Jonathan Powell was a British diplomat who went on to become Tony Blair's Chief of Staff throughout his entire time in Downing Street. He has tweeted this:
Cummings v the civil service: This looks very much like a rolling coup. Time to resist? Sounds overstated but it isn't. It takes a long time to come back, think Hungary, think Poland.
— Jonathan Powell (@jnpowell1) June 29, 2020
He clearly thinks there is a coup going on here in the UK, right now. And I have to say that I tend to agree.
The aim is to concentrate power in Number 10 with no checks and balances to hold it to account.
This is profoundly dangerous for our democracy.
It's also profoundly dangerous for the stability of our society.
Worry.
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I’m worried – definitely.
That is the most remarkable political statement made by an ex-senior Whitehall civil servant (and still considered ‘mainstream’); ex-FCO, ex-Downing Street Chief of Staff, 1997-2007; that I have ever seen.
Have our media; the “journalists” of our public-relations-machines-masqerading-as-news-information-providers, even noticed yet?
Apparently not
When will the civil service strike?
“masquerading”. My spell-check is masquerading as a spell-check.
It has been noticed by Channel 4 News who interviewed him this evening. He kind of recommended john Bolton’s book on Trump. The interview was disturbing to say the least, as is Bolton’s book. Your anticipation of your host’s next question, how will it be paid for, was a neat touch. I hope it helped the message to stick in the mind.
Since it’s a political post. I share my opinion.
The coup happened last year. It was perpetrated by these who have regularly staged coups across the world using their foreign intelligence agencies. Some fail.
This appears to be a further attempt (the last was the Ambassador) to appease the gorilla after poking it with a sharp stick never thinking it may survive to retaliate and now being scared of being mauled to death as it comes for revenge. That is my opinion.
Mr Powell (‘Pole’) must know it, he may know there are others in the chain that could also be handed over as sacrificial goats.
The game is filthy, always has been , Dom and his BS’ers know they are over a barrel if they want a ‘quick deal’ and whatever anyone thinks of Trump – he certainly knows how to be a ruthless deal maker. Especially against these who were conspirators in a coup against his election. I expect to see a few more heads roll, as events across the pond get daily more acrimonious and legal charges against their top ‘civil servants’ become more likely, as the election gets dirtier. Another 5 months to go yet!
DunGroanin – are you postulating a link between Mr Sedwill and Mr Steele? That’s interesting. Any references?
No I am not.
However there are links between our DS & ‘ex’ intelligence , via the likes of Steele’s dodgy dossiers on Trump and the various spooky characters revealed in the stings such as Mifsud. Steeles association with Millar/Skripal etc – it’s a giant exploding can of worms which I won’t pollute this site with.
None of which could have happened in a vacuum without the complicity of the senior incumbents. Much like the original fake WMD sexed up dossiers – when Powell was the senior civil servant for Blair.
As I say there is now quite a large body of evidence collected under AG Barr at the DoJ which may yet end in open court, various bits of which are emerging into public in the tit for tat continued lies of Russiagate/Ukrainegate.
Larry Johnstone at sst and a few others are shifting through it. Nothing in the MSM of course!
Channel 4 News 7pm had an interview with him.
I saw it …. albeit in catch up
There does seem to be a worrying culture among UK civil servants to capitulate to bullies. They even have a code of conduct saying they should not do it.
I mean special advisers come and go, and this one will be gone by Valentines Day 2021 by all accounts. But the culture of the senior civil servants will outlast that a long time. So how do we stop that and engender a culture where the good people stand up for what is right, rather than meekly folding and taking their unfunded pension entitlements?
Good point about the Polish election at the weekend though. Inferring from what Jonathan Powell has tweeted he must have knowledge that that was as dodgy as a three pound coin.
“BBC News is completely obsessed by the agenda set by newspapers – if the Mail and the Telegraph lead with this, we [BBC] should.” Robert Peston
If we’d had the fair and honest media we’d hope to deserve, Scotland would be independent, we’d all still be in The EU, our Covid-19 death tolls would be a fraction of their current levels and Downing Street might be inhabited by adults. Past performance is not always a guide to future prospects, but the UK’s direction of travel does offer plenty to worry about.
This is the huge flaw in the BBC broadcasting model that nobody discusses. News is led by an ‘agenda’. Think of this agenda as the ‘market’ in which news is produced. The fundamental question is, who sets the agenda?
The BBC cannot set its own agenda arbitrarily without offering some independent test of its legitimacy. The independent test of legitimacy the BBC chooses to use is (and always has been) that of the major titles in the mainstream press media, which are controlled by a cohort of neoliberal billionaires serving the interests of illiberal government. It is a boilerplate guarantee that the agenda will always serve neoliberal illiberalism. QED.
Its aye been that way.
There is no need for a coup. It has happened already. In case you had not noticed, we have always lived in an elective dictatorship, in which a government with a sufficient majority can try to do almost anything it wishes. Most governments feel constrained to work within existing conventions but they don’t have to. Apart from protesting and resisting, there is little anyone can do about that until the next general election (which of course this government could legislate to change if it wished; conventionally, such changes only take effect after the next election, but who could stop it?). Arguably EU membership imposed some legal and political constraints, although in the end that relied upon the UK government complying, but such constraints as remain are going in December.
Trump has caused considerable damage to the body politic in the US, but any UK government could do far worse, far more quickly, because there really are very few formal checks and balances or independent sources of power. If Johnson went full-on right wing populist (assuming we think he hasn’t already) who would or could intervene: the party grandees? the parliamentary party? the civil service? the courts? the church? the army? the security services? the queen?
Watch out for the rule of law, because when that is weakened, everything else is at risk. (I could start with judges being labelled as enemies of the people, and illegal prorogation, and carry on with corrupt planning decisions, failing to nominate members of the intelligence and security committee so it can’t publish the Russia report, and the very clear coronavirus laws applying to most people but not a few others who have urgent childcare needs and/or eyesight problems, …)
Thanks
I’m afraid what makes it worse is that HM Opposition has too much of the same world view as Boris’ mob. We are actually suffering from consensus politics.
As a working person I don’t have much choice voting wise – New Labour reduced my public pension under the lie that the State cannot afford it and that I could put some of it into those purveyors of probity – private financial markets – to make a return (Ha Ha). When they lost the 2010 election, one of the Labour MPs left a note telling the Tories there was no money! Fancy that!
The Tories brought in austerity in 2010 and I and many other public sector workers lost jobs or have essentially worked one year for free for the last 10 years, having lost at least a year’s wages because of cuts – money that was also remember lost to the rest of the economy.
What we have is a talent vacuum in politics, and since nature abhors vacuums, all sorts of human detritus gets sucked in to replace it – things like Johnson and Cummings and fellow travellers of the extreme and tribal Left and grey so-called centrists who are just Tory-lites.
Reflecting on the Tory party alone, it is staggering when looking at this lot to consider that many have been apparently educated at our best schools and universities and yet seem either incapable of running the country or lack the humanity and empathy to do it nicely.
All that expensive education seems like poor value for money to me.
Added to that we have a parliament who – after having their expense scam rumbled – then awarded themselves a huge pay rise (from around £60K to £80K per year) plus an increase in their pensions whilst voting for austerity for the rest of us!!
There is a huge disjuncture between politicians and the people in the country that makes it hard for me to bother to vote. They seem to do what they like regardless – as long as they get paid.
But I blame myself – I should have got involved somehow and not left my life to be governed by frankly lesser beings.
Come on, you have decades to go yet
On the point about ‘expensive education’:
A friend would sometimes say: “The purpose of a public school education is to teach stupid people to be confident”.
Eventually I asked him if he was quoting someone, and if so whom.
I got a two-word reply: ‘Personal experience’.
Indeed, this is a coup, undoubtedly. Will it be allowed to take hold and spread further? Are there any constitutional checks and safeguards to activate?
Coups do not all involve men in uniforms and tanks on the streets, but all take place when citizens are distracted by a crisis and when the power in place is weak or/and willing to be taken over and used. This is the case here. It’s very frightening.
The House of Lords Constitution Committee — not a well known body — has done a forensic job examining every bit of legislation passed and going through Parliament to change the law after Brexit becomes a reality on January 1 next year.
These are not just the better known laws like the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 but new Acts of Parliament covering covering agriculture, money laundering, immigration, trade, taxation,reciprocal health agreements and even the granting of road haulage licences.
What this comprehensive analysis reveals is that far from Parliament getting new freedoms to introduce new laws for the British people the powers are being transferred from the European Commission to government ministers and indirectly to government advisers like Dominic Cummings.
What is happening is that the perceived rule from Brussels by Brexiteers is being replaced by a real rule by decree by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.
Henry VIII powers
How you might ask? The answer is the widespread use of what are known as ” Henry VIII ” powers — or more arcanely known as statutory instruments. These are orders allowing ministers to change the law by decree — either putting down an order which Parliament has 90 minutes to debate or a negative order that if MPs don’t spot it is already law unless Parliament can overturn it.
Now what the peers have discovered is that all these bills are littered with these powers — 40 in the agriculture bill alone — giving huge discretion to introduce not only rule by decree but powers to introduce new criminal offences with unlimited fines.
One extraordinary power governing export and import duties give ministers huge powers — including one to change the law by “ public notice” avoiding informing Parliament at all. This brings us back to Tudor times when all Henry VIII had to do was to pin up a notice ordering the dissolution of the monasteries..
Now why does this matter? Take the agriculture bill which will govern the rules if, as the US wants in trade negotiations, for us to import chlorinated chicken and according to recent reports to change food labeling laws in the UK. Now this bill in its initial form gave ministers a Henry VIII power to change the law for the marketing of food including what is on the label.
So if Waitrose followed what it said it will do and clearly label chlorinated chicken a government minister could just change the law by decree making it illegal to do so. And if Waitrose disobeyed they could face unlimited fines.
Now the bill has been modified a bit but MPs and peers ought to be careful that powers don’t sneak in by the back door.
150 new ministerial powers running to 174 pages
Another more obscure Act according to peers also gives huge powers to ministers.
The report said: “The Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill involves a massive transfer of power from the House of Commons to Ministers of the Crown. Ministers are given well over 150 separate powers to make tax law for individuals and businesses. These laws made by Ministers will run to thousands of pages. The Treasury’s delegated powers memorandum, which sets out in detail all these law-making powers, alone runs to 174 pages.”
And ministers are also taking powers in some circumstances to override laws passed by the Scottish Parliament by government decree and to interfere in which already adopted EU case law can be decided by tribunals and lower courts.
Courts facing ministerial directions
The peers were incandescent about the latter.Their report said:
“The granting of broad ministerial powers in the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 to determine which courts may depart from CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union) case law and to give interpretive direction in relation to the meaning of retained EU law was — and remains — inappropriate.
“Each of these powers should remain the preserve of primary legislation. There is a significant risk that the use of this ministerial power could undermine legal certainty and exacerbate the existing difficulties for the courts when dealing with retained EU law.”
Now in my opinion because of the Covid-19 crisis the government is using this to introduce major changes to our unwritten constitution to bypass Parliament. I don’t blame my lobby colleagues for missing this — the 24/7 news agenda hardly gives them time to study a detailed House of Lords report.
It could be that a post Brexit Parliament may not need to sit as often as now — but just meet occasionally to scrutinise the latest ministerial decree.
I don’t think this is what the average Brexiteer will have envisaged. I don’t think the majority of people in this country want to live in a society where ministers and Downing Street have overweening powers to create new criminal offences by decree without being properly scrutinised by Parliament. We are losing our safeguards by stealth
Thanks, and comments agreed, especially the last
It’s the ‘boiling frog syndrome’. Similar to ‘political gaslighting’ & the ‘salami slicing’ of social services. They’re all stealth weapons in the armory of right wing political parties. Without an effective opposition and mass media to explain what’s happening they’re very difficult to counter because they depend on people themselves waking up before it’s too late. Personally I don’t believe the UK opposition parties are currently strong enough to resist this well-orchestrated and mega-funded right-wing coup. However, as the BLM movement has shown, large scale & continuous street level protests are effective. But they too take time and require a high level of grass-roots organisation – as XR is finding out.
Peter,
You say: “It could be that a post Brexit Parliament may not need to sit as often as now — but just meet occasionally to scrutinise the latest ministerial decree”
This reflex has long been there in the post “One Nation” Tory Party.
I well recall Nicholas Ridley’s suggestion as Environment Minister, with oversight for local government, that Councils should only meet once a year, to award contracts for the outsourced services (ostensibly on the basis of VFM or Value for Money, but if you believe that, you’ll believe anything), and then go home.
Nothing about Councillor casework on behalf of their constituents, or how a voter could get redress for a complaint, or a resolution of a problem.
He presumably thought Councillors would effectively be redundant, with no meetings to attend, and all of the above could be dealt with by the Customer Services arm of those providing the outsourced services.
As L.B. Barnet, on which I served as a Councillor for 4 years between 1994 and 1998, pretty much tried this model from around 2010, I believe, I can assure you that it’s not a very viable or workable model, with, I have been told, many voters expressing their dissatisfaction.
Barnet certainly performed somewhat of a U-turn on the policy: see
https://www.room151.co.uk/resources/the-future-for-outsourcing-after-barnet-formula-cracks/