The Left has long recognised the importance of ‘the long march through the institutions’. It’s only comparatively recently that the Tories seem to have grasped the disadvantages of having every non-governmental body in the country run by people who hate you.
In response to this belated insight, the Johnson government has begun appointing less virulently anti-Tory leaders to key ‘independent’ bodies. The new BBC Director-General and chairman of the BBC are a former Tory councillor and Tory donor (and Rishi Sunak’s ex-boss) respectively.
This has in turn prompted outrage from notionally independent quangocrats. The recent appointment to the UK’s equality watchdog of David Goodhart, a journalist and researcher who has expressed centre-Right views on issues such as immigration, caused a furore in the heart of Big Diversity. And the chair of Royal Greenwich Museums recently resigned in protest at the Government’s refusal to reappoint as trustee Aminul Hoque, a prominent advocate of ‘decolonising’ the curriculum.
Like the Tories, the general public has also clocked that there’s precious little ‘independence’ to be found in ‘independent’ bodies. Recent years have witnessed a mushrooming of grassroots groups dedicated to contesting power on the field of NGOs.
At the cutting edge of this development has been those feminists and gay rights activists pushing back against the once seemingly-ineluctable encroachment of ‘gender identity’ as a replacement for biological sex.
For a long time, protest focused on public debate, and the related issue of free speech, in the hope that reasoned discussion would drive a sensible political settlement. But all the institutional structures still seemed skewed in favour of gender identity and for a while no one could work out why.
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