Post Segments
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The biggest story of the week has been the Chinese infiltration of Whitehall in recent years. In an interview by The Times, Dominic Cummings has revealed that ‘vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised.’ This revelation is part of a deepening political crisis following the collapse of the spy trial.
The Security Minister, Dan Jarvis, named the deputy National Security Advisor, Matthew Collins, as responsible for the government’s decision not to cooperate with the trial. To some, it appears that the government is shifting the blame by making Collins a scapegoat. The head of MI5, Sir Ken McCallum, has expressed his frustration at the government’s treatment of the spy case.
Ahead of the autumn budget, the Chancellor is looking to restrict the mobility scheme in a hope to save £1 billion. Reeves is looking to assuage doubts that that the government is able to cut spending, particularly welfare spending. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says tax rises of £22 billion are needed to cover costs (or the black hole). But if Reeves wants to demonstrate her commitment to the fiscal rules she announced in the spring budget – which allow a strict buffer of £10 billion – her choices are limited
Media
Charles Moore in The Telegraph: China has been an enemy of Britain for decades: here is the proof
Robert Peston interviews Dominic Cummings on China’s infiltration of Whitehall
John Gray in The New Statesman: How to save British liberalism
Blog
Putin’s Meat Mincer by Adrian Hill
Putin and his political gang above all are gamblers. Manipulating political opinion is easier when you control the media. Putin no longer controls the social media. Russia has a large and thriving community of military bloggers who recognise fable when they hear or read it. Eventually the Russian people’s patience could run out. But Putin still believes he can outlast his enemies.
Key Points
The Chancellor
The great Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling maintained that political conduct in a democratic system can only be understood from a cynical perspective. Rachel Reeves has been rather tactless in her cynicism as Chancellor. She has consistently briefed the press with hints at what could follow in a budget, intent on signalling to markets. Indeed, the Speaker of the House scolded her for leaking the budget last year.
Reeves is deferential towards the Treasury and the OBR. In her earnestness, Reeves has imposed fiscal rules to signal to markets that the government is thinking about long term economic stability. This is all very sensible and restrained: but it is in the nature of politics to undermine rules and erode certainty. Economic policy is necessarily political and therefore subject to forces beyond a Chancellor’s control. Reeves’s fiscal rules may do more harm than the good which they intend.
Dominic Cummings
Dominic Cummings is a more complicated thinker than journalists care to understand. (They normally get hung up on his wardrobe or his profanity.) Having followed Cummings’s utterances and blog closely in recent years, I have noticed a coherence emerging in his thinking. Vote Leave is not just a referendum campaign, but a symbol of upsetting the Blairite political settlement. Starmer is continuity: ‘Labour’s in office[,] but psychologically completely in David Cameron, Rishi Sunak, George Osbourne mode of just let the perm secs run everything.’
Cummings has an historian’s sensitivity to the importance of individual dispositions in politics, with added experience inside the machine. As far as I have seen, he is too trenchant to be taken seriously by academics. But historians of the future will see how far ahead he was in recognising the ‘rot’ which is endemic in the British state – and should recognise that his trenchancy plays an essential part in disclosing harsh realities.
China
In 2018 Sir Niall Ferguson announced that America and western Europe were in Cold War II versus China. This perspective necessarily distorts and is helpful in understanding the context within which Beijing is conducting espionage in Britain. The breaching of British intelligence systems – not simply the penetration of networks but the purchasing of the very communications infrastructure used by the British intelligence services – is only one of many instances of Chinese influence in Britain. Soon it will be a cliché to talk of Chinese investment in the universities and for intellectual property. It will be interesting to see if the government will do anything about the Chinese embassy being built in London.
