Think Tank Immersion
Brains in a Jar
Government and especially that elusive creature known as policy is deliberately confusing—even to many of those who are supposedly at the heart of The Process. Obfuscation of the operations of power is the first line of defence for the democratic elite class and helps shroud their machinations in layers of technical jargon, official sounding titles and independent bodies. Despite the continual commitment by every government who has gained power in Britain since the late 1970s to reduce these unpopular and expensive unelected tumours—to “roll back the frontiers of the state” as Thatcher put it— they have only grown and evolved into the landscape we see today. Most notably in the realm of those neutral and charitable NGO’s.
The language surrounding entrenched systems of government has become that of “The Blob,” described in an uncharacteristically truthful way by James Snell of Politico:
“[The Blob] is a ravening collective, opposing reform in all its guises. It’s homogenizing and determined to kill any innovative idea. It replicates and, fungus-like, spreads across government.
In Britain in particular, civil servants are drawn from a certain social class, and by and large, they share similar views. They’re the views of Britain’s university-educated middle classes, associated with urban living, technocracy and a dislike of proletarian interests and politics.
The Blob loves regulations and lawyers. It includes trade unions, civil servants and regulators. It glories in obstruction, masquerading as the price we pay for being sensible. It listens delightedly to James O’Brien on LBC radio, verbally roughing up politically incorrect taxi drivers who ought to have gone to university. In Britain, the Blob likes high taxes, the EU and the memory of the 2012 London Olympics — in the Blob’s mind, the country’s finest moment in recent years.
The Blob is indifferent to economic growth and such vulgarities as commerce. It includes NGOs and charities that, through a combination of friendly tax law and government grants, are often paid by the state to lobby itself.”
Civil Servants—especially those who work in Whitehall—are already figures of mainstream derision. They are seen by the general public as Technocrats with fake jobs workshopping ideas for new LGBT interpretive dance initiatives, but within The System they have to be portrayed as a force of absolute neutrality, completely independent from it’s backers. Despite some ministerial moaning, the Civil Service has never been meaningfully reformed.
It is that last line from Snell, the astute observation that most NGOs are paid by the government to lobby them to do what they are already planning, that is most relevant here. This is a fact we have kept running across in our research into the lesser studied world of the Conservative Think Tanks: The Henry Jackson Society, Policy Exchange, The Center for Social Justice etc who all have fluid membership with each other and the likes of Chatham House.
Think-Tanks, in the abstract, take a lot of criticism too; but you will find much of it comes from fellow NGOs who are, in effect, jostling with their competition. This usually boils down to a clearly Labour Party staffed NGO and clearly Tory Party staffed NGO trying to point fingers that the other isn’t Politically Neutral like they are supposed to be according to the fig leaf that are non-profit NGO rules. This is helped by many NGO big wigs floating in and out of positions at the charity commission itself, one William Shawcross featured in our Henry Jackson Society stream is a shining example of this. The traditional line here is that these charities make a mockery of the neutral system, but they are an outgrowth of the mockery that is the system itself—anyone who tells you an explicitly political organisation can be neutral is your enemy.
On a naïve level, all of these Think Tanks with charitable status sell themselves as sensible actors attempting to reign in the worst excesses of partisan politics with their neutral hand, and objective science based knowledge leveraging big data garnered from in depth polling. Those who purport to study and reign in these organisations will describe them as murky groups that produce Policy for witless politicians like some alchemical wizard produces potions. This is an equally naïve view, as it supposes some separation between the Think Tanks and their originating political parties.
These organisations do not sell Policy or Knowledge to any great degree, their real product is influence; every think tank in history has had some kind of selling access scandal. It is very much out in the open that if you want to get the ear of certain politicians, making large donations to a think tank that supposedly has their ear is a good place to start.
Most anti-lobbying leftists can tell you this fact, it isn’t anything revelatory, but what becomes very clear is this supposed product is also a scam meant to hook wealthy outsiders with delusions of grandeur. As we have shown in excruciating detail in some of our streams, the Gordian Knot of policy influence can be cleaved with the knowledge that its threads are wholly made of the established parties and weaved by their own interests. Little to no real influence is being peddled because it is a virtually closed system, the old fashioned idea that a conversation with an MP is in any way access to power is laughable.
So what ARE think tanks for? We find ourselves in a Blob within a Blob situation, trying to zoom in on one section of the regime machine only yields its own indistinct mass made piled upon other indistinct masses. The most useful method we found to start untangling this world from the outside was to look at the people involved, some of which crop up everywhere we looked, and try to reverse engineer their motives:
Manufacturing Consent: The big Think Tanks first and foremost are run by serving or former politicians. This makes their neutral charitable status even more incredulous, but it also belies their primary mission of creating the illusion that what those in power want to do isn’t entirely of their owns motivations. The established political parties all pretend to take in a diverse range of opinions, but these opinions are from arms of their own party. Its flimsy once you look into it, but the trick is that most people couldn’t name a think tank, let alone audit its finances and staff.
Manufacturing Experts: when you have a range of—at least from an outsider perspective—independent organisations and associated news outlets run by the same political machine, it allows you to build up résumés for your fresh-faced wannabe policy wonks. You will find experts on Sky News and especially outfits like GB news with CV’s entirely made up of direct Tory party offshoots. This is how the Think Tank pod-people are manufactured—they simply shuffle between UnHerd, Policy Exchange, CapX, Conservative Home etc, and within two to three years they are hailed as mighty subject matter experts, sometimes in radically divergent fields week by week to become whatever flavour of expert is required.
Friend Enemy Distinction: as Think Tanks are run by high ranking political party insiders, it allows them to vet people for entry into political life. Admission into a Think Tank is usually contingent on family connections and previous work as a low paid ministerial aid. Therefore association with them is seen as you being “pre-vetted” by other branches of the power structure and an endorsement of your compatibility with the rest of the political class. This is why you can’t trust those who have worked in a high-flying NGO or Think Tank—they only let their own people in and carefully select from a pool made up of the existing elite class.
Elite Class Welfare: despite the explosion of government departments with associated junior ministers, committees, and boards there are not enough jobs in the political sphere to keep all those within the political class well fed. Many times we will come across someone who has a CV that contains a think tank but who has never actually put out a shred of work for them. Think Tanks and NGOs provide paid day care for the extended family of ruling elites who have no real competencies and provide both an incubator for future power brokers and a retirement home for politicians put out to pasture. They are their own tax exempt wealth havens with high paying jobs to boot.
Why study what Think Tanks say at all then? Well as they are made up exclusively of regime insiders, they are simply manufacturing plausible deniability for the origin of future policy when they provide us a window into the future intentions of the British political class. Studying Think Tanks on the supposed Right gives you an insight into where the Overton window is situated in terms of its acceptable edge, and if you’ve watched our streams you will have already seen the hatred of native Britain these places spew forth. Further, it allows you to draw up their interconnections with the wider NGO and Foundation landscape: it would shock most British people to learn that Policy Exchange, the Conservative Party outfit credited with helping draft hard-edged “Stop The Boats” legislation, received $215,000 from the Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation and even published a hawkish pro foreign-aid spending report in conjunction with them.
Digging out these undeniable and often alarming facts about where supposed Right Wing Policy comes from is the culmination of hundreds of hours of other people’s work and dozens of ours of our own. The simple act of criticising these Think Tanks from a rightward perspective is something almost unheard. It is however necessary for many of the organizations pulling back the Think-Tank curtain are of dubious quality as they come from the dissident fringe of The Left and in some cases Islamists. The Blob then has done its job, you cannot easily separate parts of it from the whole without embarking on a PHD level research crusade and wading through a sea of waffle, rumour, half-truth, and red herrings.
The general degradation of British institutions causes its own issues too: genuine paranoia is easier to come by as higher trust environments erode, dispensing with that thin veneer of fair play. Within government itself there is an increasing sense no one really knows who is in power, rising even above the fictionalised farces of The Thick of It and Yes Minister. Glimpsing somewhat behind the curtain of ministerial aids and junior researchers, you begin to realise many on the lower rungs have less of an understanding than someone armed with the right names and keywords could gain in an afternoon using search engines.
I’ve often scoffed at concepts like Hanlon’s Razor as politically illiterate Redditoid piffle, and for the most part they are; ignoring the increasing likelihood of Machiavellian tendencies as you advance up the greasy pole of the power structure. Sometimes you really are just dealing with a well meaning idiot—albeit one carefully handled by a more competent actor. The common political practice of filling positions directly below you with non-threatening dribblers in order to shore up your position was even acknowledged by members of the WEF in what looks like a rare public inter-elite spat:
“In most organisations the next generation of top leadership is faintly visible at the higher levels of management but at the WEF Klaus has surrounded himself with such a group of nobodies at the top that it’s hard to see how any of them could be taken seriously by anyone of consequence inside or outside the organisation.
Klaus picks his leaders using the same criteria Putin uses to pick deputies for the state duma: loyalty, guile, sex appeal. The quality of people at the top is reflective of the type of people who work for the rest of the organisation.”
Self aggrandising and genuine stupidity then create even more noise within this environment, making much of what Think Tanks say about themselves even behind closed doors tantamount to a chorus of unreliable narrators. One of the only hard and fast rules about the charitable organisations in the political sphere is that their actual descriptions are never accurate, they tell you nothing and give you no starting point for constructive research.
We must once again return to looking at the people involved then, and try to pick out what the genuine power brokers are saying and what they are endorsing with their time and money. Tim Montgomerie is a perfect example of this: starting off as a jobbing speech writer for the conservative party, going on to co-found the Centre for Social Justice and create ConservativeHome and more recently founding UnHerd. The blob becomes less blobby once you see it is simply made up of the projects of a handful of high ranking political actors, who represent the fact that elected officials are rarely the highest ranking political figures in their own parties.
There is no way to empirically study the corridors of power, you just get a feel for it. The British political system does not function on hard and fast rules, it is simply the outgrowth of the various handshakes between the ruling elite class. If the elite class were to be displaced from a single institution but retain overall power, that institution would collapse, as the surface level processes it undertakes are secondary to having power brokers able to act behind the scenes. ‘Government’ is just powerful people in rooms you will never see making decisions you will never hear about, there is no process.
Understanding this allows you bypass much of the aforementioned noise and look for the kind of people who have been introduced to the pig, so to speak. The kind of people who inexplicably find themselves on a private island with a teenage russian masseuse. The kind of people who are the only ones fully protected by UK Libel law. The kind of people Belgian police destroyed evidence in a pediphile ring and multiple child murder case for. Underpinning the Think Tank world is the wider web of mutual blackmail, those in the elite class have a way of keeping each other in line and on message. They don’t let you climb the greasy poll of political power without compromising you first. This is why inter-elite criticism is so rare and muted—even when it is revealed that truly awful things are taking place—and why you see so many figures carrying the torch for ideas and projects that are diametrically opposed to what have previously been advertised as their deeply held personal beliefs.
Michael Gove is credited with coining The Blob as a political term, but he himself is a creature of it—being the original chairman of Policy Exchange and involved in many other external organs of the Tory Blob machine. He has also been subject to the same kinds of inter-elite blackmail we see rife in the world of power brokers, with many rumours in the Westminster bubble making it out into the wider world. The true power of The Blob then seems to be in fully encompassing its own purported critics—after all, what better way is there to protect yourself than to invent and control your own enemies?
I wish to leave you with a excerpt from R.A. Wormser’s work Foundations: Their Power and Influence. At the time Foundations set up in the name of Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie, were the precursor to NGO’s as we know them today. These institutions were powerful enough all the way back in the 1950’s to instigate a congressional hearing into their ability to influence culture and society, upon which Wormser’s book is based. It reveals to us what we know to be true today, that so called independent bodies have always been the centre for subversion.
“The change in prevalent fashions of thinking and in the social climate arising during and after the Depression altered the style of foundation performance so much that later analysts of their impact on our culture have more and more expressed their concern at a record of anticonservative performance. A generation of critics that feared the adverse effect of "capitalistic" bias of trustees was succeeded by observers who, from their study of the support of ideas and organizations by tax-exempt foundations, concluded that foundations had become the breeding ground for socialist and related political movements and action. This more recent generation of students, while equally impressed with the potentials of control of education and of public affairs in general by self-perpetuating, wealthy organizations beyond public control, has become concerned over the danger of foundation support of various undesirable concepts and movements having political implications. Among these are the ideas of the welfare state; the principles of economic determinism; excesses in the promotion of progressive education; the impairment of our national sovereignty; and even subversion.”
Interesting - thanks
maybe it's a local dialect, but I feel like "sure up your position" is a typo or malapropism and should be "shore up."