Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK party has laid out plans to dismantle the British Cabinet Office — the beating heart of the UK deep state — and return power to elected officials from uncountable Whitehall bureaucrats.
Reform MP for East Wiltshire, Danny Kruger, who defected from the Conservatives last year to Reform, published an 11-page policy document detailing plans to abolish the Cabinet Office and the role of Cabinet Secretary and replace them with an office of the Prime Minister and a Chief of Staff.
Kruger argued that presently, British politics has been reduced to a pantomime, with parliamentarians jockeying for leadership positions that have largely been hollowed out by the Tony Blair revolution, which empowered the faceless deep state over elected representatives. Kruger has previously explained how politicians play the role of salesmen to the public for government policy which they have no real say on.
He pointed to Cabinet Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo as the true power within the British government, given that the Cabinet Office serves as the chief policy-coordinating branch and single point of coordination for Britain’s intelligence agencies, often moulding decision-making to its own ends.
Arguing that there should be no distinction between the “elected” and the “permanent” government, Kruger said that Reform would return policy briefs to departments and their elected ministerial chiefs, while simultaneously empowering ministers to hire and fire bureaucrats.
“Our belief is that the current system prevents Ministers, and even the Prime Minister, from getting good quality advice and information; prevents them from implementing decisions effectively; and obscures accountability. Real power is held not by the elected government but by the permanent Civil Service, especially the Cabinet Secretary and the sprawling, incoherent bureaucracy of the Cabinet Office,” he said.
“The new structure would place ministers and their advisers, rather than permanent officials, at the heart of decision-making,” Kruger added.
Returning power to elected officials in Parliament and Downing Street has long been an aim of Brexit boss Nigel Farage, a contributing factor to his choice of party name, Reform UK.
While technically intended to be politically neutral, the civil service has, in recent decades, shifted firmly to the left and has been a major force in advancing radical ideology nationwide.
Indeed, even under the previous “Conservative” government, civil servants were frequently found to be pushing fringe theories on race and gender, such as demanding that Whitehall staff recognise over 100 genders and accept that their colleagues may change their gender on a daily basis. Conversely, the government employees were told not to use “gendered” words like “mother” or “father”.
Reports also revealed that civil servants were forced to attend diversity training sessions in which they were lectured that Britain is a racist country and that their ethnic minority co-workers should not be questioned or contradicted.
Whitehall has also openly attempted to subvert government policy on numerous occasions, such as threatening to go on strike in 2022 over the then-Boris Johnson Conservative government’s plan to send illegal boat migrants to asylum processing centres in Rwanda rather than putting them up in hotels in Britain.
Last week, the largest civil servant union, the Public Commercial Service (PCS), voted in favour of doubling its strike fund in preparation for a “hostile” Farage government, which it claimed would seek to undermine its supposed impartiality.
Mr Kruger said that any bureaucrat who goes on strike to “undermine ministerial authority and the impartiality of the Civil Service through unlawful strike action will no longer have a job to return to.”
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