The British government is dominated by a self-perpetuating and power-hungry “stakeholder state” undermining democracy, a former top aide to British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared in a column published on Thursday.
A top ally to British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer who was forced out of his position over sexually explicit message leaks has attempted to put space between his former boss and the Alaa Abd el-Fattah affair, in which an Egyptian blogger associated with the “Arab Spring” turmoil and carrying a history of allegedly violent public comments obtained a UK passport.
Writing in The Times, the British newspaper of record, the former Downing Street director of strategy Paul Ovenden claimed that getting now-infamous “f*ing hate all white people” blogger el-Fattah released from Egyptian prison to the United Kingdom was an ‘obsession’ of the deep state imposed on the Labour government from within, absolving Starmer.
The deep state, swamp, or blob has long been a narrative of the pro-reform right in the United Kingdom, just as it has for MAGA America. Apparently unable to bring himself to use the same language as his political enemies to describe the same phenomenon, Ovenden created a novel taxonomy, christening the powers-that-be causing the Labour government to step on endless rakes the “stakeholder state”.
This is, he said, “a political perma-class that exists within every party and every department, one whose entire focus is on preserving their status within a system that gives them meaning.”
The el-Fattah affair has “revealed the sheer weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time,” Ovenden said, claiming that in his year at the top of British politics, the frequency with which senior diplomats brought up the Egyptian writer recently given British citizenship for uncertain ends “became a running joke among my colleagues: a totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues.”
Explaining his thesis, left-wing political organiser and Starmer ally Ovenden wrote in The Times:
The Stakeholder State is not a single phenomenon. Instead, it is the gradual but decisive shift of politics and power away from voters and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore. In this state, the government rows with muffled oars in order to appease a complex coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations. If the language of priorities is the religion of socialism, then consultations and reviews are the sacred texts of the Stakeholder State.
It isn’t a grand conspiracy. There aren’t secret meetings or handshakes. Rather, it is a morbid symptom of a state that has got bigger and bigger while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself.
Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere: in the democratic powers handed to arm’s-length bodies or the many small government departments too powerless or captured to resist lobbying efforts. The Stakeholder State ferments between the NGO and the campaign group, the celebrity letter-writing campaign and the activist lawyers. It is given voice by political podcasts where everyone violently agrees. It is canonised through a corrupted honours system.
Whether this bid to claim the deep state – which the political left created and controls – is the true cause for the Labour government’s failings will be taken seriously will emerge in time. Whether the headline claims were meant as covering fire for Starmer or not, the piece also contained scathing criticism of the government Ovenden had served in, identifying “picking the pockets of the productive parts of our economy” to pay for “unsustainable” welfare and the strangling of small businesses with red tape.
Ovenden wrote:
We don’t have to fatten the pockets of wind-turbine operators by paying them not to produce energy. We don’t have to import antisemitic Islamists who wish us harm. And we certainly don’t have to treat British citizenship as a scrap of paper. On all this and more, we can simply choose not to.
The comments may also be an attempt to launch a Dominic Cummings of the left. Like Ovenden, Cummings was also a top insider – albeit inside a Conservative government – who crashed out after a probity scandal and has since become one of the leading critics of the UK deep state. Ovenden’s ouster is widely understood to have been released as part of an internal party power struggle.
Ovenden’s writing comes after the British government was plunged into yet another self-made PR disaster when it decided to tout its importation of an allegedly openly racist Egyptian revolutionary as a great achievement of state power and human rights. Dissident “blogger” Alaa Abd El-Fattah had previously written that he “fucking hate white people … a blight on the earth they are. Good thing they stopped breeding” and that “Random shooting of white males” would have social benefits in service of anti-racism.
The scandal touched both of Britain’s legacy parties of the government: while Labour had brought him to the UK, the Conservatives had decided to give him British citizenship during their last period of power. Calls have emerged that El-Fattah should be stripped of his citizenship, deported, or both. The affair has also triggered a wider conversation on British citizenship itself, to whom it should be awarded, and how freely the government gives it away, much to the chagrin of the pro-open-borders left.
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