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The Tories created their own worst enemy The woke public sector is a monster of their making

Who created the blob? (Scarff/Getty Images)


June 9, 2021   6 mins

Our institutions are in a state of civil war. Matthew Rycroft, the Home Office permanent secretary, was recently caught on Zoom saying, in time-honoured Yes, Minister style, that there’s no need to “slavishly” follow the Government’s official agenda on diversity and inclusion. Because ministers aren’t unanimous in their support, for example Johnson’s recent ending of unconscious bias training, Rycroft said “we can carry on doing things that we were previously doing”.

The modern Tory Party is fond of picking fights with such unaccountable political forces. During the Coalition government, for example, Michael Gove used “The Blob” as a metaphor to describe the interconnected ecosystem of think tanks, teachers’ unions, campaigners and teaching targeted by his education reforms.

The Blob, a 1958 sci-fi movie, depicted a gelatinous alien that consumes everything in its path. And the kind of public and charity-sector organisations Gove denoted as “Blob” are, if not quite all-consuming, at least amorphous: a grey zone between government, charities, committees and other institutions.

Since the Tories rode to power in 2019 on a promise to defeat the Remainer Blob, Tory cannons have increasingly been trained upon this shadowy enemy. Gunfire is now regularly heard in an intensifying battle over the ideological focus of public institutions.

Liz Truss, for example, recently recommended that UK public bodies leave the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme. This “kitemark” programme, which at £3.2m delivers Stonewall’s single largest source of income, charges institutional and corporate members £2,500 a year or more to vet employment policies and practices for “LGBT+ inclusion”.

Led by grassroots feminist and gay-rights campaigns such as LGB Alliance and Sex Matters, there’s been a growing backlash against policies promoted by the Diversity Champions scheme. And in response, high-profile bodies have begun to back away. The Equality and Human Rights Commission allowed its membership to lapse, joined recently by University College London, the University of Westminster and Channel 4, Ofsted and the Ministry of Justice.

But how did Britain get to a point where it seemed reasonable for actual government departments to have their HR policies written by a highly politicised lobby group? How, in other words, did the Blob take over?

Prior to World War II, the relation of civic institutions to government was far less symbiotic — and far less elite. For example, some 27,000-odd pre-war “friendly societies” supported families at times of crisis in return for small regular contributions, and at their peak boasted a working-class membership numbering some 14 million.

But the mass, state-managed war effort made mass solidarity seem imaginable in Britain — and in turn drove the foundation of the welfare state. Civil society bodies and Labour leaders alike worried after Labour’s shock 1945 election victory that rolling out mass welfare would precipitate a decline in voluntarism and civil society institutions.

Four years later, a submission by St John Ambulance to Lord Beveridge observed how the British public assumed “the state will provide” and that “the man-in-the-street considered the Brigade’s work was over’. And so, indeed, it came to pass with the creation of nationwide welfare: membership of “friendlies” began to plummet.

Another raft of voluntarism fell to the pincer movement of declining religious observance and female workforce participation. The Mothers’ Union, founded in 1876, boasted 400,000 members by 1921. But it saw its membership halve to 222,000 by 1993 and haemorrhaged another 100,000 over the next decade. Some 75% of women with dependent children now work, up from 50% in 1975. It’s probably not a coincidence that membership of the Mothers’ Union plummeted over the same period: who has time for charitable fundraising and campaigning on top of kids and a job?

But as historian Matthew Hilton argues, civil society bodies haven’t so much disappeared as changed. Over the twentieth century, “service organisations” — those that do “good work” in particular places — were replaced by state-controlled welfare. And meanwhile, campaign-based NGOs have flourished.

Another voluntary organisation that’s declined dramatically since its twentieth-century heyday is the Women’s Institute. But as WI historian Jane Robinson notes, WI membership fell in no small part due to the WI itself encouraging women to enter public life — where many migrated into the Blob, in which women today make up 68% of the workforce.

And here perhaps we can see how and why such bodies have come unmoored from Britain’s great unwashed. Civil society organising has always attracted middle-class do-gooders; but thanks to the welfare state, there is less need today for those do-gooders to come into direct contact with the objects of their beneficence.

Instead, they join quangos, an acronym coined in the 1970s — the same decade that the bodies themselves drew the ire of Margaret Thatcher, who promised in 1979 to slash this proliferating and unaccountable sector.

But in 1994, The Independent reported that, far from shrinking quangoland, under the Tories quangocracy mushroomed until there was one such body for every 10,000 inhabitants of Britain: 5,521 of them, about three times as many as officially acknowledged by the Government, spending £46.6bn.

This is difficult to confirm, because the actual number of quangos is a highly political matter and depends on how you define them. What’s certain, though, is that quangocracy is by no means a Labour phenomenon. Cabinet Office data from 2002, five years into New Labour, lists 834 quangos. But toward the end of the New Labour decade, a 2009 Tory White Paper counts around 750 “Arm’s Length Bodies” — hardly evidence of growth. That same paper suggested these were funded to the tune of £80bn — which, adjusted for inflation, is not a huge jump on the amount spent in 1994, during the Major years.

In evoking a gelatinous, all-devouring alien life form, Gove’s “Blob” formulation implied that it is a feature of obdurately Leftist bureaucracies. But what if the Blob’s persistence is less evidence of Britain’s pernicious institutional anti-Toryism than evidence that Thatcher-style “limited government” is a mirage?

After all, four out of five quango staff kept their jobs after Cameron’s “bonfire of the quangos”. This stubborn persistence, if not growth, of quangos under Tory administrations suggests “limited government” is, in practice, more a matter of hiving off policy delivery into arm’s-length bodies.

It’s likely the Tories would justify this by claiming that “independent” bodies will be less noxiously Left-leaning than those in the pay of government. For example Ofsted, a key site of battle in Gove’s war on the education “Blob”, was set up under the Major government to replace Local Education Authority school inspections. The Major administration claimed LEAs were biased and inconsistent; but Tories also sought to kneecap a set of institutions they accurately understood as hostile to Conservative policy. Similarly, Gove’s drive to create academy schools spoke the language of school standards, while seeking to sap the power of LEAs viewed as institutionally Leftist.

But it’s far from clear that simply being removed from direct government control makes public bodies less hostile to the Tories. Objectively speaking, quangocracies flourish under Tory rule; but the Taxpayers’ Alliance reported last year that in 2018-19, more quangocrats than not preferred to bite the hand that (however covertly) feeds them. According to the report, 47.4% of political declarations from quango staff were pro-Labour, compared to 31.6% pro-Tory. Et tu, Brute.

Even those bodies created with resounding rhetoric about “independence” have a tendency, it seems, to drift leftwards. Faced with this realisation, the Johnson government has given up pretending that the Blob can be culled or made apolitical, and has instead (rather belatedly) begun populating it with conservatives. Predictably, this has prompted howls of rage from a Blob long accustomed to a pleasant lack of viewpoint diversity.

But while we may watch with interest the Tories’ newly Gramscian approach to Britain’s institutions, we shouldn’t make the mistake of treating “the Blob” as something alien. It’s not hostile, and nor is it a plot by “the metropolitan elite” to steal political agency from the masses.

It’s us. For whether it’s whipped into shape by Victorian matrons, self-organised by working class communities or funded by the state, society is more than just individuals and light-touch government.

Over the individualistic twentieth century, we outsourced the purpose of self-organised social provision to the state. As a side-effect, we ended up professionalising the pursuit of social good so that well-meaning people could go on pursuing it. That may have come with advantages and disadvantages, but it wasn’t a Left-liberal conspiracy.

Tory governments presided over this growing quangocracy, whose existence served as a huge accounting fiddle. It shifted off the official government books a host of social and regulatory functions whose necessity was denied by the Thatcherite commitment to individualism and limited government.

But in displacing parts of its own government machinery into superficially “independent” bodies in the name of “limited government”, post-Thatcher Tories succeeded mostly in snookering themselves. They fantasised about an apolitical version of the “good”, and created supposedly “independent” bodies oriented toward this apolitical good. By handing civil society functions to these bodies, they could embrace Thatcherite individualism while pump-priming civil society on the sly.

But there is no such thing as an apolitical version of the good. Nor, naturally, are there independent bodies dedicated to delivering it. If the Tories aren’t well-represented in the (not at all apolitical or independent) Blob today, that’s on conservatives for having so long declined to join and shape it.

It’s late in the day indeed for the Tories to be grasping the magnitude of their misapprehension. And it will take frank reappraisal of some long-cherished Tory delusions before they’re able to address a political enemy largely of their own making.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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Antonino Ioviero
Antonino Ioviero
3 years ago

“But it’s far from clear that simply being removed from direct government control makes public bodies less hostile to the Tories.”

I refer to Robert Conquest’s second law of politics:

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

Sarah H
Sarah H
3 years ago

…and Taleb’s noting the tendency of populations to normalise towards their most intransigent membership.

John Riordan
John Riordan
3 years ago

Very good. And his third law is hilarious: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

Last edited 3 years ago by John Riordan
Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
3 years ago
Reply to  John Riordan

One aspect of industrialisation post 1850s is the growth of a large clerical class – lawyers, accountants, bankers, stockbrokers, etc. Malcom Muggeridge in the 1930s noticed that by the third generation they had become left wing middle class, Webbs for example.
Nationalisation post 1939 created a massive clerical class which Northcote Parkinson in his ” Parkinson’s Law ” published in the late 1950s, mocked .
The massive expansion of humanities education post mid 1960s educated the children of second or even third generation clerical middle classes many, employed by the state and invariably lacking the hardyness and enterprise required to start and grow companies, especially technical ones involved in overseas trade.
NGOs and much of the state sector senior ranks provided comfortable employment for middle class humanities gradautes who lack drive, especially if they live in affluent , safe areas and where parents can pay for the deposit on the first home. If one has reasonsable degree from a reasonable university one can gain rapid promotion in a school or council and if one lives outside of london and other expensive areas and lives with someone, achieve a comfortable life. If one lives in a county with grammar schools or very very good comprehensives, then one does not have to pay for education. One can often live in stunningly beautiful countryside.

Hubert Knobscratch
Hubert Knobscratch
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles Hedges

This situation will continue until artificial intelligence gets rid of their positions in the next 20 years. My own cousin has been advised to retire early next year at 58, as it’s thought her job in international contract law will have gone in the next 5 years because of it.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

The FCA is a quango but it does indeed shift the cost of overseeing (to the extent that the FCA actually does) the financial industry off the taxpayer – it is funded by a levy on those supervised. It’s a bit like the Bolsheviks charging the family for the bullets used to execute their father, son, brother etc.
The real problem is one of supply and demand. As has been said here before, there is a large supply of middle-class bien pensant left-wing gob5hites, but no market demand for their output. They have to leech a salary somehow, so they infest quangoes and charities, where they can pretend not to be left-wing gob5hites.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Or not even pretend!

Andrew Raiment
Andrew Raiment
3 years ago

Where were all those social sciences graduates from the Blair era, going to go?

Nicholas Rynn
Nicholas Rynn
3 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Raiment

They make very good coffee and bake bread in their spare time.

John Riordan
John Riordan
3 years ago

“In evoking a gelatinous, all-devouring alien life form, Gove’s “Blob” formulation implied that it is a feature of obdurately Leftist bureaucracies. But what if the Blob’s persistence is less evidence of Britain’s pernicious institutional anti-Toryism than evidence that Thatcher-style “limited government” is a mirage?”
No, it’s not a mirage, but as the following paragraph makes clear in the point about quangoes being the vehicles that deliver policy instead of government departments, the way to achieve limited government is to actually limit what government does, and you start that process by legislating less, and by reducing the number of things that the taxpayer is forced to fund. What does NOT work, as the Coalition discovered to its cost, is simply expecting the Treasury to be tight-fisted, because the Treasury cannot simply refuse to pay for costs that have already emerged. Private individuals and companies can declare “This is not my debt”; the Treasury, which pays for social insurance, does not have this luxury.

You can see an example of this in socialised aged care: reduce the budgets all you want, but all that happens is that old people end up blocking beds in hospitals. Reduce access to GPs? People go to A&E instead.

So am I saying that limited government isn’t possible? Not at all: what I’m saying is that the more things you want to fund on a socialised basis, the less efficient the system will be, and the more prone to saturation through the free-rider effect it will be. There are some things, such as policing and defence, that absolutely must be paid for collectively, but in the UK we do much more besides, such as in health and education, and it shows in the ballooning costs and crap performance that everyone complains about but nobody is willing to fix. The advanced European nations almost all have better health and education systems that are still publicly funded, but which successfully harness choice and personal responsibility into the mix, such as school vouchers and publicly-backed healthcare insurance schemes.

However, small government appears to be something people only want after they’ve worked out that it is impossible to vote for big government in the hope that other people’s money will fund it, and then for this selfish,stupid wish to come true. And that takes a long time to learn, which is why people often tend only to become conservatives after learning things the hard way.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago

Yes, far fewer posters and much less debate. I know everyone including UnHerd has to make a living, so I suppose charging became a necessity, but it’s a lot less lively down here.

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
3 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Yes it’s a shame as will likely result in a distilling of opinions and comments

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

With luck, the desire to debate will return the intelligent folk to the fold.

Al M
Al M
3 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

You are not wrong, sir.

Rob Britton
Rob Britton
3 years ago

Well the conservatives have been in government now for more than a decade, in one form or other, so they don’t really have an excuse that it is all a left wing plot.

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
3 years ago
Reply to  Rob Britton

Fair point to a degree. Not a left wing plot but a change of culture.
The Civil Service and many of these organisations are jobs for life for those there – changing the culture would take nearly a generation or more.

Norman Powers
Norman Powers
3 years ago
Reply to  Rob Britton

Were the Cameron/Clegg and May governments especially conservative though? Cameron was the archetype of a drifting centrist. I doubt he ever had strong political views on the civil service one way or another. Cumming’s blogs about those times also paint such a picture.
Between the Blair-ish Cameron and coalition years, then the Brexit vote and years of internecine warfare, then COVID, you could argue that the Conservatives haven’t until now really had anyone at the top who might care to tackle these issues (and arguably still don’t).
It’s also worth noting that “wokeism” and “diversity=hard leftism” is a relatively recent phenomenon that only really got rolling starting in 2010.
BTW the quote from the civil service guy is shocking. He needs to be publicly disciplined but, of course, no such thing is likely to happen.

mike otter
mike otter
3 years ago
Reply to  Norman Powers

Recent govts resemble the tail end of the Julio-Claudian emporers in Rome: Matching Blair, Cameron and Johnson to Claudius, Caligula and Nero is the only thing left to do. None are conservative or even politically engaged. They rose on heredity and the system they created will probably wither as the genes of the “elite” weaken.

David Simpson
David Simpson
3 years ago

Mostly jobs for middle class grifters

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
3 years ago

Not to let the Tories off the hook – but rather it’s just governments over the past 30 odd years who have created this.
Tories perhaps should have done less to stoke the fires, but 13 years of Labour also left their mark

Steven Farrall
Steven Farrall
3 years ago

The quangocracy is one giant self – serving racket. They are all tax consuming parasites.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 years ago

Maybe the Tories created the left-wing public sector “monster”, but surely its the American left that added the “woke” ….

Last edited 3 years ago by Ian Barton
Dr Anne Kelley
Dr Anne Kelley
3 years ago

What a muddled argument. On the one hand the writer claims that Tories have aided the growth of quangos, on the other she provides evidence that there were fewer in 2009 than in 2002. And is Stonewall – the example given – a quango? I thought it was a charity.
There is an argument to be made that government grants to charities, quangos and NGOs should be more selective, and closely monitored, but I would argue that this is an issue for governments of all shades – blue, red or whatever.

mike otter
mike otter
3 years ago

The growth of the blob at the expense of friendly societies is mirrored by its growth at the expense of well paid jobs in technology, manufacturing and construction. If we were able to get meaningful employment levels back up to those of the Far East there would be less reason for the offspring of the richest 25% to seek work in these meaningless, corrupt and ulitmately negative areas of work: Ask yourself how happy the users of health, education or local council services are compared with say the 1960s or the pre socialist 30s when the work was largely done by volunteers.

Last edited 3 years ago by mike otter
Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
3 years ago

Some of the quangos may be doing necessary government jobs ‘off the books’, so to speak. A great many more are not. Why do need any LBGTQ blah blah blah focused policy advice, for example. I’m a gay man, we have equal rights, move off the self perpetuating grievance mill.

Alison Wren
Alison Wren
3 years ago

Oh Mary. 75% of women with dependent children are now in paid employment. Mothers have always worked, just often unacknowledged and certainly unpaid!!

Last edited 3 years ago by Alison Wren
Patrick Heren
Patrick Heren
3 years ago

Most of these think tanks, NGO’s, regulators, etc are best defined as Indoor Relief for the Middle Classes

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago

Qua(si)-NGOs. We use them abroad, where often hardline govts see them as proxies for foreign govts, and at home, where they may also be seen as anti-govt. Their breadth is enormous, and variously useful, but they risk becoming a sedimentary overlay over the bedrock of elected government and civil service, some with no proper accountability.

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Ceelly Hay
Ceelly Hay
3 years ago

A good question to answer would be ‘Why are problems best-solved politically?’ Is there something about the nature of reality that means more than one valid opinion is required to get to grips with the problem?

Christopher Hilton
Christopher Hilton
3 years ago

“great unwashed” – I haven’t heard that disgusting expression for some time now. It probably became untrue in the 1950s, if not before. As a member of the “great unwashed”, I have found that in a long life, the unwashed are much more likely to come from the so-called elite, of which Ms Harrington is a member.

John Riordan
John Riordan
3 years ago

What’s more interesting is when it became true in the first place. Cleanliness was just as likely to be regarded with suspicion by the aristocracy until reasonably recently: during the Regency period I recall there was one high-born lady who was noted for the pungency of her body odour (no, I don’t recall the name). And when Thomas Paine died and his body was prepared for burial, the undertakers noted “with approval” a liberal infestation of lice in his underwear, another half-remembered fact from somewhere in a book I’ve read.

Last edited 3 years ago by John Riordan
Ian Cooper
Ian Cooper
3 years ago

MH was being ironic against the elite.