CONSERVATIVE politicians howling about Sue Gray’s prospective job as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff are rank hypocrites.
If the top civil servant’s willingness to work for the Labour Party “undermines the Civil Service” or suggests that her role in writing the report on Boris Johnson’s lockdown-breaching knees-ups was a “left-wing stitch-up” all along — views of the esteemed Alexander Stafford and Jacob Rees-Mogg respectively — then we might want to look at the political affiliations of other supposedly neutral public servants.
The Johnson whom Rees-Mogg suggests was maligned obtained an £800,000 loan with assistance from banker — and major Tory donor — Richard Sharp just weeks before the latter was appointed chairman of the BBC.
A suitable guardian of our “impartial” public broadcaster no doubt. As suitable, anyway as its director-general Tim Davie, a former Conservative Party politician.
It is not Conservatives but Labour members and trade unionists who should really be concerned.
Gray was second permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, among the most senior civil servants. Her decision to run the leader of the opposition’s team shows that Britain’s permanent state and the Labour Party leadership are now extremely close.
The politics of that permanent state should be clearer now than they were a few years ago. State institutions are not neutral. They exist to preserve ruling-class power and maintain the political, economic and social status quo.
This was dramatically revealed when a rare challenge to that status quo arose in one institution — Parliament — in the form of Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition leadership, which raised the possibility that a socialist might become prime minister.
Longstanding conventions were quickly dropped. An army general briefed the media that the military might “mutiny” if Corbyn were elected. BBC operatives arranged stunts like the resignation on-air of senior Labour MPs to maximise political damage to its leadership.
Top spooks including former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, most associated with the bogus intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq, openly railed against him as a security threat. And the Civil Service did its bit, with senior figures briefing the media in 2019 that Corbyn was “too frail physically and mentally” to be prime minister and suggesting that these considerations might unfortunately force him to step down if elected.
Those parts of the state which are not subject to democratic scrutiny only look neutral when the system looks secure.
Gray, like Starmer, is a thoroughly statal figure, even if her “strikingly unorthodox” career break from the Civil Service to run a pub on the Northern Irish border during the 1980s was not actually a front for work as a spy (as was speculated at the time, but always categorically denied by her).
Like Starmer — who went from director of public prosecutions to MP and now Labour leader — her affiliation with the British state machine is total.
This is the party that issued a reminder of a rule change last month, telling constituency parties their affiliations to a wide range of organisations (including the Stop the War Coalition, Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Palestine Solidarity Campaign) are considered void and any new affiliations must be approved by the national executive.
Labour’s closeness to the state is the other side of the coin to its enforced separation from grassroots activism. The party “of public service, not protest” is to be a party of technocrats and career politicians insulated from any contact with unvetted, ordinary people.
What a party to represent the interests of the labour movement during the biggest upsurge in industrial action for 40 years, at a time of profound crisis for British capitalism.
Labour under current management is not going to address the issues that have workers walking out in every sector of the economy. The labour movement should treat this as the serious political problem it is.
