A Tory radical has warned the Conservatives they need to “blow up” the ‘the blob’ — the Westminster deep state — to have a hope of winning the next election.
Jake Berry, a “low tax Conservative” — a rare thing these days as the mainstream of the party has drifted towards a big state approach to government — is warning his colleagues they must take on the deeply embedded “blob” deep state to keep working-class voters onboard.
The politician, who was party chairman for Liz Truss’s short-lived leadership but has since advocated for a low-tax state from the backbenchers, said the country is being run by what he calls an “Oxbridge PPE clique”. The phrase is shorthand for the Politics, Philosophy and Economics degree taught at Oxford and to a lesser degree the Human, Social, and Political Sciences degree at Cambridge which, as long observed, the graduates of which “make up an astonishing proportion of Britain’s elite”.
Berry has compared the strangling, stifling power this clique has over politics in Britain to the grip of the unions in the 1970s, which nearly drove the economy to ruins before they were routed by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. He wrote: “Blobonomics is the political classes that you don’t know, or you’ve often never voted for, wanting to control your life.”
Remarking “we need to put more power back into the hands” of voters, Berry was forthright in his view that the British deep-state equivalent had to be destroyed, bemoaning 40 years of centrist groupthink which he said was content with “managed decline” and hoarding “money, power, and influence in London” to the detriment of the rest of the nation.
He told a Conservative conference Friday: “we need to be brave enough in our manifesto to tackle the greatest enemy of change, orthodoxy in Whitehall and inertia, or ‘the blob’… [you] can’t just take on the blob for the sake of it, it’s got to be about transferring and returning powers [to the people]… It has to be a plan to break up the political, social, and economic influence of the blob, or ‘blobonomics’ as I call it.”
The Westminster PPE elite, Berry said, were double-faced in their dealings, on one hand recognising that “sin taxes” on things like cigarettes drove down smoking rates, but on the other hand insisting that increasing taxes on businesses was not in fact a disincentive for work, and would grow the economy.
The centre was characterised by an orthodoxy of views such as these which rejects out of hand any attempt to do things differently. Calling for fellow Conservatives to adopt his model, Berry remarked: “Blobonomics has failed the north and its people… Put it simply, it’s time to blow up blobonomics. We can only achieve this by looking to break up Whitehall and its Civil Service, with its collective groupthink of decline.”
In separate remarks, Berry — although he was against Brexit at the time of the referendum — cited the massive and devastating rejection of the Brexit vote by the Westminster elite, which he said “strained every nerve to overturn the people’s democratic vote”.
While Berry’s views will be refreshing to some, as he observes the power the ‘blob’ wields both within and without his own political party is massive and has seen the 13 years it has enjoyed in power basically wasted, in terms of basic conservative achievements. The work required to wrangle control of the party from that clique, and then deliver a program of government without being sabotaged from within, will be enormous.