The Subsidised Opposition

While at University many many moons ago, I happened to get elected the leader of the Tory Group. The Labour lot were minimal and frankly pointless, the Greens in those days didn’t exist and the Lib Dems were about jumpers rather than politics. Being young and arrogant and up for a verbal scrap, the only people worth taking on were the SWSS, or the Socialist Workers Student Society. Proper sub intellectual humdinging scraps we had.

To become a formal Student Society (with the capacity to get a working subsidy to help operate and to book rooms and so on, one needed 25 members. SWSS, I discovered could only muster 15 at the Fresher’s Fair, so, to ensure somebody to actually debate against, myself and ten other Tories joined SWSS, they were ratified, debates continued, all rather jolly.

I thought of this when I read the

Read it. It is calm, documented and quietly devastating, which is Kruger’s method. He does not shout. He files. And what he has filed, since defecting a year ago and taking on the job of preparing Reform for government, amounts to the most serious audit of the machine any party has attempted in my lifetime. The civil service code, the quangos, the strike threat, and now the money. When the PCS voted to prepare “sustained industrial action“ against a government that does not yet exist, it was Kruger who pointed out, with the air of a man reading a bus timetable, that a strike declared against an election result is not a trade dispute and enjoys no protection in law. The union announced its intention to hold democracy hostage. He announced the penalty clause. I wrote about it at the time and the position has only strengthened since.

Because consider what Labour did in May. With the public finances in the state we all know, the Cabinet Office found time to rewrite the Facility Time Framework so that union representatives can now be paid to attend their own conferences, and removed the cap on what departments may spend doing it. Paid to go to conference. I have been to party conferences for twenty-five years and nobody has yet offered to pay me, though I may have got away with not paying up front a couple of times. The one growth industry in Whitehall is the industry of not working there.

But here is the point, and it is the point Kruger’s £200 million should open rather than close. It is not just the unions. The unions are the visible tithe. The larger sum flows outward, to the charities, the NGOs and the grant-fed campaign groups that the state funds to lobby the state, and on this the indispensable work has been done by Charlotte Gill (go subscribe), who has spent years doing alone, unpaid and frequently abused what an entire national press corps could not be bothered to do. Her Woke Waste files are a public service. By her count the government handed £1.73 billion in grants to the charities she has analysed over five years, and £222 million of it went to twenty organisations working on asylum and migration, with £153 million to Migrant Help alone. These are not food banks. Many of them campaign, litigate and brief against the elected government’s stated policy, and then invoice it. The Home Office funds the bodies that sue the Home Office. The taxpayer pays for both sets of lawyers and is then told the resulting paralysis proves the system needs more money.

Put Gill’s ledger beside Kruger’s and the shape of the throne becomes visible. A permanent, salaried, pensioned class of activists, some inside the departments with union lanyards, some outside with charity numbers, all funded by the people whose votes they exist to frustrate. £200 million is the entry in the accounts. The true cost is every policy smothered, every removal blocked, every reform “reviewed” into dust.

The Tories knew all of it. Fourteen years, and the grants rolled out and the facility time rolled on, because the truth is they preferred a subsidised opposition to a fight. Kruger sat among them and watched, steam gently raising from his ears, which is precisely why his defection mattered and why his papers read like a man emptying his notebooks at last.

So two cheers now and the third on delivery. The test is not the pamphlet, it is the first Budget line struck out, the first grant not renewed, the first framework torn up. Defund the blob and the blob will call it the end of civil society. Unlike those Socialist Students in 1991, with who we enjoyed the ruck, this is serious, and doesn’t cost a fiver and a pint of lager.

We must end the payment of paying our gaolers’ wages, and it is a generation or two overdue.