October 20, 2023 - 1:00pm
Last week, after Hamas launched its latest campaign of terror against Israel, a government instruction went out for Whitehall departments to fly the Israeli flag for a week as a gesture of solidarity. Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, told his civil servants to follow through with it.
But his staff refused to do so, claiming it would be “taking sides” — which is, of course, exactly the point of the exercise. Three days after the order had been issued, it was reported that Barclay had managed to “persuade civil servants to obey his order”. Then, the flag was taken down again by recalcitrant civil servants, before being possibly put up again, though no one really seems to know.
Meanwhile, Barclay tried to cajole his civil servants into lighting the entrance to the department’s building in the colours of the Israeli flag, but had only managed to have blue light projected in the face of official opposition. Apparently, the department’s projectors, which are quite capable of reproducing the rainbow, could not provide white lighting on that particular occasion.
It is a small incident, but a telling one. On paper, the British executive is in possession of formidable powers, often exercisable with limited parliamentary oversight. Academics and constitutional reformers frequently bemoan the fact while calling for the powers of the executive to be formalised and constrained by legislation.
But as anyone with experience of modern British government knows, this account is errant nonsense. That Barclay was reduced to cajoling his own staff to obey a perfectly straightforward and legal instruction is a feature of the British structure of government, which neatly combines the illusion of limitless theoretical executive power with a system designed to obstruct it at every step.
This dynamic is not limited to the minister-civil service relationship — so memorably satirised by television, to no apparent effect. While Barclay was trying to have a flag raised up a flagpole, Suella Braverman, widely believed to be one of the century’s most authoritarian home secretaries, was reduced to writing a letter to chief constables “encouraging” them to enforce the law while policing anti-Israel demonstrations.
Encouragement was all that she could give, since her powers, though immense on paper, no longer extend to order the police to investigate crimes or to enforce the law in the streets of London. In theory, chief constables should now be held to account to elected police and crime commissioners for their work. But as anyone who has written to one of these worthy officials will know, complaints about policing decisions are dismissed with a vague incantation of “operational independence”, the principle whereby many police forces have given up investigating trivial crimes such as theft and burglary.
All of this has been made worse by a recent tendency to view the civil service as a fourth branch of government whose purpose to check the administration of the day. This theory, quite unknown to generations of British constitutionalists, is now being enthusiastically propounded by certain think tanks which serve as glorified blogs for people with the letters “CB” behind their names.
Yet to merely acknowledge this new trend’s existence can be perilous. When a Conservative Campaign Headquarters email sent under Braverman’s name went out in March, accusing mandarins of obstructing her plan to stop illegal immigration, she was accused by a senior civil service trade union official of breaching the Ministerial Code.
Home Office staff responded to the accusation with fury in an internal employee forum, where they also discussed… how to obstruct the Home Secretary’s plans. Two months later, with no sense of irony, Home Office staff threatened to go on strike to stop the Rwanda plan from being implemented.
Now 13 years into the current Conservative government, there is little prospect of anything being done to change this toxic dynamic. Having given up trying to solve the problem at a structural level, ministers content themselves with having their special advisers leak tales of bureaucratic obstructionism to the Tory Party press, a formula guaranteed to generate clicks but which amounts to a confession of impotence. The modern Sir Humphrey, having traded the old school tie for the diversity lanyard, lives on.
Yuan Yi Zhu is an assistant professor at Leiden University and a research fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford.
yuanyi_z
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SubscribeGreat article on a subject of huge importance to the UK. Very few people seem to understand the extraordinary degree of executive power, expressed through non-cooperation, that both the civil service and the now huge quangocracy wield.
Wasn’t it David Cameron who promised a “bonfire of the quangos”? Didn’t happen. It’s an old Blair tactic: make a crowd pleasing announcement or declare a new headline grabbing initiative or pledge. Then, as the news cycle moves on, forget all about it. After all, the electorate are just punters and mugs aren’t they? What counts is how well the party’s actions are received by the broadcast media.
Correct. This is so little understood still. The notion of Cabinet authority is a sad silly joke. The Blair Years saw a constitutional revolution unfold – our 1918. His EU inspired ‘modernisation’ mission totally disabled the Executive and national authority, ripping away the actual levers of power from the Executive – via Devolution, Supreme Courts, Bank of England, NHS and more. A total New Order built on progressive principles and staffed by generations of unelected permanent like minded wokey political technocrats. These neo Blarites were comfortable with wet woke weedy Non Tories like May & Cameron who offered zero challenge to this new – and disastrously failing- status quo. But Brexit was a rare hostile virus, a genuine people driven threat to their worldview (as well as EU pensions) – which they were determined to castrate and impede. They openly plotted against and toppled its inadequate leaders – Johnson Raab Patel- and now, content, await with big grins a return to the natural order under Starmer, de facto leader of the Blob. No election will ever change who rules the UK. The New Order is permanent. And because our rulers are utterly inept, a permanent spiral of diktat decline and immiseration is our fate.
People feel it, even if they don’t know it. We are seeing a rise in civil disobedience which I believe reflects perceived illegitimacy of decision making bodies (who pandemic treaty, NZ 2050 commitment without parliamentary vote). I believe this will increase and lead to civil unrest in the coming years. It will be exacerbated by financial crises.
I spent many years working in industry where the simple rule was ‘do your job or find another one’. The same approach should be used to manage these civil servants who think that they are so important that they can ignore a ministers directions.
There have been (for example) nine Secretaries of State for Education in the past nine years. Senior civil servants are by contrast practically unsackable, and have a range of mechanisms to thwart here today gone tomorrow ministers, up to and including the invoking of anti-bullying policies, and judicious leaking to the media. And given how he threw his supposed friend and ally Dominic Raab to the wolves, the PM certainly isn’t going to support any minister in that situation.
Imagine if the new CEO, brought in to fix an ailing company, was not able to get rid of the staff responsible for the failure.
This is the success of the children of the British Empire in the UK of today. They are one international leftist Muslim or Islamist-sympathising community and pretty resistant to ´old Zionists´ telling them what to do.
You have literally zero idea of what you are talking about.
The iron law of woke projection strikes again!
Do explain.
Oh! How true! Working with the CS is like wading through radioactive bitumen. Anyone who either tries to take effective action or suggests how effectiveness could be improved is either beaten down by colleagues, especially senior ones, or leaves in utter frustration.
Exactly the situation faced in any number of organizations throughout the Western democracies – a blinkered cabal of young activists have taken control of the reins of power, supplying their “leaders” with only the information they deem suitable, pushing radical agendas in the press, and passively and actively opposing and blocking formal policies with which they, in their youthful wisdom, disagree. Shorter: Civilization is screwed because it’s being controlled by people who don’t believe in its fundamental principles.
I suspect that bureaucratic inertia, long a “feature” of bureaucracies everywhere, has been largely converted to intransigence by such activism while most of us weren’t watching. This has been decades in the making in Western democracies. One of the leading proponents of the global warming worry in its early years, the socialist and so-called environmentalist Maurice Strong, was asked why he didn’t run for political office. His response was to say you can’t get anything done that way but rather through the bureaucracy. In that understanding, he was truly right.
In starts in WW2. There was a massive increase in the in the Civil Service. If one had completed secondary education and was not A1 fit, it was very easy to avoid combat as there were so many reserved occupations. Nationalisation meant those engineers with get up and go went overseas and those without, stayed in the UK. The massive increase in education occurred by lowering standards. The the Welfare State and the NHS resulted in massive increases in the numbers of administrators.
The increase in government spending since 1939 is to the benefit white collar non-technical people and to the detriment of blue collar technical people, especially those in industry outside of the nationlised companies.
C Northcote Parkinson in his books The Law, etc, published in 1958 demonstrated the massive increase in the bureaucratic state.
Embarrassing attempt to excuse this pathetic government for its countless failures.
Only the dimmest will be convinced. Oh, hi UnHerd readers!!!!
Just wait until Starmer & Co face the same problems! Do you remember John Reid’s description of the Home Office as ‘not fit for purpose’?
I fully expect Starmer and co to deal with all issues in a business like and efficient manner, in complete contrast to the constant whining of the incompetent buffoons currently in charge.
For the benefit of who? We know what his approach is going to be, when it comes to local objections to new house building.
Why are you paying £50 a year to be here, then, you study in Leftoid snark? If you’re read the piece, you’d see that it is anything but an attempt to excuse this pitiful charge of an excuse of two mockeries of a farce of three shams of a Tory government for any of its 13 dead years of lazy, feckless, ruinous, squanderous wastrelism – only to explain the Civil Service’s strong supporting role in its contemptible and utter failure.
Gesture politics. Nonsense.
Civil service should remain apolitical.
A Civil service Trade Union is not the Civil Service. I don’t agree with it’s stance but we don’t live in a dictatorship so it’s entitled to make it’s views clear as it wants. Members will leave or ignore if they fundamentally don’t like it. The Author is sloppy with conflating a Union with the actual Civil Service but that was of course deliberate. Plays to a Blob theory that excuses the shambles of Government we’ve had for 13yrs.
I’m confused here. Did the union refuse to project the Israeli colours, or was it civil servants?