Conservatives need to stop blaming “the blob” – an imagined cabal of enemies embedded in British society – for failures of government, George Osborne has said.
In a speech on Friday the former chancellor said the Tories had been in government for 11 years and that they were “in charge of our country’s destiny”.
Some Tories have claimed an amorphous “blob” of political opponents in civil society and government are obstructing their policies – often blaming it when things go wrong.
The blob is poorly defined but has been said to include civil servants, parts of the legal system, charities, trade unions and remainers.
It has been blamed for all manner of government failures ranging from immigration policy, to Brexit, to Liz Truss’s mini budget.
But critics say the concept is meaningless and at best simply refers to the existence of different viewpoints in the country.
“There are some Conservatives who blame ‘the blob’ and the civil servants and the establishment,” Mr Osborne told the Northern Research Group Conference in Doncaster on Friday.
“We’ve been in office since 2010, we’re in charge of our country’s destiny, and we should stop blaming others if we don’t get things right.”
Mr Osborne, whose comments were not met with applause in the room, was talking in the context of devolution of power to local areas, which he said Conservatives should be more “ambitious” about.
Recent users of the concept include Home Secretary Suella Braverman, whose name was put to an email to Tory members warning that “an activist blob of left-wing lawyers, civil servants and the Labour Party blocked us” from tackling small boat crossings. She later distanced himself from the missive.
Michael Gove previously popularised the term when he was education secretary, to refer to institutional resistance in the civil service and teaching profession to his reform plans.
Tory peer Daniel Finkelstein last month wrote in his Times column of his distaste for the term, warning that “Tories have turned a critique of institutional resistance into an all-purpose conspiracy theory that reeks of defeatism”.
