Europe is “haunted by a spectre”, says James Snell in Politico – “or, more accurately, a Blob”. The Blob is a “ravening collective” determined “to kill any innovative idea”. It thrives in Britain, where civil servants all share the views of the university-educated middle classes associated with urban living and technocracy. The Blob is indifferent to economic growth, and likes “high taxes, the EU and the memory of the 2012 London Olympics”. It hates bold, risk-taking reformers – hence the downfall of Liz Truss and her replacement by the Blob-friendly Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, two devotees to the “orthodoxy of Britain’s famously insular and stuffy Treasury”.
The press – from the state-funded BBC to the “Blob-fathers” at The Guardian and The Times – celebrate “centrist orthodoxy”. And so it spreads, “fungus-like”, opposing reform in all its guises. It’s the same in Europe. Italy’s new PM, Giorgia Meloni, ran an “anti-establishment, anti-elite” campaign similar to Truss’s – yet practically the first thing she did in office was appoint five technocrats to her cabinet. “Blob-like characters” also run every single central bank in the West. They’re the ones who worsened our current wave of inflation by keeping interest rates at historic lows for far too long. Entire economies, “and whole generations”, will pay for this error for decades to come. It’s a screw-up that proves just how dangerous the “triumph” of establishment groupthink can be.