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Britain’s ‘deep state’ thwarted my plans, Liz Truss tells US far-right summit
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Neoliberal
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Everyday I wish the Deep State was real.
Seriously though.
If the Deep State were actually real half the problems the anti-Deep State people complain about wouldn’t exist.
What they imply by deep state isn't real, but their actual complaints is real - policies are enacted by normal, everyday workers, who are tasked with and usually pretty fastidious about following the laws that might not allow for immediate implementation of any crazy idea a regressive might think up and demand happen that day.
That's the deep state - the workers doing the actual job of administering the government.
These people want to be monarchs and anyone who doesn't bow to them is the enemy.
I mean, it is true that there's an unelected administrative bureaucracy that the government -- any government -- needs to function. And the UK is well known for having a particularly strong civil service with its own views and preferences. It's the country that gave us Yes, Minister.
So yeah, there is a deep state that thwarts politicians do try to do overly crazy stuff. And that's a good thing.
The UK has an independent civil service but the problem with Truss's premiership isn't that they thwarted her, it's that she thwarted them - if she hadn't broken with convention by deliberately freezing out the OBR from what she was planning (meaning there were no independent fiscal projections to go alongside her budget), then either the OBR could have warned her about the consequences, or at the very least the bond market might have reacted less violently to the announcements.
She's crafted a narrative that some left-wing state establishment brought her down, when the actual facts are that her own party removed her after she spooked the financial markets - neither of them being much of a bastion of leftist thinking. The civil service quietly took all this lying down, which is what the markets (which tend to like good economic governance - OBR, central bank independence, etc) were so worried about.