Gaslighting the government
Directory of Strategy
Last week a Guardian opinion piece from an anonymous civil servant claimed to broadly express how the country’s “half a million civil servants feel about getting into bed with a new Labour administration”. As an ex-civil servant, reading it was acutely embarrassing.
I’ve spent years saying that concerns about civil service impartiality are overblown, and we should be focused on more important issues like its capacity to deliver for the public. If this piece was representative of many civil servants’ views, I’d need to revisit my position.
Luckily, I don’t think it is.
In the last two weeks, we’ve seen the civil service at its finest, enabling a smooth transition of power from one elected government to another. Labour has hit the ground running announcing new policies, before they set out their legislative agenda in the King’s Speech. I believe most civil servants want to serve the government of the day to the best of their ability, and I saw similar enthusiasm to hit the ground running for the Conservative governments I worked under.
An anonymous piece like this risks undermining that impartiality by showing obvious political bias.
The author is keen to stress that their objection isn’t to do with specific policies (their colleague is “under no illusions that [they] will personally agree with everything the new government will do”), but that they’re glad the “adults are back in the room”. And yet they celebrate the end of the Rwanda policy and “other fatbergs of accumulated economic and political dysfunction”, and cite the need for the new Government to “grasp the nettles of Gaza, the climate crisis or Brexit”.
Serving a government, no matter their policies and politics, is the ultimate point of our civil service – the Civil Service code is clear on its expectation that officials will “serve equally well governments of different political persuasions”.
It’s clearly true that the culture of Ministers briefing against officials caused division between the previous government and the civil servants. Research we published on this last year supports that feeling, and it’s good for new Ministers to feel they can reset the relationship.
But it is also true that the civil service’s institutions need significant reform, a fact that many civil servants agree with. “Bitching about civil servants”, as the anonymous author puts it, is obviously counter-productive, but expressing well-evidenced criticisms of the significant flaws in the civil service model is essential – that’s how you build a better version.
In fact if the Labour Government doesn’t grasp the nettle of Whitehall reform, they’re going to struggle to deliver their big ambitions. In recent research we conducted on talent and performance, just 6 per cent of line managers surveyed agreed with the statement “the civil service in general manages poor performance well”.
Lord Sedwill, former Cabinet Secretary, in a foreword to one Reform report, called for “systemic reform” of central government which is “too metropolitan, too short-term, too siloed, too rivalrous and too focused on the preoccupations of Westminster and Whitehall.” Perhaps some of those ministers our secret civil servant is pleased to see the back of had legitimate concerns?
The new Government is right to reset the relationship between politicians and officials, but they should be concerned to see anonymous civil servants seemingly unconsciously express their bias – even though it is pro-Labour.
As nice as it may feel to get a warm reception, the PM and his Cabinet know they must deliver profound change in very challenging circumstances. That means making hard choices, and taking on vested interests in the process. They will inevitably, as Blair put it, develop scars on their backs. Will civil servants then decide to write anonymously about them?
The most frustrating part of this piece is the tone. The civil service exists to serve the public via the government of the day. They should have the confidence to provide honest and challenging advice, but then they must get on with delivering what they are asked. For the system to work, they must leave their political views at home – which thousands manage to do every single day. Alternatively, if you want to publish them, leave the civil service. That’s what I did.