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The most powerful unelected figures in the land

Gavin Williamson should have remembered the National Security Secretariat serve the system, not each government - and Jeremy Corbyn would be wise to remember that too, says NICK WRIGHT

GAVIN WILLIAMSON was chief whip, responsible for discipline, in the most fractious and disunited parliamentary Tory Party in living memory. He helped Theresa May become prime minister and called in the debt to be appointed defence secretary. Williamson then set about proving his inadequacy for the job with such a catalogue of maladroit gaffes and juvenile utterances as to evoke disbelief and hilarity among the military types nominally junior to him in rank and status.

Of course, Britain’s military and security establishment more or less runs itself conscious that ministers come and go while the defence of the imperial realm traditionally depends on the permanent caste of professionals to which they belong by birth or preference.

Where the arriviste Williamson came unstuck was in not taking account of the new importance the security apparatus enjoys.

Leaks from recent Cabinets have become so frequent as to be routine. I don’t suppose much has changed, but the last time I was in Number Ten my phone was routinely confiscated and only returned on leaving. Nowadays Theresa May confiscates the phones of her ministers and has been known to lock in these unfortunates without lunch in a hopeless effort to get her media management under control.

Williamson leaked from the National Security Council and swiftly found out that even ministerial rank offers no protection from investigation when this relatively recently constituted body has the confidentiality of its proceedings compromised.

It was over the supposed threat to national security entailed in the decision of the NSC to sanction the award of the 5G contract to a Chinese company that so exercised Williamson.

Ironically it was the triangulating technical expertise of Britain’s home-grown communications specialists that nailed him. This demonstrates that the security state operates even against the executive and rather demonstrates the value of the impeccably orthodox Marxist-Leninist (and Gramscian) notion of the relative autonomy of the superstructure.

Top dog in the National Security Council is the National Security Adviser. This is no anonymous securicrat but, since April 2017, the highly visible Sir Mark Sedwill. Late last year he added Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service to his portfolio making him the most powerful unelected figure in the land.

This unprecedented concentration of roles formerly kept entirely separate is an indication of the ways in which heightened anxiety about the security of the state has begun to erode confidence in the more informal ways in which ruling class hegemony has hitherto been ensured.

The NSC is formed of senior ministers with a clutch of sub committees attended by a wider range of ministers responsible for variously, nuclear deterrence and security; threats, hazards, resilience; contingencies; strategic defence, security review implementation and cross-government funding.

This set-up raises the intriguing prospect of these bodies filled by members of a Corbyn Cabinet elected on a manifesto that might quickly breach the established parameters of state security and foreign policy.

While this structure provides nominal political oversight the day-to-day operations are vested in a National Security Secretariat of police, military, security and intelligence professionals.

Let us speculate on the consequences of a new government which resolved to cease interfering in the affairs of states like Afghanistan and Iraq, came to the conclusion that diplomatic, economic, military and security co-operation with the Saudi regime was incompatible with an ethical foreign policy and decided that security co-operation with the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was untenable while this organisation covertly and not so secretly sponsors those jihadi factions that we are nominally in conflict with elsewhere.

It will have very well-informed expertise immediately available in the very person of the Cabinet Secretary and National Security Adviser.

For Sir Mark Sedwill was Her Majesty’s ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010 and then Nato’s Senior Civilian Representative working closely with the US military commanders on the ground.

He had an impressive range of responsibilities before that that included a spell in the Security Coordination Department and the Gulf War Emergency Unit before taking up duties in Egypt, and then Iraq, where he was a UN weapons inspector in the search to find Saddam’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Given his proximity to the decision-making circles he may well have had an insight into just how fruitless this search might be. This was followed by work in Cyprus — the location of Britain’s intelligence and electronic surveillance facility for the region.

He was private secretary to the foreign secretary Robin Cook but stayed on when Cook resigned in opposition to the war. He thus served Jack Straw in the period leading up to the 2003 Iraq invasion.

He will have gained an insight into the role of Pakistan’s ISI when he was Deputy High Commissioner to Pakistan and then was able to familiarise himself with the disparate aims of the competing imperial powers while serving as the deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa Department of the Foreign Office.

Labour’s prospective Home Secretary Diane Abbott brings something of a shared heritage with Sir Mark. She too was a Civil Service fast track recruit but instead of a steady climb through the interstices of the Establishment she became MP for working-class Hackney North.

She can assure herself that Sir Mark is no globe-trotting foreign policy wonk out of touch with the affairs on the home front. He had a useful two-year spell as international director of the UK Border Agency. In 2013 he became firstly permanent secretary to Theresa May at the Home Office, then National Security Adviser in 2017 before acting up as Cabinet Secretary in mid-2018 and taking the substantive post later that year.

Simply to state these bald facts about the career of just one senior public servant is enough to illustrate the magnitude of the problems that face a radical Labour ministry if it is to remain true to its manifesto.

This is not to doubt the personal probity of Sir Mark or indeed, any of his colleagues. Compared to some of the private sector retreads that have populated senior branches of the Civil Service over the past years career civil servants can sometimes provide more of a public service focus than any of the Treasury-driven and the market-obsessed neoliberals that have proved so disruptive. The probation service privatisation being just the latest example.

Senior civil servants might provide further evidence of their devotion to the public service ethos if they stayed clear of appointment to any of the security, armaments, aerospace, energy and oil monopolies that drive our present foreign policy choices. In fact, it might be a good idea to make such post-retirement perks a breach of the Civil Service Code and the military’s Queen’s Regulations.

The civil and public service machinery of government — or to put it in Marxist terms the administrative apparatus of capitalist class rule — is a vast human endeavour. It is staffed by hundreds of thousands of people whose political views and policy preferences are not necessarily shared by the government of the day.

It is likely that a very large number of them will welcome a left-led Labour government with enthusiasm not least because decades of privatisation, cut backs and pay freezes have worsened working conditions and reduced their salaries. But beyond these material concerns there is a groundswell of opinion that senses in the prospect of a more progressive government something of a return to a public service ethos.

These attitudes are not entirely absent in the higher reaches but political realism and real life experience suggests that further up the hierarchy a combination of material interest, personal connections, class and education background, political views and ideology drastically reduces the sympathy a left-wing Labour government might enjoy.

A good illustration of this appeared in the Daily Telegraph when Sir Richard Dearlove, former director general of the secret intelligence service MI6, argued “how profoundly dangerous it would be for the nation if Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister.”

Sir Richard then went on to speculate that if Jeremy Corbyn had applied for a post in MI6 he would fail the vetting process.

This raises the intriguing problem in deciding what might be the criteria for filling government posts under a Corbyn government given that we have on the authority of none other than the former head of MI6 that fidelity to government policy should be a decisive factor.

Electing a left-led Labour government is but the beginning of a process in which the ways in which the machinery of capitalist state power is deployed will be revealed by the response to each of the radical policies that voters will have chosen.

It will be a steep learning process for the members of such a government and, in defending the policies which they will have chosen, a steep learning process for the working class and its allies.

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