove' the IMF, the OECD, the IFS, the OBR, and every other reputable economic body is wrong when they are clearly not.
“The fact that the Tories [with four different prime ministers remember] have failed to make use of enough of these rediscovered freedoms proves there is something wrong with this Government, not with Brexit.”
This is 'not even wrong'. Simple logic should tell you that if you try four light bulbs in a lamp holder and none of them come on, the problem is probably due to something else, a circuit breaker or a switch or the lamp holder itself. And more often than not, you find the issue is down to the last thing you fiddled with before finding the bulb had stopped working. Brexit is indeed the most likely culprit. Most people would begin with that premise.
Of course, you can keep trying more and more light bulbs thinking that they're all duds, but eventually, even the dimmest observer will come to the conclusion it's PROBABLY NOT THE BLASTED LIGHT BULBS. Trust me on this, I began work as an apprenticed electrician.
Nevertheless, he is “certain that the benefits of Brexit will still easily more than outweigh its costs.” In other words, one day in the distant future and without doing anything different, he will pop in a light bulb and it will come on. Isn't faith a wonderful thing?
I ought to mention here that Heath was one of the self-styled ‘Brexit Battalion (media corps)’ who ran a guerrilla campaign to support the leave campaigns in 2016 and were all invited to a celebratory dinner on 30 January 2020 after Johnson had negotiated the Withdrawal Agreement and we had technically left the EU.
The full list is here, you will probably know many of the names. I wonder who will be the first to crack? Harry Cole was added last by the organisers and so doesn't have a number.
The value of Mr. Heath's opinion can be judged by another of his efforts, written last September, in praise of Liz Truss and her government, in which he states:
"I’m optimistic about the Truss Government. Yes, of course, nobody can possibly know how well it will do – whether it will outwit the Blob to push through genuine improvements. But it is absurd to state, almost as self-evident fact, that it is bound to collapse, that it cannot last even two years, based in part on an insulting dismissal of the credibility and intellect of all of the members of the new Government."
He claimed the then PM’s critics "fail to see that she is deadly serious about boosting growth and overturning orthodoxies" and he concluded (I'm not kidding) with this:
"Britain's declinist Remainer elite is about to be humiliated."
Oh, dear. Truss' government didn't last two years, not even two months. In the "Being Spectacularly Wrong Stakes" Heath is a worthy winner, every time.
