How Power Was Snatched From the British People and What Must Be Done to Reclaim It

Breaking the Blob: How power was snatched from the British people and what must be done to reclaim it

TCW

WHERE does power reside within the British state? For more than 300 hundred years it was an easy question to answer: it was with the people, under a constitutional monarchy, and expressed through the representatives they elected to Parliament.

Then came the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown which created and gave power to ‘the Blob’ – the mass of quangos, charities and other non-governmental organisations which, though unelected, assert the right to shape, defy, frustrate, block and scupper the policies of the governments that fund them on behalf of the taxpayer.

Take the Refugee Council, an asylum-support charity which received about £41.6million in government-contract income and grants between 2021 and 2025 while actively opposing the Conservative’s Illegal Migration Act and Rwanda Plan.

Similarly, Refugee Action recorded around £16.8million in government-contract income and government grants between 2021 and 2025, while co-ordinating or participating in campaigns against government asylum policy – including organising a letter signed by 103 charities demanding that the then Home Secretary stop ‘scapegoating’ migrants, and its Lift the Ban campaign aiming to allow asylum seekers to work in the UK.

Shelter UK uses funds from central government to sue local councils which do not share its policies, and Show Racism the Red Card has gone into schools to promote the ideologies of Black Lives Matter with slogans used by the Socialist Workers’ Party.

The Blob conspires to defy the Charity Commission that regulates such charities. When, for example, in 2022 the commission investigated Mermaids, a transsexual charity caught sending chest-binders to 13-year-old girls without parental consent among other abuses, funders stepped back from a brand seen as damaged only for new funders to replace them, including Comic Relief, the City Bridge Foundation, BBC Children in Need, Trust for London, Sport England. Consequently, transsexual advocacy became broader and more financially secure than anything that existed before.

Such examples are included in Breaking the Blob, the debut report of the Cambridge Circus Research think tank which was launched yesterday and can be read here.

Co-authored by Charles Talbot and Zack Salisbury, the report asserts that the Blob has rendered Britain ‘a state at war with itself’ because it routinely opposes the wishes of elected government.

In the foreword to the report, Fred de Fossard, a former special adviser in the Cabinet Office, writes from experience when he observes that ‘something is wrong in the British state’.

‘Orders are issued by elected politicians, and they subsequently disappear like water poured into sand,’ he writes. ‘Policies are created and sent out for public consultation only to die from a thousand cuts inflicted by stakeholders and civil society.

‘While governments are repeatedly elected with mandates from the public to end illegal immigration, secure the borders, maintain law and order, and cut welfare spending, many arms of the state are directly involved in subverting and undermining the government’s own political priorities. This leaves politicians wondering why the levers of power they supposedly have the ability to pull seem to be broken, and voters and taxpayers disillusioned with democracy.

‘What is the cause of all of this? Britain didn’t used to be like this, that much is agreed. Britain historically had a supreme Parliament – the elected dictatorship – with untrammelled legal power over the country. It purportedly had a permanent civil service that served the interests of the country regardless of the political party leading the House of Commons. Britain’s common law legal system was known for allowing quick and flexible policymaking.

‘Today, many people across the British political spectrum have identified what has filled the gears of government with sand and brought the British state to a standstill. The Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act, the Constitutional Reform Act, the Equality Act and the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act have created a new constitution and now set the terms of political debate. Each of them, in their own way, has ensured that power has diffused away from Parliament and into unelected and unaccountable arms of the state.’

He adds: ‘The web of state-funded organisations which attempted to stymie education reform in the early 2010s has been replicated throughout many areas of public policy. This has turned the British state into a hall of mirrors where seemingly nothing can be achieved.’

Mr de Fossard holds out the hope that the report ‘offers a way out of this mess, with an astute list of recommendations which – if enacted – would ensure greater transparency in the system so taxpayers, ministers, and voters can see where their money is being spent and what on; and, most importantly, put in place new rules to stop the British public’s money from being used against the British people’s interests again’.

Findings of Breaking the Blob include:

• Charities seldom act alone, but often as networks through frontline organisations with overlapping mandates and objectives to coordinate and obtain favourable policy and legislative outcomes. 
• It is typical for coalitions of charities across policy spheres to work together to achieve their goals.
• Many share common funders. It is typical for large grant-making organisations to fund frontline organisations that have these overlapping mandates.
• Despite official guidance that should prevent charities involving themselves in party politics, they are often engaged in campaigning against named ministers of state. This extends to criticism of numerous Home Secretaries, and the initiation of legal action that seeks to advance the return of Shamima Begum to Britain.
• The Charity Commission is responsible for overseeing more than 170,000 registered charities, but has only 457 employees, leaving it ill-equipped to adequately enforce charity law across such a vast and ever-changing sector.
• Identifying areas where competency issues and inadequate Charity Commission regulatory powers threaten national security and undermine whole-state approaches to countering the influence of hostile states, including Iran.

The report calls for:

• an end to the routine flow of public money to charities engaged in campaigning or strategic litigation;
• tighter charity law, so organisations whose dominant activity is political campaigning or policy obstruction cannot rely on broad charitable objects to retain charitable status;
• mandatory disclosure of grants, re-grants, public funding, litigation activity and coalition membership;
• stricter separation between charitable activity and political campaigning, especially where charities transfer money to connected non-charitable campaign bodies;
• a new grassroots-majority test for policy-advocacy charities, requiring most income to come from members, small donors or genuinely local civic sources rather than large foundations or state grants;
• taxation of campaigning activity by charities.

In the coming days, TCW will be taking a close look at some of the subversive activities of these so-called charities and ask what more might be done to remedy their abuses.

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This article (Breaking the Blob: How power was snatched from the British people and what must be done to reclaim it) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author TCW

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