Mick Hartley

Paul Ovenden, former director of strategy for Keir Starmer, on how the El-Fattah affair is just the latest in a long string of fringe campaigns that have captured Whitehall. In the Times:

What I knew of his plight during my time in government was largely down to his status as a cause célèbre beloved of Whitehall’s sturdy, clean-shirted diplomats and their scurrying auxiliaries. They mentioned him with such regularity that it became a running joke among my colleagues: a totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues.

Fattah’s sudden crashing into public consciousness has revealed the sheer weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time. But we are only seeing a tiny part of it. Like an iceberg, the vast mass remains hidden from view, buttressed in silence….

The obvious question this raises is how a government elected on a vast parliamentary majority, at a time of mounting public impatience, with fundamental problems to fix, allows itself to become distracted by this sort of political folderol.

The usual answer is one of three things: either it doesn’t know what it wants to do; it knows what it wants to do but finds it too difficult; or it is precisely this flim-flam that it wants to occupy itself with. None of them capture the scale of the problem. What we are witnessing is something at once more profound and more mundane: the supremacy of the Stakeholder State.

The Stakeholder State is not a single phenomenon. Instead, it is the gradual but decisive shift of politics and power away from voters and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore. In this state, the government rows with muffled oars in order to appease a complex coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations. If the language of priorities is the religion of socialism, then consultations and reviews are the sacred texts of the Stakeholder State.

It isn’t a grand conspiracy. There aren’t secret meetings or handshakes. Rather, it is a morbid symptom of a state that has got bigger and bigger while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself.

Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere: in the democratic powers handed to arm’s-length bodies or the many small government departments too powerless or captured to resist lobbying efforts. The Stakeholder State ferments between the NGO and the campaign group, the celebrity letter-writing campaign and the activist lawyers. It is given voice by political podcasts where everyone violently agrees. It is canonised through a corrupted honours system.

It’s something like Dominic Cummings’ “blob” – a Civil Service that needs to be decimated. But Ovenden doesn’t see it that way.

This is not a howl of despair. On the contrary, we should be optimistic. The Stakeholder State looks formidable because it is everywhere, but it is a colossus with feet of clay. Its strength has been gifted to it by politicians and it can all be taken back.

We don’t have to keep picking the pockets of the productive parts of our economy in order to fund inflation-busting pension increases for millionaires or an unsustainable welfare system. We don’t have to strangle small businesses at birth with regulatory burdens. We don’t have to fatten the pockets of wind-turbine operators by paying them not to produce energy. We don’t have to import antisemitic Islamists who wish us harm. And we certainly don’t have to treat British citizenship as a scrap of paper. On all this and more, we can simply choose not to.

The exciting bit is how easy this can be. We don’t need a revolution to achieve it. We don’t even need years of legislative fights. The public consent for change has been granted in every major election and vote going back to 2016. A government with a stiffened spine and renewed purpose could dismantle much of the Stakeholder State quickly. In doing so it would quickly find its nerve again and it would salvage something precious — the sense that politics can deliver the change people are crying out for.

I hope he’s right. Unfortunately “a government with a stiffened spine and renewed purpose” bears very little resemblance to the government we’re stuck with.