The Long March through the Institutions was advocated by Rudi Dutschke, a German, Communist student activist in 1971: he saw the progress of revolution stifled by the established order and so wrote that Communists could subvert this order by infiltrating the institutions which make it up.
As those with Marxist or cultural-Marxist ideas have apparently taken control of all institutions, the conspiracy would seem to have been sprung. Something does not feel right about this neat theory though. For one thing, giant conspiracies do not work, and for another, writing your whole plan in a popular book for all the world to see is a terrible way to run a secret conspiracy.
It has happened though, and as ConHome reminds us frequently, research has found five times more labour supporters have been appointed to public bodies than Tories.
Conspiracy or natural selection?
There may be an element of deliberate exclusion of Tories. This might be the sort of action which is co-ordinated over dinner parties or WhatsApp groups. This is a conspiracy, but a localised one rather than anything centrally directed.
It can be hard to deny a conspiracy against conservative-minded candidates when we see apparently co-ordinated attacks on such appointees bursting out into the media. This might just be a ‘Twitter congregation’. More studies would be needed to determine how much planned co-ordination goes into such attacks (but with few conservatives now in academic positions it may be impossible to commission such research).
There may be other explanations though for the overwhelming dominance of Marxists and cultural-Marxists in institutional positions; essentially that it has been a natural process caused by the characters and motivations of those involved; an osmosis where the red particles pass more easily in through a membrane and others more easily pass out.
A body which effectively appoints its own successors, or which has an independent appointments board, will through natural processes entrench its own prejudices. In making appointments, the board will be charged with choosing those considered sound and sensible: it is natural then to think that their own views are the sound, sensible view and that those who differ from them are lacking in principle or intellect. If charged with ensuring political neutrality, it is natural to think of their own views as neutral and others as political or “fringe”. Furthermore, it is natural for a board to choose as colleagues those with whom one can work in harmony, who will not challenge their colleague’s own views and assumptions.
A system fine-tuned to fail
A quick review of the positions offered in the quangocracy shows an interesting pattern: most senior positions are part-time jobs, paid well for the few hours the holder is expected to work, but not as a career salary. Therefore anyone who wishes to take a management role in a quango must be one who has the hours to spend: an academic, a semi-retired company director, or more particularly an existing quangocrat with a portfolio of positions to keep his family fed. These are not career-structure positions: they are to be filled by those with a “proven track record” in the field, which excludes new blood and favours those in the system.
The biggest ‘Public appointments’ advertising section is in The Guardian (which is essentially a socialist political party which happens to run a newspaper on the side). The implication is obvious.
In addition, these whose instinct is in favour of commerce and enterprise will gravitate to what most of us would call getting proper jobs: jobs in commercial business where merit is rewarded and wealth created. Those with no liking for commerce will gravitate to jobs living off state largesse.
Our nation’s social history does not help in this: in the days of a regimented class system, a gentleman would live from his rents and landed income, or seek such a worthy profession as the army the Church or the law, while ‘trade’ was considered a low calling. Now there are few landed estates, the outlets for those who still despise ‘trade’ are academia and the quangocracy.
A man isolated from the realities of commercial life is isolated from reality and unfit to be entrusted with any great charge. Also, he cannot be expected to appreciate the need for a limited state, if he has no love for any endeavour that is outside the state.
In this way, the institutions of the state will by natural process be filled with those who would despise the commerciality of a whelk stall and be unfit to be entrusted with one.
Challenging the entrenched powers
If all this is so, then reversing it will take more than exposing a conspiracy, as there is no conspiracy: it requires a fundamental change in the system which makes this osmosis happen.
The reality of the take-over is undoubted, and it is realised as much by the left-wing as by conservatives. The defence of left-wing hegemony has been deployed on notable occasions: just months ago Sir Roger Scruton, Britain’s greatest living philosopher, was barred from an innocuous, unpaid position after a targeted attack: no conservative is to be permitted a position of influence.
Public frustration at the leaden-headedness of bureaucracy and the strictures of public bodies (and alleged public bodies) has grown to anger, and if elections every five years seem to make no difference, the safety valve has gone.
The action to take? That might require a longer article.
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