So, exactly who is making the UK apparently ungovernable? Is it bullying, psychotic ministers intent on stoking the culture wars until Gary Lineker, the BBC, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and every other woke-sucking, electorate-hating public institution is consumed by its righteous flames?
Or is it, more specifically, us “over-unionised”, “activist” civil servants – who, despite being a “very small minority” of milquetoast snowflakes, are still somehow capable of orchestrating the ruthless defenestration of Dominic Raab, Steve Barclay and any other poor minister who dares to actually get something – anything – done?
Or is it you, dear reader, the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” with your declinist, gloomster schadenfreude, bringing the country to its knees?
It’s not you, darling, it’s me. At least, that’s what assorted Raab-fluffers – including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Conservative peer Lord Marland (who told the BBC there was “almost a conspiracy by the civil service”) and the Emperor Palpatine of civil service reform, Francis Maude (more on him in a bit) – are desperately trying to get the public to believe.
The very carefully choreographed narrative from these notable truth-tellers (brilliantly debunked recently by Simon McDonald, who himself worked under Raab and quickly dismissed the conspiracy theorists) is that the civil service “blob” is hellbent on a campaign to frustrate and undermine government policy.
Yet this absurd, toxic take on how the civil service works somehow manages to overlook the vaccine rollout, the cost of living support package and the response to the Ukraine crisis as recent examples, according to the Institute for Government’s 2022 report, of civil servants “working under clear ministerial direction … with a focus on action and making change happen”.
“Activist” civil servants? The truth is, we’re not that organised. But even if we had the hilariously short-sighted aim of “bringing down” the government, we don’t have the means or the platform to do any such thing. The idea of a hidden civil service agenda is an archetypal “deep state” trope that for years has been cultivated and amplified by the rightwing media to serve as mood music for this government’s war against the very concept of checks and balances against its power.
Ministers are now carpet-bombing the media with the next chapter of this story. It goes something like this: now that lazy, incompetent civil servants have hounded Raab from office, ministers face a struggle to get them to do any work.
Oliver Dowden, Raab’s replacement as deputy prime minister, warns against the civil service lowering standards. Civil servants even have “lower expectations of work”, according to David Davis. “We would have found it quite difficult to win both world wars” with attitudes like these, Lord Lilley sniffed.
Government ministers – with Tory backbenchers screaming for civil service blood – have ample incentive to ignore the idea that dealing more effectively with bullying and harassment might be an answer. Instead, having created the problem, they are manufacturing the solution: the actual politicisation of the civil service.
And so back to Lord Maude, who, having tried several times since 2010 to reform the civil service, now has radical plans to let ministers appoint their own civil servants. He is probably the only Tory clever, experienced and motivated enough to have another run at it before the next general election. “It is perfectly possible to preserve impartiality while allowing ministers more say in appointments … Without material adjustment, there will be more cases like Raab’s when frustrations boil over … We also need to be more robust and less mealy mouthed about ‘politicisation’,” he says.
To most civil servants, this sounds more like a naked threat than a serious effort to overhaul the machinery of government. Why? Because it does nothing to fix the problem of ministerial bullying. As Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government, points out, the government response to the Raab case seems more likely to deter officials from speaking out: “nothing has been done to reduce the risk of future problems,” she says.
And there’s baggage here: from lambasting civil servants for working from home, to ridiculing diversity training courses, the underlying motive for repeated attacks on civil servants in recent years seems to point towards encouraging the abandonment of impartiality, particularly where that can help hide the impact of government policies on the poor, the disabled, the young and other demographics less likely to vote Tory.
And don’t we already have cadres of special advisers to help grease the wheels between ministers and the civil service? It’s a system that works reasonably well. Replacing senior civil servants with political appointees would be an utter shitshow, because the main criterion for their appointment wouldn’t be talent or experience, but political loyalty.
We must tackle wicked, long-term problems such as climate change, health and social care reform and worsening social mobility. If, every time there’s a general election, one civil service leaves to be replaced by a new one, that extra churn and disruption to institutional memory would only make meaningful change even harder.
Nobody’s saying the UK civil service is perfect. And it’s possible, as Maude suggests, that other civil service models can work. But they seem to work only in countries where the “good chap” theory of government – in which “the letter of the rules is less important than the system being run by players who understand their spirit” – doesn’t keep getting tested to destruction and beyond.
Don’t take my word for it. Lord McDonald worked more closely with Dominic Raab than anyone else, as the top civil servant at the Foreign Office, and he couldn’t have been clearer: “There is no civil service activism.” The only thing that really counts is how ministers now decide to behave.
• The author works for the UK civil service
