'The Blob' revisited

Cambridge Circus Research is building an institutional map of the NGO complex which runs Britain

It has been almost six years since Herbalis published his seminal article on ‘the Blob’. In it, he described the complex network of government, NGOs, charities, and activist organisations that embed themselves in state processes at every level. At the height of the idea’s influence, senior civil servants went on the record imploring politicians to stop referring to their organisation as ‘the Blob.’ However, Herbalis’s more encompassing idea seems to have faded from the discourse, despite knowledge of this phenomenon being more important than ever before. This article serves as a reminder of the problem for the new crop of politicians and those who advise them who are seeking to refashion the British state. Our upcoming report will provide a comprehensive institutional map of the ‘civil society’ non-state actors and organisations that will have to be dealt with by any government that seeks to reassert democratic control over governance.

The origins of the concept are older, dating back the early 2000s and what Sean Gabb referred to as the ‘Enemy Class’. According to Gabb, the Enemy Class ‘exists in and around the public sector’ and comprises ‘the great majority of those administrators, lawyers, experts, educators, and media people whose living is connected with the State.’ Gabb’s libertarianism colours his particular description of the phenomenon, but his identification of a broader extra-governmental left wing political infrastructure holds true even if one wishes to pursue different ends. Since 2001, this class has only expanded in power and influence — with jobs aplenty for the boys (and girls). Others have grasped at a similar diagnosis, including Curtis Yarvin in the American context and, latterly, Dominic Cummings.

Many have mistakenly thought of the Blob as a conspiracy. It is far more durable than mere conspiracy. To coordinate a conspiracy would require secrecy and discipline, whereas the Blob operates principally on shared assumptions, incentives, and ideologies. This is why it has been effective. Beyond a shared professional sphere, they very naturally share habits, mores, lifestyles and so on. While coordination can and does happen, with the same names and funders popping up again and again on a myriad of issues, it requires no more than the same types of people being drawn into their areas of influence. ‘Class’ is a useful framework here, and throughout history, socioeconomic classes have been made, remade and ultimately dissolved by state action. Thankfully for us, dissolving our ‘Enemy Class’ insinuates nothing of the horrors of de-kulakisation — but simply the removal of state patronage and access to influence from a group that does little but gum up the legislative process and ensure that the state remains captured towards their particular political ends.

The narrower formulation of the Blob as merely the Civil Service is insufficient. The Blob is much bigger than that. The creation of a depoliticised regulatory state under Thatcher was expanded from the economic domain to the straightforwardly political under Tony Blair. These two great expulsions of power from elected politicians and the formal civil service that ostensibly serves them creates a parallel quasi-state on top of our existing constitution. Around this new constellation of regulators and arms-length bodies grew a fungal orchard of charities and NGOs, often partially funded by the public purse, which sought to influence policymaking from outside of the normal political process. This has been perhaps the left’s greatest victory in the past half century. When a minister makes a statement, it is obviously political, and is therefore treated with some incredulity. Yet a position laundered through civil society organisations, media, and consultations appears like a neutral expert opinion.

What developed under Blair was solidified under Cameron, whose ‘Big Society’ agenda sought to rebuild civil infrastructure to allow the retreat of the state from certain areas of life in a recognisably conservative impulse towards the establishment of ‘little platoons’. Naturally, though, the types of people who sought careers in the Big Society were not Burkeans, but leftists, and thus Cameron’s project only allowed his enemies to flourish all the more.

This is why Herbalis’s thick formulation remains so useful. The Blob is not merely the civil service resisting elected politicians. It is the whole environment in which certain ideas become embedded so deeply that they cease to appear ideological at all. It is the machinery by which one class’s assumptions are converted into administrative norms, charitable purposes, legal obligations, and public-sector best practice.

The charity and NGO sector is central to this apparatus. It supplies the system with its moral language. Not only that, but it actively participates in the political process, engaging with and often contracted by the state, but formally sitting apart from it. A government that disagrees with a department is playing politics. A government that tackles a charity is accused of cruelty.

The distinction between state and civil society is perhaps obsolete. The old distinction assumed civil society exists outside the state, or as a counterweight to it. This may have been true in the past, when it consisted of things like local churches or clubs. It is hopelessly inadequate to describe modern professional NGOs. These are not organic expressions of local civic life. They are funded by large foundations and by the state itself, and are now an integral part of every stage in the legislative process. They are staffed by the same class of left-wing graduates that staffs the civil service — in fact, it is entirely typical for individuals to move back and forth seamlessly across the supposed divide throughout the course of a career. Identifying clearly where the state ends and civil society begins is now an almost impossible task.

Our report will begin to untangle which particular organisations play an outsized obstructive role in our governance. This becomes more transparent when one follows the money. The data is, unfortunately, fragmented. It is scattered across GrantNav databases, Charity Commission financial statements, procurement documents, and other such places. But piecing these together begins to uncover the foundations of this component. Some of the most influential charities are not simply voluntary organisations, but connected nodes of a professional political advocacy platform.

Of course, many charities are perfectly innocent, and some provide valuable services. However, all too often, the moral authority and tax advantages conferred by charitable status are used by these organisations to build a permanent infrastructure for demonstrably political activity.

We have seen this perhaps most clearly in migration and asylum policy. There are charities in this space that genuinely provide services (such as helplines) to people in need. However, many others ‘help’ their beneficiaries not through provision of direct aid but through attempts to influence government policy, including the managing of persistent pressure campaigns, the domination of media narratives, and even bringing litigation against the state itself. Often, the same organisation will do both. A charity might receive public money to provide the state a service, only to turn around and take that very same arm of the state to court to block a policy.

The appearance of political activity can be obscured when numerous smaller organisations share common funders. These organisations will often appear as co-signatories in open letters denouncing this or that policy, or may work together in various other ways. Taken individually, each charity might seem relatively benign, its influence minimal. But understood as a whole, they form a vast infrastructure of influence not too dissimilar from the business cartels of old.

Much of this will be well-known to readers who have been in or around the ‘anon’ sphere since Herbalis wrote the original essay. Indeed, many such people now have the ear of various political leaders. Nevertheless, the current understanding of the enemy as a force within the state de jure is, whilst an improvement on previous interpretations which failed to look past elected politicians themselves, insufficient to address the problem. It is crucial that the right in and approaching Westminster develop the language to oppose it. So far, it has still been far more comfortable talking about civil servants, whose ‘officialdom’ has been a periodic target in British political discourse since the late 19th century. Those who will form the next government must become comfortable talking about the organised interests that surround, pressure, brief, sue, train, advise, and morally discipline the state. The restoration of democratic control of policymaking by Parliament is once again the central plank of this pitch.

In many areas, these external bodies are just as important as the officials themselves. They create the atmosphere in which policy is made. They define the acceptable vocabulary. They determine which experts count. They supply the human-interest story to the journalist, the briefing note to the MP, the witness to the select committee, the claimant to the lawyer, and the stakeholder response to the department.

The result is that a minister trying to change policy does not merely encounter administrative inertia. He encounters an entire ecosystem of resistance. If he reforms the asylum system, the refugee charities are ready. If he reforms policing, the activist lawyers are ready. If he reforms planning, the environmental NGOs are ready. If he reforms welfare, the poverty lobby is ready. If he reforms equality law, the human rights groups are ready. Before the policy has even been announced, the arguments against it already exist. The legal grounds have been explored. The journalists have their contacts. The parliamentary allies have their lines. The consultation responses can be mobilised. The Blob is not powerful because it is centrally commanded; it is powerful because it is permanently prepared, just as the Hydra of British trade unions were to go on strike for unsustainable pay increases in another moment of national ungovernability.

This goes some way to explain why this part of the Blob is so difficult to defeat. Unlike the trade unions, the class of the Blob rarely appears self-interested. Rather, it appeals to virtue. Of course it would never say, ‘We wish to preserve our influence, and our cushy jobs that go along with it.’ It says, ‘We are protecting vulnerable people.’ It does not say, ‘We are imposing our politics.’ It says, ‘We are following the evidence.’ It does not say, ‘We are obstructing the elected government.’ It says, ‘We are defending the rule of law.’ It mixes the good with the political, the charitable with the ideological, the expert with the activist, and the lawful with the obstructive.

This is where Gabb’s Enemy Class becomes relevant again. His phrase was harsh, but evocative: a class of people whose living, status, and identity were bound up with a state and its surrounding institutions that are fundamentally hostile to our politics and to the national interest. Since the early 2000s, that class has only gotten stronger. The result is that the ideas and agenda of the right is consistently deprived of public legitimacy. The citizen who wants immigration control is political. The charity that opposes immigration control is humanitarian. The voter who wants cheaper energy is selfish. The NGO director that wants Net Zero is an expert. The minister who wants to build is reckless. The campaign group that stops him is defending nature.

Over time, this produces a profound distortion in democratic government. Elections can change ministers, but they do not necessarily change the operating system. The civil servants and third sector workers remain, their institutional knowledge honed by decades of experience. A new government arrives and discovers that it controls the formal levers of power, but not the ecosystem through which power is interpreted and applied.

This is why we took it upon ourselves to map some of this network. We believe we have shone a light on an aspect of power, hidden in plain sight, that exercises enormous influence but is as yet unknown to most. The Blob survives because it is dispersed. No single grant or judicial review reveals the picture. The pattern emerges only when all pieces are taken together to illuminate the network as a whole.

Once seen, the central question becomes impossible to avoid. Why should democratically elected governments fund their own obstruction? Why should charitable privileges be available to bodies whose primary purpose is political campaigning? Why should we allow organisations that benefit from the standing and legitimacy conferred by public money and large grants to consistently shape public policy? Why should the public be unable to see the ways these special interests are connected?

Some might take this as an argument to abolish all charities — it is not. Charities can be a healthy part of a democratic state. We need organisations that can intervene in areas the state does not or should not interfere with. But precisely because these things matter, they should not be confused with professionalised political activism. Charity should mean something more specific than the pursuit of ideological goals by tax-privileged institutions. Public benefit should mean something more concrete than agreement with elite moral fashion.

The reform required is therefore one of boundaries. Service delivery should be distinguished from advocacy. Public money should be ring-fenced for the purpose for which it is granted. Charitable status should depend on a dominant charitable purpose, not on a political mission expressed in charitable language. The Charity Commission should not become a ministerial weapon, but it should once again become a serious guardian of the line between charity and politics. Judicial review should remain available to those directly affected by unlawful state action, but repeat institutional litigation by campaigning NGOs should be treated as the political activity it often is.

Above all, government needs to recover the habit of governing. It must stop pretending that every body calling itself independent is neutral, that every charity is disinterested, that every consultation response is expertise, and that every legal challenge is merely the rule of law in action. A government that wants to reform the country must understand the forces arranged against reform. It must know who funds them, who staffs them, who amplifies them, who litigates for them, and how they move through the state.

The Blob’s greatest strength has always been its ability to describe itself as something other than power. It is always accountability, process, or some other morally charged, fluffy term. The first task is therefore to name it accurately.

Herbalis and Gabb paved the way with their descriptions of the sociology and personality of the Blob. What is needed now is the institutional map. Any government that wishes to rule, and not merely occupy office, must begin by seeing it whole. It must understand where opposition will come from, and how. This is the first and greatest task of truly governing. There is no point in having whatever policy on immigration, crime, or the economy if this is not dealt with. A truly radical governing platform will only be defeated in detail by the Blob. It is one of the most monumental tasks any government will have ever faced. Only by being ready for this battle can anything else be achieved.

Cambridge Circus Research will release their full report into the funding networks of charitable organisations and NGOs on Monday. Follow them on X to stay updated.

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This article was written by Charles Talbot, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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