What would Britain be like with a functional press?
Dreams of Scrutiny
In July of 2022, J’accuse carried a piece denouncing the role of an unelected Monarch in the downfall of Boris Johnson – through an arcane and little known mechanism known as ‘the Lascelles Principles’, which allowed the then Queen to stop Prime Minister Boris Johnson from taking the issue of his eating cake to the public in a General Election.
At the time, the Lascelles principles, which had only been reactivated essentially by accident with the repeal of the Fix Terms Parliament Act in March of that year, was being held up by the usual suspects as a last line of defence against the democratically elected demagogue. See below from the now Deputy Diary Editor of the Times:
In the aforementioned J’accuse article, I put forward the case that the bejewled old crone was probably ‘intimating’ that the palace would refuse to allow Boris to dissolve Parliament. My instincts in this case were correct. In Sebastian Payne’s book about the fall of the PM, he revealed that Graham Brady (1922 Committee Chairman), Simon Case (Cabinet Secretary) and Edward Young (the Queen’s chief courtier) were actively conspiring together to ensure that the old slapper would refuse to permit Boris Johnson to dissolve Parliament.
“According to a second source, it would be “politely communicated to Downing Street” that the Queen “couldn’t come to the phone” if she received a request for a call about dissolving parliament.”
Her Maj wouldn’t even grace the election winning Duffer by acknowledging his request. Oop! Crumbs! The phone was off the bloody hook! How wonderfully, brilliantly British.
Did a single journalist of the centre-right bother to bring this constitutional outrage to the eye of the public? Did they, as another contributor noted, care about the revelation in Out of The Blue that Sue Gray was vetoing Theresa May’s cabinet appointments while ‘Director of Probity and Ethics’? How about the barefaced political assassination of Miriam Cates, who is currently being hung up to dry by an unelected ‘standards commissioner’ called Daniel Greenberg who has attacked her with a ‘Code of Conduct’ which has been in place since 2019 – and is legally not allowed to defend herself from allegations of corruption.
Who is Daniel Greenberg? Who elected him?
All you will find of his interventions in the media is him telling off MPs for using Social Media – a clear a sign as any that the Deep State’s intention to ‘regulate’ the utility of X as a means for communicating directly to the public without the usual filters of Ofcom et al. The whole purpose of the cadre of ‘ethics advisors’ like Sue Gray is to disable the prospect of Democratic revolt permanently. This is a continuation of the Blairite revolution that has bubbled away in ‘impartial’ institutions without any marshalled response from the ‘right-wing’ press. They often tragically misunderstand the purpose of moves made against; in the form of boring, often subtle structural changes in the constitution and reform to the public sector.
Foundation Trusts were introduced by Alan Milburn in 2003 to give NHS trusts greater operational independence from Whitehall with the stated reasoning that local decision making would be more effective and that internal competition could be created in the NHS to drive up standards. This utter nonsense was completely swallowed by the right of the time as Labour Getting to Grips with the Argument for the Internal Market. See this glowing endorsement from Rachel Sylvester in the Telegraph in 2003.
Foundation Trusts actually had very little to do with making the NHS function more effectively, or ‘local innovation’, whatever that is. The purpose behind Foundation Trusts was to make the case for NHS independence from Whitehall a fait accompli by empowering local ‘stakeholders’ in the system. Below is from a Department of Health paper written in 2008, five years after foundation trusts had been introduced.
Cameron would actually finish this particular anti-democratic coup himself – by the late 2000s ‘Tory Modernisers’ were marching in step with the Blairite Deep State. The final blow came in the form 2012 Lansley Health reforms, which gave formal operational independence to the ‘Chief Executive’ of NHS England.
The current Chief Executive of NHS England is Amanda Pritchard, who predictably worked in Tony Blair’s Delivery Unit as a ‘Health Team Leader’. Not a single hew, nor cry was raised by Robustly Independent organs of the Right when this Sue Grey plant was installed. Instead, the Tory press rails against the ‘Woke’ when ‘the Health Blob’ effortlessly shrugs off Minister Steve Barclay’s impotent demands for a suspension of EDI hiring in the NHS. They hang us all with the nooses they string up for themselves.