Losing Our Marbles

I was recently struck by the news that the Chairman of the British Museum George Osborne has agreed to give the Elgin Marbles to Greece. This is despite the British Museum Act 1963 specifically requiring trustees not to dispose of objects in the collection. Lending is however permitted and therefore Osborne and the other trustees plan to get round the act by lending the Marbles to Greece in full knowledge that they will not be returned. 

This one vignette contains everything needed to understand the contours of the crisis afflicting modern Britain. We have a former Conservative chancellor who feels his moral obligations are towards the international community rather than to our country or posterity. We have him finding a legal wheeze which allows him to give away treasures in violation of wishes of the public, his duty as trustee and the spirit of the law. This act perhaps will help him advance within the larger system of international offices of state, corporate roles and mutual patronage from which his fellow trustees are drawn.

A similar thing happened to The Wallace collection too. The Trustees are a similarly internationally networked set of bankers and cultural brokers have found a way to thwart Lady Wallace’s stipulation that the collection should never be altered, that it should never leave Hertford House and never be mixed with other items.  They have reinterpreted the original bequest so as to allow loans to other institutions, and reinterpreted the purpose of the trust as ‘making culture matter’ a definition which includes “positively integrating the principles of equality, diversity, and inclusion across all that they do”.

These heritage examples are microcosms of a larger malaise which has affected our legal system, administrative system and indeed all organs of state. That has led to the loss of control over our borders, prosecution of our police and armed services, the bankruptcy of councils and companies, and crippled the country by making it largely impossible to build or do anything. Part of it is actual laws and regulation but the larger part is that people in positions of power - “the blob”, “the deep state” - call it what you will, are activists engaged in motivated re-readings. They have repurposed of organisations to advance their agendas, careers and social standing among their fellow elect. 

Law, policies and rules are often vague, ambiguous, or conflicting, this allows those in positions of power from judges to planning officials significant discretion to interpret, and apply them. As progressive critical legal scholars drawing on postmodernist ideas in the 70s argued “texts lack fixed meaning and interpretation is a political act!” The woke are entirely correct in this respect, who interprets the rules and how the meaning of terms are defined often matters more than what the rules say.

Consider that trans activists tried to redefine what is meant by “woman” rather than campaigning for changes to the law. Consider that the ballooning PIP bill hinges on shifting diagnostic criteria and definitions. Consider that Birmingham was bankrupted, and Asda and Next fined because a court aided by “academic experts” (legitimated in some way) determined completely different jobs to be of “equal value”. 

You can come up with all the policy ideas you want. You can form the next government, you can even leave the ECHR and Aarhus conventions but unless you have a detailed plan to replace all the activist judges, civil servants, academics and quango heads with either neutral professionals or ones who actually want Britain to be great again the regime stays. You can go for growth but what if local planning officers continue to block businesses? You can pull on the levers of power but the mechanism is broken. You send out instructions and rules to try to correct our course but nothing happens, we continue to decline and enter a death spiral. 

Regaining Our Marbles

Returning to our  British Museum vignette… Osborne in turn was appointed by the board of trustees including Baroness Shafik, former Bank of England deputy governor, Philipp Hildebrand, the Swiss vice-chair of BlackRock and governor of the IMF, Grayson Perry, Muriel Gray, Mary Beard and the Jamaican-born playwright Pat Cumper. These in turn were appointed by a combination of votes by previous trustees, and a procedural and yet incestuous public appointments process.

Picking Baroness Shafik at random we see just how networked and international the British Establishment is, and how the same people occupy multiple positions of power, criss crossing continents and moving between academic and commercial roles, between international institutions and public policy.  As well as being a peer the Egyptian born trinational American, British and Egyption citizen is currently: Chair of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Trustee of the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Member of the Task Force on Fiscal Policy for Health, Chair of the Review of the UK Government's Approach to International Development. She was previously: President of Columbia University, Vice chancellor of London School of Economics, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Managing director of the IMF, Permanent Secretary of DFID, and vice president of the World Bank.

To be clear the playbook of power is to circulate people though a series of high status institutions other positions on the cursus honorum, this creates a track record of prestige which legitimates their appointment and a network of fellow influential people which provides a further reason to appoint them - a vice-chair of BlackRock might be able to bring in some rich donors .

This elite circulation also inculcates these people into the consensus opinions and actions, which are rewarded by further invitations, more power and more prestige. Initiatives like ESG or UN sustainable development goals can drive financial and personal incentives and provide both the elite and the lanyard class of middle managers with ready made reasons, language, fashionable trends to follow.

So if power is downstream of the shared beliefs of a set of highly networked elect how do we change it?

There are two historical models for replacing the long tail of positions of power. 

The first is a Gramsci-inspired "long march through the institutions", you create a pipeline of similar people, train them, circulate them, and gradually infiltrate and transform key institutions from within. This has been successfully pulled off by Marxists, the woke and the Fabians. The Fabian Society equips their members with expertise, networking and membership opportunities preparing and helping them secure roles in academia, policy-making, or politics. They then gradually push for change and take over. Blair as a good Fabian cleverly reconfigured the machinery of state with constitutional changes like the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, not to immediately take over but to accelerate the long march and entrench the changes. If Starmer wasn’t so preoccupied and weak he would have finished the job locking in a permanent government. 

The Gramsci approach is even slower. Cultural hegemony is achieved by dominating civil society institutions, schools, churches, media, and cultural organisations, embedding ideas and shifting societal norms. The woke focus on decolonising the curriculum comes from the recognition that if you indoctrinate the child then the student and you have the man. 

The more fatalistic variant is Vaclav Benda’s Parallel Polis which described how dissidents created an alternative culture, economy, education system, and even foreign policy (CANZUK anyone?) to escape the totalitarian communist regime - while incubating political structures capable of replacing it if and when it collapses. Even more darkly the mafia offers a model of shadow government that flourishes where states fail to provide basic services like dispute resolution or security.

There are softer versions of this. Voluntaryism and the private sector offer models where state functions are replaced. Indeed England has a rich tradition of mutual societies and voluntary organisations including friendly societies for welfare, parish poor relief, private watchmen for security, mutual firefighting brigades, and cooperative societies for goods and services. These systems, rooted in community cooperation and mutual aid, align with voluntaryist ideals and predate modern state institutions like the police (established 1829) or national welfare. 

In modern times BUPA provides health care, my local bobby provides residential and high street deterrent patrols and response for people and businesses dissatisfied with police. Sports clubs and gated communities provide leisure and community services. You can go clean your street, scrub off graffiti. You can organise a more regular bin collection. You can create or take over a school. You can create an alternative union. You can start a new prize for literature. You can just do stuff.

There is a limit to this approach - you are still constrained by regulations and planning, you can’t build a nuclear power plant. If you can create competent institutions that meet peoples needs you can build, expertise, legitimacy and resources. You can offer exit and potentially step in where the state fails. You can shame the state for its failure and inspire others.

Moreover the experience of doing stuff for real is great training, particularly as the institutions and movements you build still face the risk of capture. It is only by actually doing stuff that you figure out how to recruit, inspire and achieve. It is only by defending against co-option that you learn to prevent capture, pressure, scope drift, or bureaucratisation.

The second approach is a quick direct takeover. The deep state establishment is simply sacked and replaced . This not only requires power, popular mandate and a feeling of crisis in the first place, but assumes the existence of a large pool of good candidates capable of assuming power.  Even if this difficult feat could be pulled off it could still fail due to resistance from lower level staff, loss of market confidence, international isolation and punishment, or just messing up due to loss of institutional knowledge, capability and legitimacy. 

If speed is needed Javier Milei’s “Afuera” approach of dissolving entire departments and agencies and reducing bureaucracy while strategically placing loyalists in key positions in remaining institutions to advance his libertarian agenda is perhaps a better strategy than capturing institutions.  The chainsaw approach reduces the number of competent loyalists required, makes the strategy harder for the opposition to read and oppose and is easy to sell to the public in terms of financial necessity (TINA) than a clearly political changing of the guard. 

Within the above we are starting to see the outline of a potential strategy in the movement. This means getting out from behind the laptop and doing stuff in the real world.

In order to act you need to understand all the myriad agencies that make up the blob, you need to understand how they are governed, their appointments process, the financial flows, the way in which they use and legitimate each other. You need to know who occupies what key positions, and gather evidence of waste, poor decision making, political activism or corruption. 

Much of this can be done in public - a Panama Papers style website could act as a hub, while journalists or data scientists could foreground discoveries and patterns of corruption, nepotism and waste.  Acting publicly in this way helps fend off accusations the group doing this is some kind of shadowy conspiracy. It also attracts further people and funds.  Consider for example Charlotte Gill’s woke waste which investigates grants, Wig Watch which collates information on the activist judiciary. or Project Afuera, imagine a map of officials and agencies implicated in the grooming gang scandal. These projects are ongoing, the point would be to pool resources and use these as a strategic planning tool as well as a campaigning one.  

That said you probably want to also keep other strategic information non public. For example, which organisations do you want to target. Information about who might actually be on your side, who simply acquiesces to the prevailing power. Similarly you want to wargame how you might shift an organisation and wouldn’t want to give away your strategy. You definitely don’t want to have a big list of who is part of the plan. 

Pre-democratic mandate you not only need to map and plan, you need to build resources: You need competent people and to know who you would appoint to each position, financial power , public support and political experience. This means creating a talented network of like minded people, linking them up, linking them with tech and other aligned sources of financial power, developing parallel institutions, and placing selected people in key positions within existing ones. The strategy should aim firstly at ensuring that there are good competent aligned candidates for key roles, secondly at ensuring that there are parallel institutions which can take over key functions, thirdly at embarrassing and delegitimising target people and institutions. 

Then when a democratic mandate is secured multiple crisis such as financial collapse or scandals which implicate the establishment - for example the grooming gang scandal or bribery of immigration officials can be used to justify an “Afuera” approach. Some institutions should be entirely dissolved, others reformed, the remaining ones streamlined, leadership replaced and changes to the appointment processes entrenched via hard to roll back principles like increased democratic participation or devolving power.

tl;dr

The fundamental reality of political power is that people matter more than policies. The left has grasped this truth and systematically achieved cultural hegemony by placing their supporters throughout key institutions, from universities to civil service positions to cultural organisations. They understood controlling who interprets and implements rules is often more important than the rules themselves.

In contrast, the right has failed to develop both an adequate talent pool and the institutional appetite necessary to challenge this dominance. This strategic oversight has left conservative forces perpetually fighting on terrain controlled by their opponents, where progressive interpretations of law and policy consistently advance left-wing objectives regardless of electoral outcomes.

Given the time constraints and the depth of institutional capture, a traditional "long march through the institutions" approach is no longer viable. Instead, a more targeted and aggressive strategy is required. Before securing a democratic mandate, conservatives must develop replacement personnel and parallel institutions whilst conducting network analysis to identify the most strategically important positions for capture or elimination.

Once in power, the approach should be twofold: place loyalists in essential institutions that must be preserved, whilst applying an "Afuera" strategy to dissolve unnecessary or irredeemably captured organisations. Crisis situations, scandals, and financial pressures should be leveraged to justify these radical changes. Finally, any reforms must be locked in through structural changes that make them difficult to reverse, including careful succession planning to prevent future capture.