Never has the gulf between our elected and unelected state been as wide as it is today according to Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph. Indeed so great is the disparity, so blatant the discrepancies, they now raise fundamental questions about the legitimacy of the democratic process itself.
Voters who go to the polls in the expectation of one kind of government now find their wishes routinely thwarted by a plethora of institutions supposedly acting on their behalf which nonetheless continue to ignore or override them.
From the Church of England and the BBC to the film and television industry, from the BMA and the National Trust to the teacher training colleges, the country continues to be run by erstwhile political appointees from a Blairite era whose mandate has long since expired. Yet here they are, thriving and surviving along with their successors, years after the political tide went out.
"The evidence is everywhere. It is seemingly business as usual at the BBC, where newly appointed chair Richard Sharp defends the broadcaster’s impartiality (he insists that Auntie’s Brexit coverage was “incredibly balanced”), as the evidence to the contrary mounts and the public’s anger grows. The UK’s top universities are becoming, if anything, even more confident in their virtue-signalling hypocrisy.
While Oxford vows to “decolonise” degrees, it has emerged that two of its colleges have accepted millions of pounds in donations from the Mosley family, money inherited from the notorious fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Both of the colleges in question, St Peter’s and Lady Margaret Hall, were at the time headed by paragons of the soft-Left elite, former BBC controller Mark Damazer and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger."
Given their parliamentary majority, the lack of courage and guile from the present government in taking on these vested interests is disheartening:
"The Tories have made little progress in reining in the “Blob”. Whitehall sinks every project that insults its sensibilities – most recently the Prime Minister’s gumptious hopes to make Britain the Qatar of hydrogen. And so much for the bonfire of the quangos; in fact, their spending has tripled under the Tories.
Though the Government likes to reassure its supporters that it knows these organisations are compromised by bias, it lacks the will to tackle the problem head on. Many Tories have long suspected that the parliamentary standards commissioner, Kathryn Stone, has been treating Brexiteers unfairly, but the Prime Minister retreated from battle last week as soon as he realised that it would be politically controversial."
To be fair the system is far harder to unpick than it might first seem:
"The problem is partly that the power of the soft Left establishment is even stickier than many Brexiteers imagined. It has rigged the system by elevating “process” to an almost spiritual status, while subjectively defining the qualities candidates need to succeed.
This includes the gold-standard ideal of “objectivity”, or “impartiality”. The meaning of these words has been reinvented for the post-modern era, from a commitment to logically revealed truth to a “balanced” positioning between extremities, which tends to mean a commitment to a socially liberal form of technocratic “centrism”.
Equally, since Blair, the definition of “diversity” has been restricted to refer only to professional women and ethnic minorities, who conveniently tend towards a centre-Left worldview, rather than greater openness to the working-class or laymen."
But the public's patience, believes the writer, will soon wear out. The government must act:
"The Tories cannot do nothing. The institutional resistance of public bodies to conservative policies will only get worse over time. Leaving these bodies in the hands of the same old figures also effectively overrules the democratic rejection of the elite old guard that Brexit embodied. The public will not put up indefinitely with being ruled by a professional elite that does not see the world like them."
The full article can be read here with a link to the original beneath it:
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