THE government’s plan to ban its critics from speaking to civil servants is presented as maintaining political neutrality.
In fact it marks a further politicisation of the Civil Service in keeping with the jumpiness of a Tory Party increasingly intolerant of criticism, the authoritarian drift of the British state and the paranoia of a ruling class that knows its ideological hegemony is under threat.
Karl Marx observed in The German Ideology that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
At each stage of history current social and economic structures seem natural to those living and working within them and so the “common sense” of each period reinforces the status quo. These ruling ideas are reproduced in everything from “mainstream” politics and media to forms of popular entertainment like films and books.
For organisations aiming to overturn the existing order, this has always been a problem, which helps explain the focus on political and self-education in the history of the labour and socialist movements as part of the drive to build “our” culture counterposed to that of our rulers (as well as the strong, continuous influence of capitalist ideologies like liberalism within those movements, which tend to blunt their challenge to the ruling class).
State institutions do not ordinarily face this challenge and major efforts to blacklist or purge non-conforming voices are usually only necessary when the ruling class feels threatened — as with the BBC’s infamous drive to hound out communists during and after the second world war.
Reports that the Civil Service will now be required to carry out extensive vetting to ensure those invited to speak to staff have not made comments “on government policy, political decisions, approaches or individuals in government that could be deemed political,” including checks on whether they may have criticised government on social media, are superficially part of the Tory “culture war” (and were headlined in The Telegraph along those lines: “‘Woke’ anti-government speakers banned from Whitehall”).
Questioned by the Morning Star as to whether this would mean a ban on independent expert advice — for example, whether the ban would apply to a scientist who had been publicly critical of the government’s Covid strategy — a Cabinet Office spokesman is swift to point out that the vetting applies to speakers invited to internal staff events, not advice officially sought by ministers or government departments.
It still implies a draconian extension of political control over the Civil Service and a determination to keep state employees away from ideological subversives. It is also bound to discourage criticism of the authorities by public figures who lose access to government circles as a result.
Disclaimers would carry more weight if this was a one-off, but it ties in with a consistent push against political pluralism by this government.
Before the last election that took the form of the bizarre refusal of Boris Johnson, alone of party leaders, to be interviewed by the BBC’s Andrew Neil — a right-wing presenter seen as far more hostile to Labour than to the Tories.
Though the state broadcaster had engaged in a relentless partisan propaganda war against Labour, designed to demolish the Jeremy Corbyn threat, for more than four years, Johnson was so afraid of even minimal scrutiny that he ducked out of appearing.
A few months later Downing Street prompted a walkout by political journalists when it tried to restrict press conference access to the friendliest titles.
This hostility to media criticism parallels the efforts to suppress Palestine solidarity activities in universities as the range of “acceptable” opinion narrows, a drive linked to Priti Patel’s wider crackdown on the right to protest which at root is about the state’s fear of what happens when the public are exposed to dangerous ideas.
One near-election win for an actual socialist in 2017 is evidently still giving the Establishment nightmares.
