If activism is your thing, then the civil service, (which is more into passivism) couldn’t be a worse career choice. Credit: Ben Stansall / AFP / STANSALL/ GETTY
British politics is turning upside down. Conservative support is growing in the North and among working class voters, while Labour has made progress in parts of the South and among the middle class voters.
Unluckily for Sir Keir, the Labour gains aren’t enough to offset the Tory advance. The electoral map isn’t inverting completely. It’s getting bluer at the top, but, like a disappointed baboon, it’s not much redder at the bottom.
Except that from a ministerial desk in Whitehall, things might not seem that way. With younger, London-based graduates leaning evermore to the Left, then, for Tory ministers, enemy-held territory starts right outside the office door.
The Conservatives maybe the “natural party of government”, but things have been tense with the civil service ever since Margaret Thatcher proclaimed her intention to “roll back the frontiers of the state”.
Though the Tories have been busy of late rolling those frontiers forward again, this hasn’t made the relationship with civil servants any easier. In fact, the relationship is acquiring paranoid undertones. Only last weekend, a story appeared in the Mail on Sunday alleging the existence of a Labour spy ring somewhere in Whitehall. That’s almost certainly nonsense, but one can see why ministers might be feeling a little jumpy.
In any workplace, it helps if you feel that you and your colleagues are on the same side. But in Whitehall, that’s rather in doubt. Certainly, the politicians are outnumbered. There are about a hundred ministers, but hundreds of thousands of civil servants.
Of course, the civil servants that matter most to ministerial life are only a small fraction of the overall number. Most immediately there are those who sit in the minister’s Private Office. This is a misleading name, because there’s nothing private about it. Apart from the occasional special advisor or speechwriter, a minister has very little control over the staff who literally surround him, or her. As soon as he walks out of his physical office, there they are waiting for him — people appointed by someone else to provide an all-enveloping interface with the outside world.
That “someone else”, by the way, is the department’s Permanent Secretary — whose own office and staff are never very far away.
These are the most politically-sensitive parts of the civil service and they take extreme care to be politically neutral — and to be seen as such. Nevertheless, civil servants are people too and people have opinions. So how many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing?
Well, judging from my own experience of working in two government departments, I would say approximately all of them. Not that you need any special insight here. You only have to walk around a ministerial Private Office to get the picture. The staff are young — most of them in their twenties and thirties. They’re all university educated — largely in the humanities and social sciences — and thus have been wokishly catechised. To purchase this dubious privilege, they’ve had to take out hefty student loans, which they’re now paying back out of their modest salaries. Of their remaining money, most of it is paid to some landlord to rent a room in an overpriced London suburb. So, yes, of course they’re Lefties.
If the hyperactive fools who run Downing Street weren’t so concerned with backroom politics and conspiracy theories, then they might want do something about a system that churns out a hostile graduate workforce from which the civil service is recruited. But why engage in serious systemic reform when you can be briefing out cock-and-bull stories to the tabloid press?
Going to war with the civil service as it is now would be a terrible mistake for the Government. Whether or not Whitehall harbours hardcore Lefties leaking secrets to Labour is unimportant, because they’re not representative of the civil service as whole. Even among London-based public sector professionals there is more than one kind of Left-winger — and it’s important to distinguish between them.
It has become fashionable for pollsters to divide the country not just by party preference (which can change), but also by ‘political tribe’ which reflects underlying values. For instance, research conducted for More in Common identifies seven political tribes — from “Progressive Activists” to “Backbone Conservatives”.
It’s tempting to place our younger civil servants in the “Progressive Activist” category — which is the most Leftwing of the seven tribes. This grouping is notorious for its disproportionately gobby presence on social media. However, our civil servants — especially those working in Private Offices — are anything but outspoken in their opinions. If activism is your thing, then the civil service, (which is more into passivism) couldn’t be a worse career choice.
If there is a political tribe that our civil servants naturally belong to, it’s a group called the “Civic Pragmatists”. This tribe is also Left-leaning, but unlike the “Progressive Activists” they’re far from confrontational. More in Common describes them as “a group that cares about others, at home or abroad, and who are turned off by the divisiveness of politics… they are charitable, concerned, exhausted, community-minded, open to compromise, and socially liberal.”
The civil service might not always attract the most adventurous of souls, but many of its recruits are looking for more than a regular pay check — they also want to do something meaningful and public spirited with their lives.
From a Conservative viewpoint, the real danger is not that these people are subversives. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Far from wanting to smash the system, they’re all too inclined to perpetuate well-meaning, but stagnant, public sector orthodoxies. As such, they become absorbed into the Whitehall ‘blobs’ that stand in the way of meaningful reform.
Is there anything that a reforming Conservative government can do about this? One way is for ministers and their special advisors to challenge the system, Cummings-style. But while I’m all for a spot of creative confrontation, true change comes from persistence of effort. And as long as ministers and their advisors are moved every few years (or months) that will be cut short. And don’t forget that any civil servants that fully get behind a particular reform effort will get moved too — and thus reabsorbed into the blob.
There is a way forward, however, which is to restructure bits of government around the delivery of strategic missions. This would allow the most entrepreneurial and idealistic civil servants to be recruited with the promise that their dedication to a reforming project will be properly recognised and rewarded over the long-term. Given the shining example of the vaccine development and procurement programme, there’s never been a better to promote a mission-led government.
Of course, that approach would require Conservative politicians to accept that the state can be a solution as well as a problem. Hopefully, that’s not too Leftwing an idea for them to swallow.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
peterfranklin_ 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribePerhaps there is a bifurcation appearing in the English (I do mean the English), whereby the educated middle-class, especially the young, is becoming ever more child-like and self-indulgent, lightweight, self-estranged, but the mass of the English people are becoming more concerned for the future of their people, more aware of the forces at work in the world, and more in touch with their own instincts and nature.
“their dedication to a reforming project will be properly recognised and rewarded Given the shining example of the vaccine development and procurement”
sure, why not, but….what project? The vaccine was pretty easy to side with, I cannot think of a single other project that fits the parameters.
The basic problem is everything the government does it makes a mess of. Take one thing – say, Housing Benefit’. No way can that dog be fixed. There is a criteria the government seems completely unable to answer: ‘Who is Deserving Poor, Who is Not’. Without that being fixed there can be no system which is good. The government is unfit to lead as it cannot make distinctions, has no morals, no judgement, no real ability to rank need and costs, no objective goals. In trying to be ‘Fair’ where that is very different to different people, it just has to use its dart board to make decisions, as it is not allowed to use right and wrong, to make moral decisions.
BUT UNHERD, YOU LACK THE MOST VITAL STORY OF OUR TIME – YOU COMPLETELY IGNORE IT, THE ECONOMY! I believe the economy is due to collapse into a depression not seen since the Great one. I think the entire Fiat Money System of Central Banks and USA being the reserve has been harmed so badly by the covid lockdown and response, it already had problems, that it needs such a correction that the 1980, 1999, 2008 recessions will be exceeded, or equaled anyway. I think the bubble will burst.
Could you not get writers with good credentials to write specific articles on this. Show me right or wrong, I am totally absorbed by this matter. Interest, Bond Yields, Equities, MMT, Treasuries, The FED, commodities (Lumber in USA has tripled since last year!), inflation, ECB, Deficit spending, PIIGS, QE, Fractional Reserve Banking, what is going on with the M2?, and M1, M3, gold standard (China is buying gold madly) Digital Yuan, Blockchain, Bit Coin, Tether, silver/gold backed crypto, Zombie Corporations, China shipping full containers to us, and them going back empty, Housing Boom, Mortgage Forbearance, Hyper Inflation, Deflation, Stagflation…..
Please write about these REAL things rather than the fluff you mostly love. This will be our entire future life, how it goes, this is the big story.
So Sanford, where would you put your money?
Kazatomprom, Cameco, URA as the world MUST get more nuclear baseline generating to use solar/wind. I bought 1000 oz of silver last spring, some gold miners, junior silver miners, Air B&B, some food staples producers, real estate, but most cash as I wait for a crash, before inflation eats it, so I can get into equities as I missed the entire 2020-2021 Bull run, one unparralled, taking the market to record highs (During a huge drop in GDP!) because I could not believe it. Like Bitcoin has done, and I think is a huge bubble so I missed doubling my money! But FOMO is dangerous, or so I thought. I almost bought etherium but backed out………
I am also getting some Ivanhoe Mines, copper in Congo, so risky, but I will just get what I do not mind losing. We missed it all though. last spring was the time.
No way I’m investing in Air BnB after they gave half a million bucks to BLM.
…totally agree Sanford. If anything is going to arrest the current moral panic it’s the looming economic “correction”. That needs focusing on if ways out of it are to be found, with or without a mission management approach at the government level.
It certainly occured to me that some of the most absurb liberal ideas are perhaps designed to create division-lets you & him fight , so that we take our eye off the ball.Covid seems to be created to affect the young-some of whom already seem afraid of their own shadow-they keep saying ‘keep safe’ to me as though we were in the time of plague & they are the ones indoctrinated with this ‘fluffy’ stuff.
Totally agree. The mask of fiat is slipping as what was unthinkable 20 years ago is now routine. Want to do stuff? Print the money. Inflation? Nah, buy cheap stuff from elsewhere. Kids can’t buy houses because they’re too expensive? Make up a scheme that’ll push them up more.
The problem is the absence is strategic thinking. Not deficit, utter and total absence. We’re run by limited thinking, narrow minded graduates of the same useless degrees who attend to polls and news.
Meanwhile, that light at the end of the tunnel is a train.
Completely agree. I’ve lost count of the number of articles here saying a change is coming, but containing no practical proposals as to what that might involve
Debt to Earnings ratios, off in crazy land, but still it makes no difference to the equities market. IMF just printed 1 TRILLION of its Special Drawing Right $, SDR, an imaginary fiat currency they can print, and then Spend! Google it, it really is true.
Blah blah… this was pontificated upon every few years after the markets went higher than expected and were due a “crash” or readjustment. It hasn’t happened. Put your money into metals or cash, and see the markets rise again, and you missed the boat again.
Great if you’re right this time, but not so great if your prediction is like previous predictions. When old Buffet cashes in, we know it’s real. Until then, it’s a guess.
You want to read ‘The Long Emergency’ by James Howard Kunstler that will tell you all you need to know. Still relevant today as when it was published in 2005.
“Of course, that approach would require Conservative politicians to accept the state can be a solution as well as a problem. Hopefully that’s not too leftwing an idea for them to swallow.”.
The Conservative Party last year decided to adopt an illiberal policy from Communist China, in which formerly free people were imprisoned in their homes for 23 hours a day. Did it not apply to you, Peter, or are you going senile and you’d just forgotten about it, since it partially ended 10 days ago?
The Tory party have already decided on Covid passports, advertising for members to join the workforce which will bring them about- candidates must be ready to be in place by the beginning of May. This will be the state allowing people the basic freedom to undertake normal, daily activity in return for having an experimental, potentially life threatening gene therapy, which is still under trial and has resulted in serious side effects and death for many experimental subjects, that is ordinary, trusting, silly, members of the public who allow themselves to be coerced by the state. Is that not evidence enough that the Tories think the state can be part of the solution? They have single handedly destroyed a thousand years of freedom and the idea that everything is permitted unless it is specifically forbidden. Is that not leftwing enough for you? What else do they have to do, ban fossil fuel, dish out billions of pounds of tax payers money to procure goods?
Nail on head!
Hear! Hear!
Well you will win a few plaudits from those who already agree with you, but this sort of semi-hysterical rant is not likely to convince anyone who thinks things may be a little less clear cut. The state limits our freedoms all the time including in the field of public health and control of outbreaks of communicable diseases, of which covid 19 is an example. Other limitations of freedom include being forced to wear a seatbelt in a car. Unless you are not a flat out anarchist,most people would agree the state has duties to protect the citizens, and if you disagree with these measures, best provide some evidence and rational argument instead of a rant. I wear a motorcycle helmet when riding a motorcycle, and do not regard myself as a silly trusting member of the public coerced by the state when I do so. You will not be forced to have a vaccine, but you may not be able to do things that potentially wili risk others. This may be not entirely clear at the moment, but may become so with more data in time
So, what you’re saying is if we sacrifice a little freedom for the public good, we might as well sacrifice it all?
There is a stench of arrogance that unite the Tories and the Labour Party. Both parties riddled with graduates who have been through the great indoctrination programs provided by institutions once known as universities. They call themselves Tories but they are a continuation of Blair and the ‘third way’. Neither party have any real interest in the people, only in perusing what they have decided is best for them.
I despise the party politics that have become a cancer in our western liberal societies.
The civil service full of middle class, graduate students.
What a suprise, the working class would never be let near that sort of job of money, perish the thought
Things might change then?
Apprenticeship maybe?
To difficult better to keep it to the right class and sort
I know people that joined the civil service at 16 and made senior positions and placed billions of pounds of contracts in that time. The problem is that the Blair government offered them all early retirement to cut the size of the civil service. There used being a pairing of long service people that worked their way up from entry level positions, who knew how the system worked in practice, and fast track oxbridge types. Now there is no one with practical knowledge of procurement left and its all Oxford PPE types agreeing how great they are.
And duly getting ripped off.
Mutters under breath “….. f ….g Bliar”
The staff are young — most of them in their twenties and thirties. They’re all university educated — largely in the humanities and social sciences — and thus have been wokishly catechised.
It’s as if the problem reveals itself. What organization has 20 and 30-somethings running the place, irrespective of which way they lean? This may happen in some tech environments, but those people are not making policy decisions about our lives. That this cohort is barely removed from the cult of academia only makes things worse.
Very much so. And what makes it even worse is that ‘academia’ is quite far removed from actual academia these days. Barely more than a cult indeed.
I think we all gave up on the Civil Service and all arms of the state some years ago.
Two lines from this story jumped out at me.
“They’re all university educated — largely in the humanities and social sciences…they’ve had to take out hefty student loans, which they’re now paying back out of their modest salaries.
“… they might want do something about a system that churns out a hostile graduate workforce from which the civil service is recruited.”
We have the same issues in the US. People borrow piles of money to go to elite universities to earn degrees that don’t pay. Spending $250k to get a sociology degree from Columbia is not smart. The problem with the “system” is that it doesn’t teach people that college is a business decision that should warrant a cost/benefit analysis before matriculating. The solution is not to pay off their loans. It’s not the fault of the plumber or truck driver (who’s taxes will cover the costs) that someone spent too much money on a degree that qualifies them to be a barista at Starbucks.
Bloke in the pub yesterday claimed to know the mandarin who was told by Norman Tebbitt
“if you are so f&&king clever why are you doing this job ”
As marx should have said, the problem is not to change the world by writing essays, but stop essay writers poncing off the taxpayer
The idea the the vaccine procurement process can be a model for a normal is quite frankly ludicrous. It’s shows the real problem with the civil service that it was proposed by someone who had worked in government. The government got fast delivery by assuming the risk from the manufacturer. This was a good choice in the case of vaccines because the macroeconomic cost of each day of lockdown was far higher than potential cost risk from the vaccine. It’s single set of circumstances that’s highly unlikely to reoccur. If you did a roll of new it system for the NHS and the government took all the risk , the outcome would be a system that didn’t work or very late because the contractor has no cost on their bottom line.
It just shows that we’ll educated people who work in government and the media aren’t as clever as they think they are.
The issue with government IT is the specifications – all the power-players get their oar in so systems are excessively complicated, _and then_ the specifications change during the life of the project which is a recipe for ruinous cost and late delivery.
NB this is an opinion, I have never been involved in government IT or wish to be – but I have seen IT projects go wrong like this.
The success of the vaccine procurement has been due to its limited and unchanging scope. I think delivery success is down to the British military, who are accustomed to getting “handle with care” stuff to the other side of the world in the right quantity and on time.
It doesn’t matter what you are buying. If the tax payer takes all the risk you are signing a deal that favours contractor.
“Given the shining example of the vaccine development and procurement programme, there’s never been a better to promote a mission-led government.”
A project for which there are no fail criteria and seemingly limitless budgets, almost non-existent parliamentary oversight or adequate accounting procedures, and for which the outcomes are yet to be determined, not only in vaccination effectiveness and collateral damages, but also in opportunity costs is hardly a model upon which to base public administration.
The problem with the Civil Service, as with the politicians, whose short-term, media driven demands civil servants have to develop into practical policies, is the absence of real world experience, especially that related to managing projects within a constrained financial framework and to meeting the demands and expectations of the consumer, in this case the citizen, in a market efficient manner.
It is unlikely that in the current Magic Money Tree and quantative easing dispensation, where government is basically operating on tick and its creditworthiness and where any project no matter how large and impracticable can be funded in the short-term by borrowing, that there is any incentive at all for either ministers or civil servants to address this problem. As long as the Bank of England keeps printing the money and buying the bonds, and banks and financial institutions have surplus liquidity to lend to the Government at a low rate of return, seemingly any project which politicians believe will be popular and will gain them positive headlines, particularly if related to COVID-19 and ‘Our NHS’, will be pursued, with little regard to effectiveness or realisable benefits. That is until the credit stream dries up and the money runs out.
The reason why vaccine went so well is because it was not a Civil Servant given the mission but someone with appropriate real life experience that had proven their ability to do the job in the real world.
Probably too much to ask for the Civil Service to recruit those sorts of people on what they pay, but it would be nice if we had a few more ministers who had those qualities before they stood for election in the first place. People like Rishi perhaps.
Of course Boris had real life experience but as a journalist and I guess in the current world real life experience of being able to sell a load of bullshit probably is a relevant skill.
Worth a try. However, as has been pointed out, ‘Yes, Prime/Minister’ is a documentary, not a sitcom.
That was a very nicely phrased analogy, thank you Peter Franklin. I enjoyed reading it.
I’m bug*ered if I know why all civil servants have to be graduates. Anybody else know?
Somebody has to employ them sadly.
I would imagine that the majority of these young “leftwingers” will have moved firmly to the right by the time they reach their forties and fifties. Just like the generations before them.
Civil servants undermining government policy- we’ve all seen “Yes Minister. “
So, if you want confidentiality in meetings and no behind-the-scenes discussion, how can you have Civil Service unions?
So, is our “Rolls Royce” civil service now Tesla or a Volvo?
Since the mid sixties it is more like a Lada
Trabant, I’d say. You are being a tad hard on Lada.
So “Conservative support is growing…. while Labour has made progress.” Note the evasive implication of equivalence. Is Labour support growing to match that for Conservatives? Thought not. Talk about Unherd…. more like unsaid.
More Unhinged than UnHerd if the latest polls are accurate, and If Labour lose Hartlepool.
How about a nice simple approach. Only one ministry per city. Get the majority out of London and the south and things may change.
The vast majority of the civil service is outside of London already. The DSS is in Longbenton. Ministers have to be in London to vote and to answer questions in Parliament. That means that the head offices have to be in London.
I have a sneaky feeling that the last year or so has demonstrated that you don’t need to be in London to vote, or to answer questions. Yes it feels nicer to be there in person but its not essential.
Its the “head offices” that need moving.
I have an even better feeling that you can’t attend a corba meeting by zoom.
Surely not now in the Age of Zoom?
Redacted
Yes, pack the rest off to Dounreay if it is still standing.
This reminds me of the way Afrikaners eventually won their way to an apartheid state, not through the ballot box but by filling the civil service.
“Of course, that approach would require Conservative politicians to accept that the state can be a solution as well as a problem. Hopefully, that’s not too Leftwing an idea for them to swallow.”
This. The old neoliberal wheeze that only less government can possibly be the solution to any and every problem is dead. A new Conservatism needs to accept that more government isn’t necessarily a bad thing provided that it works in the service of what Conservatives believe are the priorities for action.
Isn’t the issue less that every civil servant under 35 has been captured by extreme left-wing politics, and more just that this government’s divisive agenda, cronyism and extreme incompetence just doesn’t appeal to them, either in its embarrassing culture war stuff or in its actual economic offer to anyone not already a home-owner?
Perhaps lot of young and young-ish middle-class people who might ten years ago have got on the property ladder and leaned conservative or Lib Dem under previous iterations of conservative governments, look at an administration of Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Gavin Williamson and quite reasonably surmise it has nothing to offer anyone under 40 and even vaguely liberal-minded? And by ‘liberal-minded’, I don’t mind extremely woke or anything – just alive to the economic realities of Brexit, embarrassed by Boris Johnson on the world stage, unmoved by screeds in the Telegraph about protecting statues of Churchill and blue passports, dismayed by Tory cronyism and clear-eyed about the effects of both austerity and the pandemic of some of the poorest people and regions in the UK? As the piece alludes to, most civil servants are fairly standard representatives of the British professional classes, and if they increasingly feel the Conservative party doesn’t align with their values and has nothing to offer them, maybe that’s a warning sign for the Conservatives.
We can argue about what kind of education is best suited to the people who actually run the country, but we need people with a level of education and critical thinking skills to join the civil service, and it’s not surprising that many of them see little to admire in the current government.
” just alive to the economic realities of Brexit ” – so it was a deep understanding of economic affairs that persuaded young voters to vote Remain ?
No, much of the Remain vote was values-driven, as was the Leave vote, but Brexit has had a negative impacts on the British economy. You can argue those impacts are worth it for the principle of Brexit, but plenty of people (48% in 2016 and a higher percentage now) don’t think they were, and they’re not all uber-woke cultural warriors.