Dominic Cummings is an unusual man. When I first saw his name, in Tim Shipman’s book Brexit: All Out War, I imagined him as a sort of vast Chesterton or Mycroft Holmes figure, doing everything by the power of mind. But then I saw a picture: and he looked more like a Dickensian character, Traddles or Clennam or someone. Funny, since his critique is that of Dickens in Little Dorrit, that the art of government, regrettably, is “How Not To Do It”.
Cummings is unusual for being both a cog in the machinery of the state and also a spanner in the works of the state. I cannot think of anyone in the history of England who has been both things at once. Lytton Strachey: all spanner and no cog. Lloyd George: all cog and no spanner. Disraeli bent his spanner into a cog. So did J.M. Keynes. Enoch Powell twisted his cog into a spanner. So did Edmund Burke. But Cummings has always been an insider-outsider, a strange in/out figure, spanner and cog.
Not many people in ze media like Cummings. Nick Cohen certainly does not and blames him for not wanting war in Ukraine. In fact, Cohen reminds me that I have something in common with Cummings, namely, Norman Stone:
Cummings’s mentor at Oxford, Norman Stone, a decent historian until the drink did for him, ended his days penning apologias for Hungarian authoritarianism. Viktor Orbán was so impressed by the flattery that he attended Stone’s funeral.
Or (and I am rapping you on the skull with a teaspoon, Cohen), Orban respected Stone, who was a great historian and a great man, and so did Cummings. (I, too, was at the funeral in Budapest; I hear Cummings was at the memorial in London.) Lots of silly things are said about Cummings, especially by those who think by joining preprinted dots. On November 15th 2019 Emily Thornberry in the Commons said: “There are questions about the Prime Minister’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, his relationship with Oxford academic Norman Stone, the mysterious three years that he spent in post-communist Russia aged just 23…” Libby Eyres, who knew Cummings at Exeter College, Oxford, crowed when he was fired from No. 10 by, it was supposed, Carrie Symonds and Allegra Stratton: “Girl power has won the day: now it’s time to let the grown-ups be in charge.” [Slow clap, anyone?] Anyhow, I only mention this to indicate that there is a lot of low-level slurry about Cummings in the press. Whereas he is evidently a considerable man.
The subject today is the deep state. Cummings has recently dilated on ‘The Deep State’ to the Pharos Foundation, in a video posted on YouTube on November 28th. Beverly Turner has picked it up for GB News and it is likely to get more play: you should listen to it. Cummings begins with a naïve historical comparison: he likens our time to the 1840s, on the grounds that our elites are witnessing new technology, the break-up of the old security order, and the rise of mad ideas in the universities. Then he says bureaucracy has taken over government. Aha –
Now, this is where I have to interrupt Cummings and dilate a bit about the deep state.
What is the deep state?
It is a new phrase for an old thing, but actually – as usual – it is not one thing, but two things, and the two things are different, and yet their meanings slide into each other.
First, the phrase. It comes from Turkey, funnily enough. It is derin devlet, where derin is deep, and devlet is state. Our meaning, the meaning in English, the American meaning, is derived from this, but what we mean by it is not exactly what the Turks originally meant by it. So I shall distinguish, a bit abstractly (as things are never as clearly cut as they are in an essay), between derin devlet as a phrase for one thing, and ‘deep state’ as a phrase for another.
- The original meaning of deep state, i.e., derin devlet, is, and I can quote from some literature on the subject: “criminal or rogue elements that have somehow muscled their way into power” (this is from an article by Ryan Gingeras in the academic Middle East Journal of 2011): i.e., gangsters, smugglers, military officers, clandestine agents, all involved in the opium trade, heroin, money laundering, and state security. The term emerged after a scandal in in the 1990s in which a known mafia hitman was killed in a car crash which also killed the Director of the Police Academy in Istanbul and involved an MP. A former President, Suleyman Demirel, said gnomically in 2005: “The deep state is the state itself”, and a scholar called Belma Akcura wrote a book entitled Derin Decvlet Oldu Devlet (The Deep State Was the State), in 2006.
- The translated, Western, meaning of deep state is somewhat at odds with this. Perhaps the emphasis on state security is the same, but we are not talking about crime syndicates – except, perhaps, by happy implication. Rather, we are talking about, in Conrad Black’s words (in the National Interest of March/April 2018), “non-partisan and politically inactive people who are in or near government, and are in practice partisan and often hyperactive in their opposition to the administration”. I said it is a new phrase for an old thing. A lifetime ago, James Burnham called this “the managerial class”, C. Wright Mills called it “the power elite”; more recently, in 2009, Janine R. Wedel called it “the shadow elite”, and Jacob Silverman in New Labor Forum in 2018 suggested that although in theory it was “a shadowy power elite, removed from democratic accountability”, in practice it was “the [Trump] administration’s catch-all term for a nebulous collection of Obama-era appointees and civil service veterans who are working to undermine the Trump agenda”.
Can you see the difference?
Deep State 1 = outlaw, informal, but supporting the established regime.
Deep State 2 = inlaw, formal, but opposed to the established regime.
To speak more plainly, the original deep state was criminals, but our deep state is civil servants.
No wonder that when a selection of pundits was asked in 2018 (in the issue of the National Interest I cited) whether there is a deep state or not they divided fairly neatly on whether they were insiders who took it to be a phrase describing criminals or they were outsiders who took it to be a phrase describing civil servants. Ha, ha. No wonder everyone has difficulty making sense of things.
Anyhow, the short way of making sense of this is that our use of ‘deep state’ for the U.K. or USA is part of our modern supposition that our political order is not, as we formerly thought, a responsible state, but, rather, an extractive and ideological conspiracy carried out by formally non-political elites against (and through and over) the people supposedly represented by political elites: and hence – since we are upset about this discovery – something we want to talk about openly by calling it a “deep state”.
I hope that was useful.
Now, Cummings is extremely good on the problems of the modern deep state in the U.K. He says that politics is theatre, and amusingly calls MPs “NPCs” (I had to check the meaning with my sons, who assured me that NPCs refers to ‘Non-Player Characters’ in computer games): Cummings says they sign the documents in the boxes supplied to them by Sir Humphrey and only worry about their appearance on the BBC the following morning. They want to be seen to be in leadership, want to refer to “my Department”, and, as far as they are concerned, reality can go back to rest at ease in one of F.H. Bradley’s 19th Century philosophical books. Cummings is also good on immigration. And he says Gove only achieved anything at the Department of Education by “purging” the officials.
As Leavis always said, “Yes, but…”
There is a problem.
The problem with Cummings is that he a political rationalist. You may recall that he was, and remains, a Covid-maximalist: that is, he is one of the people who made COVID-19 into something. He believed it, remarkably. He took it to be factual. Whereas it was anything but. Cummings, the great political genius, was too preoccupied to notice that COVID-19 was almost entirely a political artefact, created out of almost nothing, by politicians and pseudo-politicians, including himself.
Cummings is, therefore, half right.
He is right on what is wrong. Right about the symptoms – “shitshow” and all that.
But he is wrong in his reasons. Wrong about the explanation and the remedy. Because he is a rationalist. He thinks problems can be solved by force. He is a bright ideas man.
A word on rationalism. The theorist of ‘rationalism in politics’ was Michael Oakeshott, and Oakeshott, when young, was influenced by the old and brilliant reactionary, whom I just mentioned, F.H. Bradley. The philosophy of Bradley is completely anti-positivist. There are no facts before theories: facts are created by theories. So, for Bradley and Oakeshott, we make our reality. There are limits to how much our reality can be made, if it is historical or physical. But when it is political, there is almost no limit to what can be made. My line about COVID-19 from the start has been that it was of political manufacture. And Cummings was part of this. His language of “the failure of government” is attractive to us, partly, because he is right – there is too much bureaucracy and there is too much holding the doors open for the corporations – but also unattractive, because he makes the argument from a false ground, on a rationalist basis: he thinks government fails because it is inefficient, a simulacrum, ‘fake’. Well! Others would say that this is a sign of the success of government. Government is there to hold a system together, not do anything. It does everything it does to hold everything together – hold its own obesity together.
Cummings operates with the mentality of a maximiser. Maximisation: you might remember it from school mathematics. It is a big thing in business administration and industrial engineering, also, of course, anything involving computers. Maximisation is basically the utilitarianism of the machine. Input – machinery – output. Maximisers, from Bentham onwards, have looked at the state and said, “Inefficient: let us make it more efficient.” (Ironically, missing the point that, for some, maximisation = maximum extraction and maximum inefficiency.)
On the basis of no evidence except everything I know from history, I would like to suggest that no state has been more efficient than any other. No doubt some states have looked more efficient than others. But they have looked more efficient, usually, by looking on benignly while their citizens have been busy; or, latterly, and incrementally, by incorporating more and more of that citizen activity into their own warlike and then welfarelike circumference. The state circumference has increased: adding competitive examinations, ministers, departments, boards, committees, reports, etc: and despite each addition to taxation and expenditure the level of government efficiency has remained what it was in the unreformed parliament of Canning and Peel, or, indeed, what it was under Edward I or Penda the Mercian, i.e., almost entirely inefficient, except for extremely brief instants, like the second phrase of any war, but perhaps not even then. Now, in 2024, instead of Lord Raglan and Tite Barnacle, we have half a million civil servants.
Cummings has two suggestions, which, despite my criticisms, are still worth listening to. As I say, he is a very considerable man: and two inches of words from him are worth ten yards from anyone else. The first is to reverse the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the 1850s which reputedly instituted the modern impersonal anonymous apolitical permanent civil service. The second is to restore ministerial responsibility by restoring political talent to the House of Commons. Aye, and aye. Just as churchmen used to note in the 20th Century that talent chose university over the church, he observes that talent in the 21st Century chooses start-ups and creative destruction of economic corporate life over the theatrical stultifications of politics.
I approve, in a sort of if-I-were-sitting-with-Cummings-with-a-whisky sort of way. But I doubt as well. For Cummings, like most men with a suggestion, has to face the fact that if he strips away a permanent Civil Service: 1. there is no guarantee that he will suddenly get either responsibility or talent in his politicians; and 2. he will inevitably throw us back to the old world of before the 1840s when everything was done by patronage or what was called “jobbery”. Indeed, Francis Fukuyama, the acclaimed thinker, has just written, I find, an academic article in the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration of 2024, entitled ‘In Defence of the Deep State’, in which he says the USA under Trump, by draining the swamp, is likely to “return the country to the 19th Century patronage system”. Like the good academic he is, Fukuyama sits on the fence, saying we need “balance”: a bit of this and a bit of that. Boring, but he is facing the fact that Cummings is more likely to get partisan hacks than experts-techsperts if he abolishes the permanent Civil Service: and then the U.K. will be administered by Douglas Adams’s hairdressers – as well as being offered leadership by them. (Johnson: “Get haircut done”; Sunak: “Comb out to help out”; Starmer: “My father was a quiffmaker.”).
Anyhow, all this aside, it is obvious that ‘deep state’ language has made sense to many of us since COVID-19. It is not easy to analyse: we have the cabal element, the corporate element, but also the ‘mass formation’ and ‘death spiral’ elements, i.e., all the low-level elements which operate in NHS and HR and the various OFSTEDs and OFCOMs as well as in the trundle of the enslaved and ignorant media which has turned Cummings into yet one more ‘alternative’ voice. But let’s face it, SpAds are part of the deep state too.
Yet Cummings, despite his colossal mistake over COVID-19, is a voice worth pondering.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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“Walport’s review in the Royal Society of Medicine stated: “Lockdowns and face masks ‘unequivocally’ cut spread of Covid.””
For the benefit of anyone new, I don’t care whether they did anything of the sort, whatever could be meant by those words. Cut from what to what, at what cost, and what benefit? If “covid” exists then it’s a bad cold/flu. I’m not staying at home for that, nor am I wearing stupid nappy on my face. I don’t care if they work, the cost is far too high. Bring me the Black Death and I will concede we should interrupt normal life for a while, but not for “covid”.
As you know it was the CCP that locked down the Chinese Province of Wuhan along with mandating masks and mass testing. They also welded some people into their homes, while also forcibly removing others. They built emergency hospitals in days and dug mass graves using JCBs in preparation for the huge death tole. The WHO (and Gates) asserted that the CCP had done a good job controlling this virus with the intimation that the entire planet must copy China (see some evidence in Video below). Later on China introduced a ‘much better’ anal swab test, perhaps to see if they could get the rest of the world to follow China again and properly humiliate themselves.
No one checked whether anything China claimed was true and it didn’t seem to bother our leaders that China had locked down just one province even though the virus had escaped to the rest of the World. Miraculously, most of China remained free of the virus and remained open and it’s industries unaffected. All the tests and masks were made in China.
In the video below Kate Wand exposes Anthony Fauci’s connection with the CCP. It’s only 7 mins long and all worth listening to, IMHO. There is mush insistence that the world must not open up too soon and towards the end the Chinese Professor states that natural immunity will not work because it is unrealistic less scientific and inhumane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb-JExoBhmU
Fauci Follows ‘the Science’ | Kate Wand
Not forgetting, those who went to the pub were safe – only if they ate a substantial meal such as a scotch egg 🙄
For me that was the ultimate “jump the shark” moment when anyone who was going to wake up would surely have woken up.
We had lunch with some normies we haven’t seen for a few years the other day and at a certain point they started talking about bubbles.
‘They’ really played and ridiculed the populace didn’t they – and unfortunately, far too many failed the common sense test.
As long as you were sitting down.
If people would be ‘safe’ from a killer virus by eating a scotch egg – sitting down – why did the country go on a jabathon, jabbing the masses? People could have been encouraged to consume a scotch egg – daily – to the saying ‘a scotch egg a day keeps the doctor away’…or ‘a scotch egg a week makes BigPharma weep’ 🙂
Absolutely spot on TOF. We decide if the cost is acceptable or not, individually, not our Servants from on high.
Stop infantalising us and let us make our own informed (or even ignorant) decisions. We have a right to choose the wrong choice, as long as it is OUR choice.
The trouble is a lot of our fellow citizens seem to want to be treated as infants and worse than that they want us to be treated as infants too – equality!
I do believe the latter group are a tiny, but very vocal and MSM promoted minority.
Zealots supporting whatever agenda
Far from tiny – expecting/wanting/hoping the state/government to solve all or many of your problems is pretty common in my experience.
I meant the group that want the government to dictate to everyone, not just their lemming selves, but you could be right!
Most covidians I spoke to back in the day were quick to condemn anyone “breaking the rules”.
The situation is exactly the same in New Zeeland and they are prepared to do it all again:
https://www.malone.news/p/new-zealand-lets-do-the-time-warp
My experience as an educator has taught me that change begins within. It is our inner experience that enables us to gain perspective, to re-evaluate and change gear. This is the need of our time.
This point was forcibly driven home for me this week when I read the “New Zealand Pandemic Plan: A Framework For Action.” This document has just been published by Health New Zealand, which is laying out NZ policy in the event that the WHO declares another pandemic. It is a prime example of an aspiring cabal of policy wonks stuck in the past, unable to change gears and move forward. For 211 pages, the document rambles on rubber stamping all the mistakes of the COVID-19 pandemic response. It dictates that in the near future we will do it all again—lockdowns, masks, vaccines, antivirals, mandates, social distancing, isolation, school and business closures, and censorship of media content…
…Most chilling of all, the policy recognizes the power of a medical officer of health, in conjunction with the police, to detain persons in isolation by force and to continue to do so until necessary prescribed preventive treatment has been administered. You know what that means.….
Same reason the powers that be won’t investigate the destruction of nordsteam 2, or verify who actually voted for Biden in 2020 when the film 2000 mules shows ballot harvesting to drop boxes in swing states. If something is ignored one can almost be sure it is true. Get ready for another bout of vote rigging in 2024 via these mail in ballots without ID checks.
One way would be another ‘new’ virus followed by lockdowns and all voting becomes electronic.
Basic modelling shows that lockdowns result in lower acquired immunity leading to second waves. https://osf.io/y6ckv/
A cynic might suggest that if they say lockdowns are useless, they can’t do it to us again…
Well done, the two old geezers. It is worth listening to old geezers, could save huge sums of money. The taxpayer has already paid for all knowledge that might be required in this area by means of another astute old geezer. He was called D.A.J. Tyrrell and he ran the Common Cold Unit.
Regarding treatment of the common cold, he mentions:
‘local hyperthermia (inhaling water-saturated air at 43°C) has an immediate effect in improving symptoms but also a lesser effect that lasts a few days.’
Hyperthermia has, I believe, been used since Roman times, if not before.
He does not mention ‘lockdowns’ but gives us a clue as to the likely effectiveness of isolation:
‘…it was shown that colds could be transmitted from one end of a long room to the other when only air contact was possible…In recent careful experimental work, manual transmission in a group playing poker was prevented by using splints or large plastic collars; yet rhinovirus infection was freely transmitted, so the airborne route must have been of major importance in those circumstances’
He also indicates the major problem with vaccines:
‘This essay has focussed mainly on rhinoviruses, as the main cause of common colds. However, we know that coronaviruses as well as paramyxoviruses or enteroviruses also make a small but significant contribution, and there is a substantial fraction due to as yet unidentified organisms (Larson et al., 1980). This means that even if a highly effective specific rhinovirus treatment were developed it would provide no benefit for many colds.’
What, then, to do? Mr Tyrrell has a straightforward answer:
‘It is therefore arguable that in the case of infections like coronavirus or rhinovirus colds, which are normally quickly self-limited, the best approach would be to relieve the patient’s discomfort and disability and leave their immune system to take care of the virus.’
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016635429290032Z
We knew what to do. We had been doing it for millennia. It worked.
Unfortunately, as far as the dimwits in government (and now in this silly, ruinously expensive, inquiry) were concerned, this was not an unknown unknown, not even a known unknown, but, apparently, an unknown known……
Oh for heaven’s sake!
Spot on. It’s instructive to review what was done there in Salisbury, out to about 1989. They actually invented the term “coronavirus” as well, having detected them using election microscopy, which was quite new in the late 1940s.
“….ministers, lacking experience and expertise at the time, are kept in the dark by the reassurance of their advisers.” Isn’t that most of them, much of the time, especially if they change their jobs reasonably often? The Permanent Secretaries and the staff call the shots, most of the time, as long as it’s capable of being sold politically.
There are certain things that are diffiult to admit. There willl be no lockdown enquiry or anything like it. Maybe if we had a revolution and a simultaneous jump to a higher level of consciousness but that aint happening.
Because the RPTB.
“Let’s start with the 2011 preparedness plan. The inquiry correctly identifies the focus on a single pathogen (influenza) as one reason for its irrelevance.”
Wow. If that 2011 plan had been followed, the outcome would have been dramatically better than the fiasco we actually saw. That plan basically recommended what Sweden did.
This whole thing is ridiculous now. Everyone can see the events of 2020 were actually a national security response to the escape of an artificial pathogen from the US bio weapon research programme in Wuhan.