CW: Sexual assault
Dominic Cummings’ talk at the Sheldonian Theatre, hosted by the Pharos Foundation, was titled, ‘What Is There To Be Done?’. However, his focus was not so much on searching for solutions as on raising the alarm over what he called the “cancerous regime” of government institutions.
Cummings painted a picture of stagnation in the Cabinet Office, the civil service, and almost every British institution, from the “broken” NHS to the “old school system”. Comparing current leaders to 19th century prime ministers like William Pitt, his argument was clear – he was calling for a return to “civilisation in this country”, what he depicted as the nation’s past greatness.
Amongst all of the “things that have gone wrong”, he kept underlining one issue: immigration. One of his first statements was to argue about what he called the “industrialised mass rape of white English children” by “Pakistani and Somali gangs”. Although referring to the Rotherham child exploitation scandal of a decade ago, his rhetoric was urgent in its sense of the now. His talk presented the country as under threat from an immigration system that let in “criminals and terrorists” while neglecting skilled workers, and could not stop the “stupid boats in France”, addressing an issue which was a large part of the Labour government’s migration policy.
The Pharos Foundation, known for hosting conservative politicians and academics, also hosted Cummings at a talk last year. His discussion of immigration then, though significantly more limited, did touch on how the only way to separate “legal immigration” and “illegal immigration” and deal with the “ludicrous boats” was to make the “upheaval” of the civil service which he envisioned.
The issue of immigration permeated every topic. When discussing the “pathological institution” of the NHS, it was “foreign trained doctors” he singled out as stopping “British people” from accessing training. For Cummings, who repeatedly fell back on Asian and African cultural references to make his criticism of the British government, the Home Office was on a “jihad” and the stagnant civil service was a “caste system” of “Brahmins and Untouchables”.
Most pointed were his references to protests over the war in Gaza, which he described as calling for a “second Holocaust”. Although his talk was received with laughs, as when he referred to the “cult” of “LGBTQ+ plus plus… plus Hamas”, his opinions of both the LGBTQ+ community and Palestine protesters appeared entirely serious. His reference to attempts to protect the “world’s most famous religion of peace” in an ironic tone, apparently referring to Islam, after the recent fine given to a man for burning the Quran, was equally pointed.
Cummings’ condemnation of the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic may have brought an uneasy reminder of the scandal over his alleged breaking of lockdown rules, most notoriously in his claim that he drove to Barnard Castle while self-isolating to test his eyesight. However, the winding queues, and spontaneous applause during the talk, suggested the speech was received by loyal supporters.
Dominic Cummings’ talk, was wide-ranging in its description of what he saw as the breakdown of UK institutions. It was just as wide-ranging in the solutions it recommended: to “change the people, the ideas and the institutions”. Cummings, describing a nation where “normal people” are those who wish to “close the borders” to immigrants, was careful to demarcate what it means to be a “normal” British person – a phrase he repeatedly used. Additionally, having attended Oxford to study Modern and Ancient History in the 1990s, Cummings made it clear that his audience did not consist of fresh “graduates”, whom he called “the easiest to fool”.