This week in Brexitland, April 11, 2024

Examining the British “deep state” and what that concept really tells us about anything

Last month, when Liz Truss appeared at CPAC, an American hard right political conference, she had this to say:

“What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.”

When asked what a “quango” was, as this term is not known to Americans, she continued:

“A quango is a quasi non-governmental organisation. In America you call it the administrative state or the deep state. But we have more than 500 of these quangos in Britain and they run everything.”

And suddenly here, out of the blue seemingly, we had a very recent, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, indulging in American deep state conspiracy theories. This is an unfortunate ideology that the alt-right in the States has expanded upon massively over the last few years. What I want to examine here is whether the idea of a “deep state” has any validity in the UK and further, talk about how someone like Liz Truss is in fact a creation of the deep state, if one can be said to exist in the United Kingdom, whether she is aware of that or not.

First of all, to explain the deep state idea as it pertains to America. It is essentially something that has long been there in US politics, given new life and conspiratorial underpinnings by Donald Trump. It is the tension between the notion of the United States as one nation, with a strong federal government tying it all together, or the idea of it as a collection of separate states, with the federal government existing simply for defence and money printing purposes.

Like most of American politics, this all makes zero sense when you take the same concept and foist it into the middle of British politics. The size and reach of our civil service has a lot to do with Britain having had an Empire - and given one of the things Brexit was supposed to be about was taking things out of the hands of Brussels and bringing them back to Whitehall, Brexit implies a larger civil service - which is also what leaving the EU has delivered in practice.

Which brings us to this pertinent question: what exactly is the right’s vision for a post-Brexit Britain? Is it a revitalised Anglosphere, with Britain taking a leading role? Adjacent to this, a Commonwealth that strengthens its connectivity through greater trading ties amongst member states? All of that would require more of a deep state, a greater number of civil servants to pull it off. It is the very opposite of the libertarian anarchy being called for by large sections of the British right. Given this paradox, it’s baffling even trying to figure out what it is the right actually wants now, what sort of Britain they wish to create. No wonder the civil servants can’t seem to deliver on this utopia they crave when they cannot define it themselves.

Yet we haven’t even got to the crux of the matter, which is this: if there is anyone in Britain that I can think of who has benefitted from anything remotely like a “deep state” in Britain over the last decade, it is Liz Truss herself. And that, maybe more than anything else, demonstrates how flawed the thinking of the new right in Britain is at present.

In 2008, Truss became the Deputy Director of Reform, a Westminster think tank - aka one of those NGO things that she lambasted last month in America for being part of the deep state. This role was pivotal to her becoming an MP - thus, if NGOs are a part of the deep state, the deep state was what opened the door for her to everything that followed, all the way to Downing Street.

Truss’ career in government was defined by her skipping from brief to brief, not really distinguishing herself in a positive way in any of them. To a large extent, this is not completely her fault - the cabinet has been musical chairs for some time now, with people being moved around a ridiculous amount. Still, her time as DEFRA Secretary was defined more than anything else by her terrible speech at 2014 Tory conference - you know the one, where she goes on about apples and cheese for ages before delivering the “pork markets” meme. Before that, when she was a minister in the Department for Education, she seemed confused about how many people it actually takes to run a nursery; much later on, her time as International Trade Secretary is largely remembered for a much criticised trade deal with Australia, one that even members of her own parliamentary party have lambasted as being terrible for Britain.

And yet, she made it all the way to Number 10. How? By leaning pretty heavily on the deep state she seems to now blame for her downfall. The basic competency of the civil service covers for even the most inept of ministers and Secretaries of State. If we stripped away the “deep state” in Britain, there would be nowhere for certain members of the government to hide any longer.

That brings us to the real point here: how was Brexit supposed to change Great Britain in a positive way? Almost eight years on from the referendum, no one seems to have a cogent answer to that question yet. Mostly because they don’t know what kind of Britain they want to live in.

Thank you for reading. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do, and I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.