According to a stunning new analysis, Boris Johnson is unable to reap the full benefits of Brexit because the country’s ruling elites are paralyzed by woke orthodoxy.
The ‘defeatist mindset’ of civil officials, according to experts at the Centre for Brexit Policy, is holding the country back. Civil servants are forsaking their impartiality to frustrate the Government’s aim.
According to the hard-hitting report, the Whitehall ‘blob’ is afflicted by a ‘dismal cosmopolitan worldview’ and a ‘liberal tyranny of guilt’ founded on a ‘caricatured image of British history focusing on slavery, murder, and colonial oppression.’
Its authors take aim at the Establishment’s declinist attitude, which feels the UK is a fading force on the global stage.
‘How different would our perception of the world and our position in it be if we saw ourselves as a fresh and emerging force, rather than a declining nation?’ they add.
‘History and geography have no bearing on whether Britain will emerge as a rising or declining force after Brexit: it is entirely in our own hands.’
Identity politics, with its focus on race and gender, as well as a fascination with the worst aspects of Britain’s past, are also criticized in the report, which was written by experts including Cambridge Professor Robert Tombs and former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith.
‘It seems almost calculated to increase internal dissent and ethnic and religious conflict; and it certainly works in the interests of our global opponents in the rapidly crystallising “grey war” between the authoritarian and free worlds,’ the authors say.
Mr Johnson has been urged by pro-Brexit Ministers and MPs to do more to highlight the dividends the UK can reap after leaving the EU.
Cabinet members, led by Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, have campaigned for a low-tax, low-regulation ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ to take advantage of the UK’s new freedom from EU legislation.
The Prime Minister is also urged to make Brexit a “concrete success” that is “unambiguously irreversible,” according to the paper.
It proposes that Britain skip the EU and build links with the nascent democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, while reinvigorating its alliances with the US and Commonwealth nations to counter China’s and Russia’s rise.
It is scathing, however, of how the Civil Service has thwarted government goals, highlighting its outspoken resistance to the policy of sending migrants on one-way tickets to the United States.
‘The shocking thing about these interventions is their entirely subjective and political character, in flagrant breach of the Civil Service Code,’ it says.
‘Civil servants are servants: the clue is in the name. They are required to maintain the highest standards of impartiality… not allow their personal political views to sway their advice to Ministers or affect the way they do their jobs.
‘It appears that this fundamental principle… has been completely abandoned. By extension, democracy itself is at risk when officials attempt to undermine Ministers and frustrate policies that the Government was elected to implement.
If civil servants feel empowered to threaten – quite openly – to block a policy simply because they don’t like it, without fearing so much as a slap on the wrist, the problem in Whitehall looks to be enormous.
‘Is it even possible to reform a bureaucratic behemoth that thrives on disloyalty and ineptitude?’
The report, Defining Britain’s Role In The World After Brexit, will be published this week and says the EU’s impotent actions over Ukraine have exposed it as a ‘paper tiger increasingly irrelevant on the world stage’.
It concludes: ‘The notion that we are a country in decline is deeply ingrained in our elites. It explains why we joined the EU and why we are struggling to escape its orbit even after our departure.
‘After Brexit, Britain needs a new self-confident national mindset, one that sets aside the myth of declinism and recognises that the country has huge assets, not least the fact that it is held in high regard across the world and that it plays a pivotal role in the Commonwealth.
‘Britain needs to re-establish a cohesive national purpose respectful of our past and our traditions and patriotic without being jingoistic.
‘We must now return to what we were, a fully sovereign, independent, United Kingdom that needs a coherent understanding of its national interest.
‘A renewed sense of national purpose would also reject both isolationism and the liberal tyranny of guilt that seeks to atone for past imperial power.’