An excellent piece of polemical comment by Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail.
This piece exposes to a mainstream audience what many of us have long suspected, which is that there is a disproportionate number of card carrying Lefties running public services and charities.
This fine rant against the deeply embedded ‘nexus of Left-wing schmoozery’ shows how Leftists pushed their way or were inserted by Labour supporters into the charity, local governance and quango sectors during the Blair/Brown years. These people still have a major influence on the UK, even though Blair and Brown are now but a nasty memory and a huge leftover fiscal debt.
The infiltration of public and charitable bodies such as those mentioned truly underlines the urgent need for a change in politicians. Too many of our current crowd of politicos in the Lib, Lab and Con parties have connections either past or present with such infiltrated bodies, or are frightened of the noise that they make if they criticise them. Also there are those, such as the Prime Minister who should be clearing up this mess but instead are making the problems worse.
We need independently minded politicians, not party hacks who will trim the state of the handsomely rewarded Left wing ‘make-workers’ in places like the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Forestry Commission the Charity Commission and so many other places. There also needs to be an attack on the so called ‘charities’, such as the NSPCC and others who take vast amounts of funding from the taxpayer in order to lobby the government to give more taxpayers money to their pet causes.
The Blair/Brown governments encouraged the growth of a leftist fifth column that would frustrate any future government who tried to change policies instituted by the Labour party. It is now time for this fifth column to be kicked out of their well upholstered chairs and genuinely apolitical people put in their place. The Labour party made a mockery of the Northcote-Trevelyan rules on civil service impartiality and it is vital that Labours public sector stables are well and truly cleaned of Labour’s placemen. Labour recreated the old ‘rotten’ civil service and people do seem to have been recruited and promoted on the grounds of ‘preferment, patronage or purchase’ which the 19th Century Civil Service reforms were made to counter.
Quentin Letts really hit the nail on the head when he said:
“Great institutions seem to have lost sight of impartial public service and have become infected by politicised turf wars and blame-evasion.
This, I am afraid, is the stuff of serious cultural collapse. From time to time a scurvy journalist (soon, of course, to be regulated by a new organ of this mottled state) dares to point this out. We are then told that there is ‘nothing untoward’ and that ‘no political influence’ has occurred.
But this refusal to question institutional bias may remind us of Rene the café owner in TV’s ’Allo ’Allo. When caught by his wife in the arms of another woman, Rene would call his spouse ‘you stupid woman’ and insist he was innocent. Officialdom tries to pull the same trick.
When card-carrying Labourite Dame Suzi Leather chaired the Charity Commission, we were assured that her stewardship was non-political. The Charity Commission, pre-Leather, had been a dusty, faultlessly non-controversial body. Under Ed Balls admirer Dame Suzi, it became entangled in politics as it tried to destroy independent schools.”
Mr Letts hit out at the corruption of our public life by the Left and described the situation as ‘Connections, connections, connections. Favour, favour, favour. “
The list of major bodies that are now, as Mr Letts stated, controlled by those with Leftist sympathies is staggering and depressing. Here is just a short excerpt from the list given in the article. He said:
“At the BBC, former Labour Cabinet minister James Purnell has been tossed a £295,000 job as ‘director, strategy and digital’. The BBC does not comprehend the whiffiness of an ex Broadcasting Minister being given such a well-paid job at the very organisation he once supervised.
Nor does its new director-general, Lord Hall, accept that the BBC’s already patchy reputation for political objectivity is worsened by having a former Culture Secretary in its executive ranks. Cabinet experience was once reserved for non-executive BBC chairmen. Now it is in the very cockpit of day-to-day management.
Elsewhere, the Environment Agency is run by another former Labour Culture Secretary, Lord Smith. The Agency’s remit includes climate change, flooding, rubbish disposal, wildlife and more. Almost three years since Labour was ejected from office, this influential body is still being run by a leading Blairite.
The Forestry Commission, useless and expensive, was until recently chaired by Pam Warhurst. She calls herself a ‘community leader’ but ‘former Labour council leader’ is more accurate.
The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts is run by Geoff Mulgan, Tony Blair’s former head of policy.
Jenny Watson is head of the Electoral Commission, which regulates party donations and organises elections. ‘Modern Militant’ Miss Watson, a former Left-wing campaigner, earns £100,000 for a three-day week and has just been given another four-year term. Her lover Andrew Puddephatt is a former Labour leader of Hackney Council.
Media regulator Ofcom (now there’s a handy lever of power) is in the suave hands of Ed Richards, previously head of ‘corporate strategy’ at the BBC.Mr Richards, you may be shocked to learn, is a former policy adviser to Tony Blair. He is a chum of the Milibands and — bingo! — James Purnell.”
The rest of the list makes worrying reading for anyone concerned that those who administer the organs of the state should, as far as possible, be politically neutral in how they carry out their jobs. Many of these people, especially those at the BBC and the state supported charities such as the NSPCC are anything but politically neutral.
The fact that Cameron of all people, has increased the number of leftists appointed to public bodies shows that we urgently need to stop voting tribally, and vote for those independent candidates and candidates from minor parties who offer a fresh outlook. Such candidates and parties may at least promise to do something about the rampant lack of integrity and political corruption in public life. This overt political corruption that was started in the Blair/Brown years, still rampantly carries on under the useless and feeble David Cameron, who has shown that he cannot be trusted to sort out this problem.
Change cannot happen without changing the politicians and change them we must, because the lower levels of government and administration cannot be reformed without action from the elected representatives higher up.
The politics of the unrepresentative political left must not be allowed to metastasise for a moment longer in the public sector because it does great damage to it. Also, those charities that have become vehicles for leftist individuals and causes should be shunned, and their representatives told why they are being shunned, they do not deserve either our time or our money.
It is time for a purge of the political appointments that have been made to the great and not so great public bodies of the United Kingdom and the medicine needs to be effective and administered soon.
Links
Original excellent article by Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail
Read the rest it’s excellent
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2308301/How-Lefts-grip-Britain-tightening.html#ixzz2QL5HC8RN
Fake Charities – a list of those so called charities which gain either the majority or a significant proportion of their funds from Government or government agencies. Currently this site appears to be down but if it comes up again here is its URL http://fakecharities.org/
On a similar line from this blog:
Cabinet Office fund a ‘Multicultural Association’ in Rotherham which appears to have very tight connections with the local authority and the NHS. Yet more Left wing backstratching? https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2013/04/07/the-cabinet-office-wasting-our-money-on-utter-rubbish/
Possible Labour party backscratching in Bolton UK
The History bit: The 19th Century Northcote-Trevelyan Civil Service Reforms
Brilliant Post – an education in itself and something that, at last, contains the real ring of truth.
Thank you. The sort of self serving leftie scum that Mr Letts draws attention to does need to be removed from our body politic. Such people even if they are not able to influence policy directly are often able to frustrate badly needed reform.
People are rightly critical of the excesses of our ‘benefits culture’, & the way it, in conjunction with a left-dominated education system, throttles initiative & induces dependency on an ever-expanding state.
Well, as we can see from this post, there is another ‘benefits culture’; one with a far more sinister intent. Lots of large taxpayer-funded salaries & perks for the, as the Germans say, Gutmenschen, the ‘good people’ who know what’s best for us: the well-connected, well-heeled ‘progressive’ left – a shadow government that, eventually, wants to control…well, everything. New Labour, like a defeated, retreating army, salted the earth with so many political placements that even though they’re ‘out of power’, they’re pulling strings at the highest level, witness the Common Purpose presence behind the latest press curb. Let alone the institutions rife with the left-liberal agenda. Even if Cameron wanted to break this stranglehold, which he obviously doesn’t, he’d have his work cut out. So, it’s going to take hard, intelligent, outsider politicians with unbreakable conviction to, firstly, expose this cabal’s gravy train for all to see, &, secondly, start to dismantle it. That begins by severing the funding to ‘charities’, taking the knife to the self-serving quangos and getting the civil service back to an impartial status. Only a few days ago we heard of a senior civil servant who thought it his personal crusade to promote ‘global welfare’ – flooding this country with immigrants from the Third World, to the detriment of those who pay his extortionate salary – he was more concerned with people from Burundi than Birmingham! This is the mindset we’re up against.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297776/SATURDAY-ESSAY-Why-Left-epic-mistake-immigration.html
The link to fakecharities.org doesn’t seem to work, so here’s one that does: http://www.libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/at-last-a-comprehensive-report-on-fake-charities/