SOON the Prime Minister will sign that terrible international treaty, totally binding legally, called The Withdrawal Agreement. As we are urged to ‘move on’, and trust in the messianic qualities of Boris the great preacher against ‘vassalage’, our one realistic hope, arguably, lies with the capacities of one person, a certain Dominic Cummings.
He alone has shown any realisation that the UK has to fight its corner and stand up to the habitual EU threats. And this is also to fight against the institutional remainerdom embedded in our establishment, hence Cummings’s plans to shake the tree of the civil service in all departments and recruit high-level critical thinkers, as against the Blairite-processed place-holders dominant in all levels of the Whitehall club. Cummings wants scientifically expert thinkers and ‘weirdos’, or ‘corkscrew’ thinkers as Churchill called them.
The establishment is circling the wagons against any such radical shake up. Lord Kerslake has issued a warning to Cummings, despite Kerslake himself having issued a very critical review of the Treasury as being in the grip of ‘groupthink’ and needing a fresh approach. Lord Gus O’Donnell in the Telegraph likewise warned against radical changes to our ‘brilliant civil service’. The Treasury has been at the heart of Remainer groupthink, and brilliant only at the Project Fear propaganda campaign. It is hard to see such a vast container vessel being able, let alone willing, to turn 180 degrees in its course. The failure of the civil service to plan for a Leave win in the referendum has been the most serious dereliction of duty in its modern history.
Cummings is basically having to turn the Whitehall guns around to face the EU, rather than face the UK, as it seeks to leave. He chose to focus on the Ministry of Defence in October in a blog for the Spectator. In it he said that EU states which sought to hinder the UK’s Brexit could be told that the UK will not help defend them militarily. This seemed at last a counter blast to the many from the EU, not before time, and indeed in accord with Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech, before she caved in. The Remainer establishment was furious: Andrew Mitchell MP asked Boris if he ‘was proud’ of Cummings’s statement, as if it were a matter of shame for the UK at long long last to get real and stop self-harming appeasement.
That illustrates the task facing Cummings: is he alone prepared to stand up for the UK, against Brussels and against the politico-administrative establishment? Since then he has run his slide rule over the MoD and found it to be in line with Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, in which the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Joseph Porter, tells of his progress to becoming the ruler of the Queen’s Navy by sticking close to his desk, and never going to sea, and never thinking for himself at all. Cummings is right and the MoD admirals know it. ‘The first sea lord wants sailors transferred to crew ships and submarines, not manning desks in Portsmouth,’ said a naval source.
Cummings rightly said that the two vast carriers built for the Royal Navy were irrelevant for modern warfare and a waste of billions. Even the Guardian agrees.
Let’s stay with the MoD, although all the ministries deserve the full treatment. In Briefings for Brexit Professor Gwythian Prins discussed Andrew Marr’s interview on 10 November with Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir Nick Carter, who denied all knowledge of the UK participating in the new PESCO force and its big push to exist and fight. But his story was blown when the EU was forced to disclose what Whitehall covered up, that he was at the crucial meeting on 21 November and was signing the UK up to everything, covertly. As Professor Prins wrote: ‘So now we know that if General Sir Nick Carter was, as he said that he was, entirely unaware of any of the origins, initiation, instantiation, funding, acceleration and ambitions for the EU Defence Union on 10 November, he certainly must have had a rapid education since he was in the room on 21.’ The article must be read by taxpayers and all UK citizens: we are still being hoodwinked by the Blairite Remainer establishment.
The MoD is incompetent and duplicitous, still. The sooner Cummings can shake this rotten tree the better, and get rid of the Whitehall phoney servants of the defence of the realm, a realm they want to melt down into a Brussels management agency – this is still happening, this vast ship is still a remainer tanker.
My worry is that Cummings seems be the one figure engaging with the Remainer cling-on civil service, unless Boris is reinforcing him with sufficient comrades to take on this vast establishment jellyfish.
