Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has written to the Treasury’s most senior civil servant, Sir Tom Scholar, to put the Treasury on notice of the radical changes he is planning for how it operates if he ever becomes Chancellor. Guido has obtained his own copy of the three-page letter setting out McDonnell’s 10-point plan to reshape the Treasury as the all-powerful instrument of his own economic ideology. Guido gives you a taste of the future that lies in store under our glorious Corbynite overlords:

The revolution will be swift, McDonnell wants an emergency budget passed “within no more than 10 weeks”. The Treasury is instructed to “plan for the necessary preliminary actions to be taken to ensure that spending in advance of Royal Assent is permissible” – he wants the civil service to enact his “urgent spending priorities as well as tax proposals” including a “National Investment Bank” before he has even secured full approval from Parliament. The centrist counter-revolutionaries will never see it coming…

A full civil service re-education programme will be implemented: “The Treasury will widen the range of economic theories and approaches in which its officials and those in the rest of the government are trained”. Those emergency spending powers will help them get their own copies of Mao’s Little Red Book in good time…

McDonnell plans to centralise more power under himself by introducing new versions of Brown’s Public Service Agreements scrapped by Osborne, which give the Treasury the power to impose “monitoring arrangements” and exercise much tighter control over individual Government Departments. He also wants the current 3-year Spending Reviews to be replaced by good old 5-year plans. They worked so well in Soviet Russia and Maoist China after all…

The Treasury will also be required to throw open “all its policy making processes, including Budgets and Spending Reviews” to “wide” and “meaningful” consultations with the public, “businesses, trade unions, civic organisations and relevant stakeholders.” Will Momentum be getting a seat at the table?

The obvious reason why this is not done is because the contents of the Budget are highly market-sensitive, it would cause absolute chaos with price moving leaks. Of course in McDonnell’s true Marxist utopia, all businesses would be owned by and all prices set by the state, so maybe this wouldn’t be an issue after all…

The letter makes clear the scale of Corbyn and McDonnell’s ambitions to fundamentally reshape the institutions of the state along their own ideological lines. Any moderate Labour MPs who are happily going along with it on the basis that it’s just a slightly stronger form of Milibandism are going to be in for a nasty shock…