The populists are the deep state now! - and they are becoming unstuck

It is reported in the Financial Times by Jim Pickard that Dominic Cummings, a favourite of the Trumpian populists, has blocked implementation of Conservative manifesto promises to spend £9.2 billion on 'energy efficiency of homes, schools and hosptials'. He is reported to have said that energy efficiency is boring, and he wants to spend the money on new houses.

Apparently the Treasury and BEIS want to spend on energy efficiency to fulfill the manifesto commitment, but, it would seem, Cummings' view of the will of the people is not to be denied. Of course the Steve Bannons of the world claim that it is the career civil servants, closet liberals and socialists, who are the deep state.

But how can this be if it is the democratic wish of the nation as expressed through a manifesto which the self styled populists are trying to thwart? The Brexiteers have been keen on announcing that they are defending the will of the EU Referendum Result, but it seems now that it is just that the populists know best even when their views are different from what people voted for in a General Election. This attitude used to be called elitism!

Yet this instance of the blocking of energy efficiency is not an isolated case. There is now a creeping awareness that the so-called populist right, with their anti-statist and allegedly pro-personal freedom agenda, have backed the wrong horse when it comes to combatting coronavirus. They have made this a partisan issue, with their reluctance to support lockdown measures - or even to (in many cases) to embrace low cost measures such as facemask wearing, proper testing and proper contact tracing schemes.

But the majority of the population has not been going along with them. They have wanted strong measures to combat the virus, even if it means economic costs. The usual tropes of banging nationalist drums and blaming foreigners have certainly been tried (in the case of Trump and others), but people realise that shaking your fist at foreigners does not deter a virus. The populists are no longer so popular.  We can see this perhaps in the French local election results in which the far right slipped backwards. Hopefully we will see it a lot more in the US elections in November, although that is still sometime off.

But one thing that we need to do is to expose this theory about the deep state subvertng the popular will. The only deep state that is doing this is run by the right wing populists themselves. In the USA they have largely prevented an effective US response to the coronavirus, and in the UK they have damaged it. Who knows, but it may be that this virus crisis is the beginning of the end for the Trumpian populists.