Something rotten in the state

Today's publication of Sir Brian Langstaff's long-awaited Infected Blood Inquiry report has sent shockwaves through the Establishment. 

Good. It's long overdue. Now that Rishi Sunak has accepted in his statement to the House of Commons that this is "a day of shame for the British state" we need to ask ourselves what it is about the state that leads to the proliferation of such scandals. For while this is the most shocking instance, with over 30,000 cases of infection and 3000 deaths over a fifty-year period, it is by no means the only example of government cover-up and denial.

The outrage prompted by the ITV dramatisation, 'Mr Bates v The Post Office', about the Post Office Horizon computer system scandal, screened in January this year, totally overshadowed news that military veterans were reopening their compensation claims against the Ministry of Defence (MoD). They allege deliberate exposure to radiation in the UK's nuclear test programme conducted between 1952 and 1967 in Australia and the South Pacific. In other words, they were treated like Guinnea pigs. Sound familiar? 

Once again an arm of the state stands accused of withholding Information by refusing to release the results of blood and urine tests on the grounds that it is 'classified information'. This kind of obstruction and obfuscation will be only too familiar to victims of a raft of other British injustices including Windrush, Hillsborough, Grenfell, WASPI and Carers, with many more in the pipeline, such as maternity care failings, prison conditions and asylum processing backlogs. These cases are all very different but one thing unites them - state cover-up.

So what is it about the British state that makes it so prone to treating its citizens with contempt - so much so that it is its default mode? One answer might lie in the fact that the British are not technically citizens of the state but subjects of the Crown. Admittedly, the doctrine of Crown Immunity has been scaled-back since 1991, for example from the MoD and NHS, but still exists and its mindset is deeply ingrained in government groupthink, having seeped into its every interaction with the governed.

Freedom of Information Requests (FOIs) and Subject Access Requests (SARs) are now enshrined in law, supposedly allowing citizens to easily obtain information from public authorities and check data held about them. In practice it seems that the state makes this process as difficult as possible, routinely obstructing, ignoring or even denying such requests. It seems the culture of excessive secrecy is deeply ingrained and difficult to break.

I suggest that this comes from the entrenched arrogance and elitism of the British Establishment, which probably owes much to the history of Westminster politics and Whitehall bureaucracy. Politicians, civil service 'Mandarins', army officers, judges et al tended to come through the 'old boy' network of public schools and 'Oxbridge'. As such they showed patrician suspicion of, if not contempt for, the 'lower orders' of society - the 'little people'. In other words, as a product of the British class system, itself a social pyramid with monarchy and landed aristocracy at its pinnacle, they felt they had a God-given right, indeed a duty, to rule - and still do. Sir Brian called this out as 'paternalism' but I fear it may be more sinister than that.

They would have us believe that the system is now much more transparent, democratic and egalitarian but I rather doubt it. It may seem to be so but I suggest that is more apparent than real. Bright working- and middle-class civil service entrants may well penetrate the corridors of power in larger numbers than hitherto but I suspect they are soon seduced into the prevailing culture.

When even the historic architecture of the buildings they work in on the parliamentary estate and along Whitehall tend to preserve and promote the condescending attitudes of an entitled elite from another era this is perhaps unsurprising. But the fact that one of the most modern buildings, the 2005 2 Marsham Street, houses one of the worst offending departments, the Home Office, speaks to an ethos enshrined in more than just bricks and mortar. It is systemic and endemic.

Until this system is made truly accountable, today's will just be another scandal (though admittedly a particularly egregious one) to add to the list. So what is to be done to end this sorry litany of state failure? This is one area where meaningful reform can justifiably be conducted top-down, by dismantling the apex of the existing system first and abolishing the monarchy. 

When this is done all branches of the state can be made truly answerable to the people. Achieving this will require a totally new mindset, upending the social pyramid to put the people on top. Rather than sustaining the bizarre survival of medieval, pre-democratic government represented by the Crown we must sweep away this indefensible system in favour of properly representative democracy.  An abstract concept shrouded in mystery, cloaked in privilege, veiled in secrecy and accountable to no one but God has no place in a modern secular society.

Only when subjects become citizens will their rights finally be respected.

* I was pleased to hear Sir Chris Bryant MP (Labour, Rhonda) make the point in the Commons debate following the statement by the Paymaster General, John Glen, that we need to do politics very differently in this country. He said that, while we are excellent at inquiries and reports, we are terrible at implementation. Hear, hear!

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