ANDREW NEIL: Final triumph of the New Establishment: Now with a Leftie lawyer in Downing Street, they've seized the last piece of the jigsaw...
The election of a Labour government with a massive majority is being portrayed, at home and abroad, as the start of a lurch to the Left in Britain. It would be more accurate to see it as putting in place the final piece of a Left-wing jigsaw that already covers all the crucial aspects of national life.
Despite 14 years of allegedly Conservative government, the Left has never stopped making gains in nearly all the important professions and institutions that wield power and shape the most crucial areas of British endeavour: the civil service, the judiciary, the media, the police, the medical profession, academia, our schools, the bewildering array of government agencies which regulate and fund almost every field of human activity, the charities, the arts and entertainment.
In all these areas, the Left increasingly reigns supreme. Capturing the government merely completes the picture of Left-wing dominance. The Cabinet and the House of Commons were the last commanding heights for the Left to be scaled — and now they have been.
Keir Starmer's government represents the clinching consolidation that embeds the Left even more securely in power and facilitates the expansion of its control and influence into the few areas where it is still perceived to be weak. Under our new government there is good chance that the process will become irreversible.
Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner take the knee in 2020
The election of a Labour government with a massive majority is being portrayed, at home and abroad, as the start of a lurch to the Left in Britain, writes Andrew Neil
Tory ministers were either unable to stop, or ignorant of, or did not care about, this ongoing power grab of the Left. What radical students and academics designated in the late 1960s the 'long march through the institutions' — the long-term strategic infiltration of the Left into every important citadel and crevice of public life — got under way when that generation graduated and entered the work force.
Of course, it was never centrally coordinated or organised by any kind of Left-wing mastermind. There is no conspiracy theory at work here.
It just sort of happened naturally as increasingly Left-wing students moved from university to take up jobs in key professions and positions that required graduates, from the law to broadcasting to public service, in much the same way as seriously woke graduates from elite universities today take up plum jobs in newsrooms and broadcast studios, transforming the workplace culture to fit in with their norms in the process.
But it was really given legs during the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown years of Labour government (1997-2010) when public appointments went overwhelmingly to centre-Left types sympathetic to the government's political outlook, including many who had been Labour activists or donors.
The process was never reversed when the Tories came back to power after a 13-year absence in 2010. More Tory-inclined folks got a look in but Left-wing types continued to enjoy the spoils of the public purse. They became increasingly ensconced in public life until they and their kind became impossible to move.
Over time, even professions that had traditionally been regarded as conservative — the judiciary, the police, the military — moved steadily Leftwards.
Judges, once depicted in popular culture as reactionary, became increasingly liberal, a trend reinforced by the leftward tilt of a legal profession which grew wealthy on the relentless expansion of human rights cases, state regulation and judicial activism. The Left-wing lawyers of yesterday became the judges of today.
Police chiefs increasingly began to sound like social workers in uniform, which was hardly surprising since a degree in sociology became a passport to advance in law enforcement.
Even the military was not immune. Officers who prioritised diversity and inclusion over fighting or organisational abilities could expect speedier advance up the greasy pole. The RAF was recently engulfed in a scandal over such attitudes, which risked imperilling national security.
Sir Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria outside 10 Downing Street after the Labour leader was appointed Britain's 58th Prime Minister following a landslide General Election victory
The universities, always a bastion of Left-wing thinking, have become ever more so. A recent survey of academics found at least 75 per cent were Left-inclined, some pretty far-out Left, while fewer than one in five could be regarded as even moderately Right-leaning (only one in 10 among academics in the humanities and social sciences).
Campus intolerance is on the rise — and not just among students. More than 50 per cent of academics admit they'd feel uncomfortable sitting next to a Leave supporter over lunch; fewer than 40 per cent would want to sit next to somebody who holds gender-critical views.
Those who don't naturally fit into the Left-wing consensus are often advised to keep their opinions to themselves if they want academic advancement or research funds.
The teaching unions are even worse, pretty much a one-party state of Left-wing ideology.
The media is travelling down this road, too. There was a time when the Left used to rail against the 'Tory press'. These days it barely exists, while all major broadcasters are various shades of Left.
The BBC, as our leading public broadcaster, is regularly singled out for its liberal-Left culture and attitudes, which it has. In reality its main competitors — such as Sky, ITV, Channel 4 — tilt the same way, sometimes more so.
Efforts are sometimes made to introduce a greater variety of views to improve impartiality. But it rarely works. Today's broadcasters, it seems, are enthusiastic for all manner of diversity, except diversity of opinion. With Labour back in power nothing will change. If anything they might move even further Left. Who would stop them?
But perhaps the area of Left-leaning dominance that is best financed and most powerful is to be found in the myriad state agencies known as quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations) — public bodies financed by the taxpayer, at arm's length from the government but with members appointed by government and often with substantial funds and regulatory powers.
Quangos are now ubiquitous in British public life. There are almost 300 of them with a combined annual budget of around £250 billion — an incredible 20 per cent of public spending — and range from huge operations (the Environment Agency) to prestigious organisations (the Arts Council) to obscure ones that most folk have never heard of (Active Travel England) and whose duties and responsibilities are a mystery.
They are a huge gravy train for the great-and-the-good Left. They are largely populated by metropolitan middle-class professionals who have little aptitude for business and profess a fashionable dislike for the profit-motive, which goes down well with their peers. But they like the status and rewards of high-profile public life.
The Tony Blair-Gordon Brown years of Labour government ran from 1997 to 2010, with John Prescott (centre) as deputy for many of them
Many have carved out lucrative careers as well-paid quangocrats, boasting a portfolio of senior positions on multiple bodies, moving between different ones with the help of a well-oiled, mutually reinforcing network.
London's most fashionable clubs and restaurants are regularly frequented by our capital's quango kings and queens. They are the new aristocracy, the modern, public sector equivalent of the old-boy network in the City.
As a young, trouble-making editor of The Sunday Times in the 1980s I used to rail against the Establishment and complain that we'd never be a proper meritocracy as long as so many positions of power went to those from public schools and Oxbridge.
One of my targets was a rival editor — Charles (now Lord) Moore: Eton, Trinity College, Cambridge, The Spectator, the Telegraph and the Lords (and author of a magisterial biography of Margaret Thatcher).
An easy target, obviously, though I only went for him when he attacked me for being critical of the Monarchy. Honest.
I recently interviewed him, describing him as someone 'at the apex of the Establishment'. But he later penned a diary article that I found revelatory and made me think again. 'I think Andrew misunderstands what the modern British establishment is,' he began.
'Today's establishment consists neither of the snooty bogeymen of his youth, nor of iconoclastic meritocrats… Much more than in the past, it is a public-sector affair (no landowners, for example), populated by people who, while lauding 'diversity', are uniform in opinion.
'They are entranced by concepts which scarcely existed when Andrew first stormed the citadels of power — 'governance', 'inclusion', 'sustainability', 'leaning in', net zero, 'activism', 'stakeholding', 'gender fluidity', 'LGBT+', BLM, CSR [corporate social responsibility]. They run almost everything which the state controls and most semi-state offshoots and dependents, such as quangos, big charities, universities, museums, regulators, the judiciary and the BBC.
With Labour back in power nothing will change. If anything they might move even further Left. Who would stop them? asks Andrew Neil
'They run very few things for which people pay voluntarily from their wallets rather than compulsorily through their taxes. True, many are barons or baronesses, but none is aristocratic. To qualify, they must hold certain opinions — anti-Brexit, pro-abortion, anti-grammar schools, pro-mass immigration, anti-fossil fuels, anti-Boris [Johnson].
'In our different ways, neither Andrew Neil nor I are part of this charmed circle. We can only press our noses against the windows of their eco-offices and stare resentfully at the establishment privilege displayed.'
I read and re-read his words. He was right. He had captured perfectly the new establishment populated by the public-sector Left which has multiplied and prospered no matter who was in power. The powerbrokers the Tories did nothing about for 14 years.
They are the people who really run Britain, no matter what politicians are in power.
Just as you had to have gone to the right public school and Oxbridge college to fit comfortably into the old establishment so you now have to think a certain way, display the correct right-on attitudes on issues that are deemed important and prefer public service (well-remunerated, of course) to private enterprise to be part of the new establishment that calls the shots.
This still being a British Establishment we're talking about, even one of the Left, it's naturally still not a disadvantage to have gone to a posh school and Oxbridge.
Just ask any quangocrat.
There was a time when opposition politicians promised a 'bonfire of the quangos' when they got into power. Of course, it never happened. Too many pay cheques, too many school fees depended on them.
Starmer hasn't indicated he will introduce any cull. Instead, he promises a plethora of new quangos: an Office for Value for Money, a National Wealth Fund, Great British Energy, Border Security Command, an Integrity and Ethics Commission, Skills England, a National Cladding Taskforce.
It is all largely virtue-signalling nonsense in terms of making this a better country. But it means more well-paid and prestigious jobs for the right-thinking boys and girls. Lovely Jubbly.
As Conservatives survey the wreckage around them this weekend after their thumping on Thursday, their first conclusion should be that what went before under their rule cannot happen again.
If they can't confront the permanent centres of Left-wing power because they are too strongly embedded, then there is little point in a future centre-Right government.
The new populist right has its unsavoury aspects. But it does have a bracing desire to take the fight to the enemy. That should be harnessed.
It might be too late. The Left's roots might be too deeply embedded for them to be pulled out.
But unless a revived Right — if there is to be such a thing — is prepared to confront the challenge, then, even if it does one day win a majority of the votes, it might be back in government but it would still not be in power.
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