Who rules?
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As this is hearsay, we can't take it as gospel.
Tony Blair warned David Cameron about a “deep state” conspiracy, the Conservative Prime Minister’s former director of strategy Steve Hilton said.
Blair warned, “You cannot underestimate how much they believe it’s their job to actually run the country and to resist the changes put forward by people they dismiss as ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politicians. They genuinely see themselves as the true guardians of the national interest, and think that their job is simply to wear you down and wait you out.”
Actually, i think either Blair or Hilton has been watching too much "Yes Minister" but it does raise the issue that the Left often berates us with… the government doesn't control it the State through parliament.
Blair is talking within a very mundane context: i.e. how politicians gets things done within capitalism, like say financial deregulation, a new airport or free bus passes for the elderly, and how permanent bureaucrats can put obstacles in the way of whatever political initiative people like Blair think up on a particular day. An American politician would not necessarily say the same thing. It seems to be a British thing to believe that politicians should run everything, and by extension, 'run the country'. In countries that are constitutional republics, there are formal checks and balances that limit political power and the reach of parliaments. For example, Donald Trump, though chief executive in the U.S., is being blocked on many measures, both by the legislature and by the federal judiciary. Some of these 'republican' features have crept into the British system, but I think it is basically still about raw power. Technically, under fusion of powers, Parliament (by which is meant the Queen, as a conceit: the Queen in Parliament) is supposed to be supreme and is meant to control all arms of the state, subject to certain long-standing conventions, informal rules and customs, as well as general law: for instance, the judiciary is said to be formally 'independent', and the civil servants that Blair refers to are meant to be neutral and politically-impartial. Maybe Blair just doesn't like being limited?I don't believe this raises any issues with the socialist case. Surely if socialist consciousness is being widely adopted, to the point that socialist delegates are being returned to parliaments and assemblies around the world, then this would reflect in general changing attitudes within the different branches of the state in each country, which cannot survive without popular acquiescence or consent. There is something in the anarchist case – some of the mechanisms for revolution will have to be extra-parliamentary – but I think socialists are right that any revolution, if it is to be legitimate, has to capture whatever are the elective mechanisms for the expression of popular consent. Indeed, I am struggling to think of a revolution within capitalism or premodern times that has not involved an assertion of parliamentary legitimacy. Even Cromwell, England's nearest version of a dictator, was a parliamentarian and careful to assert his legitimacy through Parliament.
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