Unfaithful Servants: Britain’s Activist Civil Service

The British are always claiming to have the best institutions in the world. The NHS, the British Army, the Mother of all Parliaments, whatever it is, whenever it was, Britain leads or led the world, or so the story runs. It is interesting to note Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, doubtless high on Neuro-Linguistic Programming, using the phrase “world leaders” whenever he mentions British aspiration in any field. He recently included this desire to lead globally in an otherwise disastrous speech about deploying British troops as part of a peace-keeping force in Ukraine. His suggestion is the quickest route to war anyone can think of, but he wants Britain to be world leaders at it.

Strange times.

He is tapping into the same mythos of British exceptionalism as Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1970s, when computers were first coming to the fore, crowing about the country he led being at the heart of the global forge producing the “white heat of technology.” How did that work out? Britain has often been audacious in its self-belief. At one time, however, Britain really did win Best in Show for one of its rather mundane governmental departments: the Civil Service.

As with all worthwhile British institutions, the Civil Service is scarcely a new and technocratic innovation. Today, when famous alumni of some institution are sought, they are often sports personalities or people on the television. Famed British civil servants include Chaucer, Milton, Pepys, Wordsworth, Burns and Trollope. That type of famous. Trollope wrote the novel The Three Clerks, semi-autobiographical and with themes concerning promotion on merit, drawn from his time as a civil servant. I imagine the internal memos produced by these literary giants were of a higher quality than is likely today. It should be pointed out, as Claire Tomalin does in her biography of Pepys, that no official Civil Service was in existence at that time, and so the great diarist (and thus his predecessors) could not have been civil servants. Not in name, certainly, but the duties performed were de facto those of today’s Civil Service.

Indeed, the roots of the British Civil Service can be traced back to “wicked” King John, who reigned from 1199 to 1216, and is popularly remembered as the monarch who went after proto-Marxist pin-up boy, Robin Hood. John was the first British ruler to compile comprehensive archives of constitutional proceedings and, possibly, the inventor of the filing system. I am sure he had an MI6-type file on Robin and his Merrie Men.

The British Civil Service came into its own with the occupation of India, a chapter in colonialism which (like the whole book) is now viewed as a source of shame by the Leftist chattering classes. In fact, British rule dragged that country — or continent — out of the dung in which it was mired and set it on its way to its present status as a country with a space program (one which the British now fund from the seemingly inexhaustible money-mill which is its foreign-aid budget). Figures differ, but it is estimated that around 20,000 British Civil Servants ran India from 1858 to 1947, around 0.5% of the population. Now, that is government efficiency, and possibly Elon Musk’s DOGE could learn something from studying this miracle of efficient bureaucracy.

On a related subject, the evolution of the Civil Service in the UK is testament to the possibility of a fruitful union of the private and public sectors. The first use of the phrase “civil servant” was among the employees of the East India Company. As this hugely successful concern became more and more entwined with government, so these “civil servants” took on a civic role they were well prepared for. Added to this, they were already familiar with India.

So it was that the Civil Service grew into the provisional wing of government, the mediator between the two Houses of the Commons and the Lords, and the British yeomanry. It is the properly executive branch of government. Acts of Parliament are merely paper records without their execution — as Musk himself recently pointed out in the case of his adoptive country — and Civil Servants are the delivery system for the legislative body of Parliament. Socrates might be seen, from a certain curious angle, as a civil servant, and might have had a question ready about the office. Just as the carpenter and the horse-trainer have special skills which allow them to succeed at their trade, does the civil servant require a similar skill? If so, what is it?

The Northcote-Trevelyan Report (NTR) of 1853 laid down a template which supposedly still dictates the structure and performance of the CS, a prototype of today’s “mission statement”. The following are stressed:

• Permanence and competitiveness.
• The union of the intellectual and the mechanical.
• Separation of function and responsibility.

The NTR is of interest for two reasons. Firstly, it is effectively the founding document of the British Civil Service. Secondly, its intellectual patron, who provides an introductory letter to the report by way of a preface, was the Reverend Benjamin Jowett, one of the great educators of the 19th century. Should you ever purchase the collected works of Plato in English, ensure that it is in a translation by the Reverend Jowett, with his exegetical essays on each dialogue included, if possible. You will not find better. To have his imprimatur on the constitution and ethos of the Civil Service guarantees that its principles, at least, were sound.

But the report is highly critical of the type of personality attracted to the Civil Service. Musk and Trump have the same attitude today:

“Admission into the Civil Service is indeed eagerly sought after, but it is for the unambitious, and the indolent or incapable, that it is chiefly desired. Those whose abilities do not warrant an expectation that they will succeed in the open professions, where they must encounter the competition of their contemporaries, and those whom indolence of temperament or physical infirmities unfit for active exertions, are placed in the Civil Service, where they may obtain an honourable livelihood with little labour, and with no risk.”

A need for meritocratic hiring is stressed, rather than advancement through familial connection. And, even in the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign, with the industrious and naturally bureaucratic Victorians in charge, we read eerie foreshadowings of today’s Civil Service:

“[W]e often hear complaints of official delays, official evasions of difficulty, and official indisposition to improvement.”

There were supplementary reports and directives in the decades following the NTR, but these were refinements, and the notion of political impartiality grew organically, rather than being a diktat. The Pole Star of the British Civil Service is always assumed to be impartiality, but the NTR does not really mention it, although it does describe a modern malaise, that of the placeman, less interested in his performance of his job than its security and opportunities for personal advancement, nepotistically enhanced wherever possible. We will leave Victorian England, note the Civil Services becoming an organic and essential part of government, and also that political impartiality is almost a natural adjunct to the whole notion of civically oriented service to the people rather than for the government. We will come back, as though we were in the time machine H. G. Wells wrote of in 1895, to the present day.

Now, there is a new breed of civil servant, and one which should not exist within the supposedly strict requirement for political impartiality; the activist civil servant. But this is almost a secondary concern. The first systemic fault in the modern British Civil Service has been brought into sharp relief by Musk’s DOGE operation and its wider range of effects in Europe and the UK, and that is its sheer inefficiency. A combination of overstaffing and underperformance is beginning to become embarrassingly apparent, and change could be imminent. But, as Lucy Burton, Employment Editor of The Daily Telegraph notes, “We have heard all this before”:

In a nutshell, taxpayers are paying more for less. Although the number of civil servants has soared, public service productivity remains 8.5pc below pre-lockdown levels amid a collapse in output.

Then there is the vexed question of what these under-worked Civil Servants are actually doing on the taxpayers’ dime. The Daily Telegraph has been a disappointment in recent years as a conservative newspaper, but while it might not speak truth to power in more than a whisper, it does have the decency at least to mention the subject once in a while. From a report on the problem of the “woke” Civil Service:

Mr Glen said that the public expected ‘the core mission of the Civil Service’ to be delivering the Government’s agenda and public services rather than working on internal projects related to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). He said that taxpayers were ‘very sceptical of activism in identity politics which can slip into these networks’.

The anomaly is that the article sees the excessive time spent on “woke” projects as a problem of efficiency, not one of impartiality. The former can be evaluated with a time-and-motion study, the latter not so easily. It might be simple inefficiency if an employee were spending more than their recognized break-time filling in crosswords or learning a foreign language, but what if they are spending an inappropriate amount of time preparing transgender-awareness literature for government departments?

There is increasing coverage, even in the British MSM, of “woke” Civil Servants. This quote from another Telegraph article last year sets the mood music:

Civil servants in HMRC were told to ‘yield power’ to the marginalised and that they ‘unknowingly benefit’ from racism.

A handout given to senior officials, published on April 6 2021 but still in use as of last year, asks civil servants to ‘take a moment to reflect’ on ‘how actively anti-racist are you?’

The job of civil servant is a curious occupation in that it requires a certain mundanity. There is a need for competence, concentration, organization, and a host of other transferable workplace skills, certainly, but the acceptance of a monotony of efficiency is, or ought to be, a Civil Service maxim. Civil servants do not need to think outside the box; their position requires them to think inside it. But what if that box has been subtly altered, tampered with, to contain a certain political perspective that the Civil Servant should not, according to his professional ethic, condone?

The Institute for Government has as its working remit that it is “Working to make government more effective”. Not efficient, effective. Its statement on Diversity in the Civil Service repays inspection in this regard. The three key maxims behind diversity policy in the Civil Service seem designed to compromise the efficiency of its performance. They begin with a spurious claim:

Failing to reach different demographic groups can lead to missing out on attracting and appointing the best people for the job.

Well, it can, but then a lot of things can be the case, given the premises. And it would depend on the likelihood of “the best people for the job” being found in any of those different demographics. A good indicator of the suitable civil servant would be IQ, so the demographic the CS needs to “reach” would be White European rather than, say, Somali. But to be diverse, you cannot have White on your color-wheel.

The second maxim is headed Diversity of Ideas:

Attracting people from different backgrounds is likely to improve the quality of work by bringing forward new ideas, perspectives and ways of working.

Firstly, no Civil Service which has ever functioned efficiently — as the British CS did in India — has ever needed “new ideas, perspectives and ways of working”. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, runs the old engineer’s adage. But there is a new one now, a social engineer’s adage: If it isn’t broken, fix it until it is. And that is the real reason for the Tower-of-Babel approach to hiring for an ideologically diverse workforce.

Finally, an entirely groundless statement:

A civil service that reflects the society it serves is more likely to be trusted by the wider public.

This does not mean that there have to be a couple of French people in the Civil Service to reflect the proportion in the population, rounded up. It always means more Muslims and Blacks. And, if cutbacks in hiring make it more of a zero-sum game, this will mean fewer Whites.

Other government documents do at least address the concept of political impartiality, which seems to have gone missing. The following must, one can only assume, be read as an update, an abrogation, to the NTR. The title of the document is Guidance on Diversity and Inclusion for Civil Servants.:

We must at all times be mindful of the core values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality (including political impartiality) in the Civil Service code”.

Including political impartiality. It is not a core principle.  Again, note the order of priorities.

3. The Civil Service code sets out that all civil servants must serve the government, whatever its political persuasion, to the best of their ability in a way which maintains political impartiality, regardless of their own political beliefs. Civil servants must not allow their personal political views to determine any advice they give or their actions.

Unlikely as it may seem, I would defend the impartiality of the current British Civil Service, in practice as well as in theory.

A curious situation has evolved. The UK now has a Civil Service which is treating both parties, and thus the last two governments, in the same way, but this apparent impartiality is due precisely to impartiality. And this is due to the nature of the British uniparty. I wrote about this here at The Occidental Observer in a review of Peter Oborne’s seminal 2007 book, The Triumph of the Political Class. If the two main parties share the same core ideologies, then Civil Servants are impartial by the standards of either, logically as well as politically. The trouble would arise on the accession of the current British political tertium quid: Reform UK.

Nigel Farage is being talked about as the next Prime Minister of the UK, but this is of course fanciful while still over four years from a General Election. There will be a likely recession and a possible depression between now and 2029, and plenty of time for Starmer’s crew to further scupper a sinking economy. But Farage will want to watch the Civil Service in the meantime. If he were to take over, then you would see the end of the current and paradoxical Civil Service impartiality. Farage would have to “dismantle” the CS and start from scratch, in the same way Trump has taken a wrecking-ball to the American Department of Education and much else. Sometimes, you have to destroy the village to save it.