Spot on again, Matt. Having worked as an individual consultant in Government in the past, it was 50% over resourced then - probably over 70% now! Hope Farage has a proper plan to get rid of all the excess fat!
I was in half a mind not to read this as I expected it to be yet another depressing piece about the state of the British bureaucracy. But if true that civil servants would leave rather than implement an elected government's policies which they find abhorrent, then bring it on. Better than staying in post and blocking at every possible opportunity for which they have previous, as we know.
A friend of one of my sons works for HMRC and has been told to not complete his work so quickly as he’s “showing his colleagues up”. He reckons he could complete his work in a third of the time he’s given. On that basis HMRC has potentially 3x more people than it needs.
A very similar experience to mine as a Christmas Postman around 1965 - I was doing my round far too fast for their liking. I too was a Civil Servant from about 1976 until 2005 having worked in retail and wholesale before that. I applied that experience to buying in the Civil Service and working with business counsellors advising start up businesses. My savings and service improvements were almost regarded as a crime instead of getting approval for efficiency and economy.
This is an old trick favoured by manual workers. State bureaucracies are just like large factories so we shouldn’t be surprised it’s become a feature of life there. Mind you I’m not convinced that outsourcing to private companies helps much.
The egregious, warmongering spiv Blair politicised the civil service.
If Reform UK are elected to govern, then all civil servants of First Division Grade should be made to resign, and re-apply for their pots if they wished to.
In addition, I would like to see Mr. Dominic Cummings given the task of 'cleaning the Augean stable' that is the Wokehall coterie of senior civil servants. It would be great fun to see Cummings in amongst that collection of 'greasy-pole climbers' - great fun.
I think that is right. I was a Foreign Office official 1975 - 2009. At the start of my career, civil servants were studiously neutral. No-one discussed their vote and one or two even declined to vote in case it influenced them in their work. Under Blair the civil service was politicised and I was warned when I commented that in the interest of 'diversity', people who were evidently not British by birth, and who may indeed have been illegal immigrants, seemed to be being hired by Whitehall ministries.
Civil servants receive defined benefit pensions which boost their pay by over another twenty percent entirely paid for by tax payers who have to fund their own retirement. On top of that they can work from home and do the minimum amount of work with virtually nil risk of redundancy. If they wish to leave this very privileged job because their "conscience" bothers them, they will find the real world a very cold place indeed. Stop feeling sorry for them and give them an ultimatum to go.
There is no way that senior snivel servants will go. I am still waiting for Alison Alibongo Brown to leave (she promised to remigrate after the Tories last victory).
I think every member of the civil service should get an email on day one of a Reform UK government. Anyone unable to demonstrate that they properly endeavouring to enact and progress government policy will be dismissed and stripped of their pension entitlement. In addition, anyone found to be working against government policy will brought up on charges of treason and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. A rod of iron will be required to motivate the blob.
I'm going to have to cancel my subscription to your column I think. I'm a CS of 35 years service. I have faithfully served the public who pay my wages, as do many thousands of my colleagues. The woke activists you refer to are in fact a very vocal minority, as they are in the real world and on social media. I don't agree with the current government but I enact whatever policy I have to without fear or favour as I am an impartial civil servant.
I don't believe Matt was tarring all CS with the same brush and we all know there are some excellent people serving the government. I, for one, appreciate your good service and hope you don't cancel your subscription.
I am sure we understand your point but it is tedious always to have to add "but there are many who do their job properly". The impression given, indeed strongly claimed, by former Ministers is that there was direct opposition to their policies and even policies pursued without Minister's approval in contradiction to instructions.
I understand that strong, well prepared Ministers will do better than weak, wet and unprepared ones but unless the Tory former Ministers are all (each and every one of them) lying to us, the civil service refused to follow its instructions.
Perhaps Toffeepud can assist us - are the Tories lying. I am persuaded most of them are but all?
Most ministers don't understand legislation or how government works. Most of the time, you can't just do something because you want to. Often, it means changes to the law or legislation and that takes time. Liz Truss for example, told the Home Office to "stop mass immigration immediately". Yeah, ok love but there are huge issues there. Blair signed us up to a whole raft of legal shite that means you can't just do it NOW. Civil servants spend half their bloody time trying to explain this to them, does it ever get through? Apparently not. If the CS says, I'm sorry minister, we can't do that because of X, Y and Z, we'll have to think of another way, in the tories case 5 minutes later there was a new minister and round and round we go. So yes, they are lying, to cover up their own incompetence and the fact that they didn't actually WANT to cut mass migration because most of them were Blair Light. Politicians, lying? Whatever next?
Hang on in there Toffee pud. I have known affair few civil servants. All bar one were impartial. And would not offer an opinion. Which is as it should be. Nor they criticise me for leaning left.
If you cancel your subscription you won’t know when we have won. Happy New year
I am inclined to agree with you. Although I left work in the CS long ago and am now a retired individual, I do feel strongly about the way we all get slagged off. The majority are in middling to lower grades, not exactly on stratospheric pay (despite what the social media columnists claim). They are primarily conscientious people, doing a job, just like anyone else in the private sector. I've even had people tell me I shouldn't be entitled to my government pension because I already have a state pension! people need to get their facts right before they mouth off. I can fully understand your concerns.
Totally correct in my view. But it goers far farther than just civil servants - of whom there are far too many. Wokery has reached every corner of the quangocracy and is unaccountable. If Reform comes up with firm policies then those policies must be acted on and reinforced with referenda if necessary: we simply do need to reclaim our country and lead the Western world back to sanity. Any criminality in the immigrant population should result in cancellation of citizenship and the deportation of the complete family. Incidentally the National Trust has become a classic nest of woke considering it as part of its remit to promote homosexuality which is definitively not part of their purpose of looking after NT properties - which they seem to have forgotten.
The National Trust was originally set up to preserve beautiful landscapes from development and urbanisation. After WWII it got into the stately home business, with more and more great houses falling into its grasp. In other words, museums. Museums became politicised under Labour, so the NT followed suit. It has greatly exceeded its original terms of reference. Unfortunately the NT is also the biggest landowner in England, answerable to no Minister and free to impose its Woke ideas, even on tenant farmers. Beatrix Potter would be horrified if she could now see the farmland that she bequeathed to the NT in the Lake District.
As always you get to the root of the issue. My father in law was a civil servant all his working life, through 1950/60/70’s. He was a manager of what were then called ‘dole offices’. He never once strayed from his neutral position - to his death we never knew who he voted for. He worked for the good of the country. He had a degree of autonomy in his job and spent time with employers working to find places for those ‘on the dole’….but on the other side, if he suspected someone was working the system he would insist they ‘sign on’ three times a day. Dole was for a designated length of time to help people back to work - it was NOT a lifestyle choice. He would be turning in his grave to see what has happened to this country and specifically to the ‘civil service’. If current members of the service feel that they cannot work to the rules of their masters in government then they should be sacked….no compensation, remove pension rights - basically show some balls you useless governments. The tail is wagging the dog and it stinks. Somewhere along the line governments and civil servants have completely forgotten who pays their wages and to whom they are responsible. The public have not forgotten though - and push us too far and the traitors will feel our wrath. Vote Reform at every opportunity. Let Britain return from insanity and push forward to greatness again. Labour out now. Starmer is a traitor to our country.
Well it will reduce the amount of redundancies Reform will have to make! There are plenty of unemployed people who would be able to step in , should they be needed. Draining the swamp must be a priority!
Best thing that could happen - I worked for the civil service 30 years ago. Well maybe not worked - who did? People came in late went early, Friday the office was empty. They spoke about their pensions most of the day - and let me be brutally honest here I spent two hours a day at the swimming pool opposite I came back had a cup of coffee and then went home. Then I left.
Certainly not tarring everyone with the same brush! My father was an engineer in the building opposite and he worked very hard spending weeks away from home. All I did was post a very true picture of where I worked it was MOD and people were ‘very elusive’ and continuing talking about their pensions? I was young and thought it was great I even got a season ticket for the pool! Tottenham Court station rush hour started at 3pm from our office Friday the building was empty. I did leave in the end through boredom - I was a secretary.
Well not me in any of the departments I worked in. I arrived at 8.00 and left at 4.00 pm in my early years in London, but after that, in Sheffield, was always in the office before 8.00 and I sometimes worked late if necessary with only a 30 minute lunch break. Please don't tar us all with the same brush, Chrissie, even though there are shirkers in almost every business, but I do wonder how much less work is now done because of mobile phones and social media.
Staggeringly important points for a mature and established civilization. There used to be such a thing as "doing your duty", which is apparently an increasingly rare virtue. That does not mean that civil servants should not have individual moral consciences. If they had, more of the "establishment employees" in Nazi Germany wouldn't have done what they did: they seemed to regard "duty" as "obedience", even to an evil state, and even against their own consciences. If Reform gets voted in, or perhaps I should start saying "when" Reform gets in, then they will have my support as long as they do not become an evil state. If they do, we take them down. But we already have an effectively evil state, although it is kind of a handful of virtuous-sounding and yet authoritarian and ideologically captured wimps, hiding behind democracy. Clearly there are plenty of "civil servants" who can also be understood as virtuous-sounding, authoritarian and ideologically captured. We need men and women of character, like the ones who built the 19th century, but with 21st century understanding of matters that were not understood fully in the 19th century (like "race" and sexual orientation).
They won't leave. There are not enough jobs in state funded charities, quangos and the BBC for even a small proportion of them.
The smart ones would be advised to find a private sector job pdq but beware, the sector is under extreme coist threats so you'll have to be good to keep a job here.
Spot on again, Matt. Having worked as an individual consultant in Government in the past, it was 50% over resourced then - probably over 70% now! Hope Farage has a proper plan to get rid of all the excess fat!
I was in half a mind not to read this as I expected it to be yet another depressing piece about the state of the British bureaucracy. But if true that civil servants would leave rather than implement an elected government's policies which they find abhorrent, then bring it on. Better than staying in post and blocking at every possible opportunity for which they have previous, as we know.
Will anyone miss them anyway?
They won’t willingly leave it’s total bull💩
A friend of one of my sons works for HMRC and has been told to not complete his work so quickly as he’s “showing his colleagues up”. He reckons he could complete his work in a third of the time he’s given. On that basis HMRC has potentially 3x more people than it needs.
A very similar experience to mine as a Christmas Postman around 1965 - I was doing my round far too fast for their liking. I too was a Civil Servant from about 1976 until 2005 having worked in retail and wholesale before that. I applied that experience to buying in the Civil Service and working with business counsellors advising start up businesses. My savings and service improvements were almost regarded as a crime instead of getting approval for efficiency and economy.
They don’t like it cos it shows have ineffective they are. If everyone is useless then every one keeps their jobs….
Hope they all resign AI will do their jobs. They should be careful what they wish for 😈
No surprises here.
This is an old trick favoured by manual workers. State bureaucracies are just like large factories so we shouldn’t be surprised it’s become a feature of life there. Mind you I’m not convinced that outsourcing to private companies helps much.
The egregious, warmongering spiv Blair politicised the civil service.
If Reform UK are elected to govern, then all civil servants of First Division Grade should be made to resign, and re-apply for their pots if they wished to.
In addition, I would like to see Mr. Dominic Cummings given the task of 'cleaning the Augean stable' that is the Wokehall coterie of senior civil servants. It would be great fun to see Cummings in amongst that collection of 'greasy-pole climbers' - great fun.
I think that is right. I was a Foreign Office official 1975 - 2009. At the start of my career, civil servants were studiously neutral. No-one discussed their vote and one or two even declined to vote in case it influenced them in their work. Under Blair the civil service was politicised and I was warned when I commented that in the interest of 'diversity', people who were evidently not British by birth, and who may indeed have been illegal immigrants, seemed to be being hired by Whitehall ministries.
Reform should declare all jobs open and aim to employ British white people.
Civil servants receive defined benefit pensions which boost their pay by over another twenty percent entirely paid for by tax payers who have to fund their own retirement. On top of that they can work from home and do the minimum amount of work with virtually nil risk of redundancy. If they wish to leave this very privileged job because their "conscience" bothers them, they will find the real world a very cold place indeed. Stop feeling sorry for them and give them an ultimatum to go.
There is no way that senior snivel servants will go. I am still waiting for Alison Alibongo Brown to leave (she promised to remigrate after the Tories last victory).
😁🤣🤣🤣
I think every member of the civil service should get an email on day one of a Reform UK government. Anyone unable to demonstrate that they properly endeavouring to enact and progress government policy will be dismissed and stripped of their pension entitlement. In addition, anyone found to be working against government policy will brought up on charges of treason and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. A rod of iron will be required to motivate the blob.
I'm going to have to cancel my subscription to your column I think. I'm a CS of 35 years service. I have faithfully served the public who pay my wages, as do many thousands of my colleagues. The woke activists you refer to are in fact a very vocal minority, as they are in the real world and on social media. I don't agree with the current government but I enact whatever policy I have to without fear or favour as I am an impartial civil servant.
Please don't tar us all with the same brush.
Unfortunately it is always the noisy few who get the headlines, and who will be out on the picket lines.
I don't believe Matt was tarring all CS with the same brush and we all know there are some excellent people serving the government. I, for one, appreciate your good service and hope you don't cancel your subscription.
Thank you, your kind words are very much appreciated 🙏
I am sure we understand your point but it is tedious always to have to add "but there are many who do their job properly". The impression given, indeed strongly claimed, by former Ministers is that there was direct opposition to their policies and even policies pursued without Minister's approval in contradiction to instructions.
I understand that strong, well prepared Ministers will do better than weak, wet and unprepared ones but unless the Tory former Ministers are all (each and every one of them) lying to us, the civil service refused to follow its instructions.
Perhaps Toffeepud can assist us - are the Tories lying. I am persuaded most of them are but all?
Most ministers don't understand legislation or how government works. Most of the time, you can't just do something because you want to. Often, it means changes to the law or legislation and that takes time. Liz Truss for example, told the Home Office to "stop mass immigration immediately". Yeah, ok love but there are huge issues there. Blair signed us up to a whole raft of legal shite that means you can't just do it NOW. Civil servants spend half their bloody time trying to explain this to them, does it ever get through? Apparently not. If the CS says, I'm sorry minister, we can't do that because of X, Y and Z, we'll have to think of another way, in the tories case 5 minutes later there was a new minister and round and round we go. So yes, they are lying, to cover up their own incompetence and the fact that they didn't actually WANT to cut mass migration because most of them were Blair Light. Politicians, lying? Whatever next?
Hang on in there Toffee pud. I have known affair few civil servants. All bar one were impartial. And would not offer an opinion. Which is as it should be. Nor they criticise me for leaning left.
If you cancel your subscription you won’t know when we have won. Happy New year
I love toffee puddings 😈
Thank you Julie 😊
You need to have a word with your work colleagues, form a movement from within to identify and drive out that ‘vocal minority’.
Who knows, the public may gain a new respect for a civil service which begins to actually work for them….
I am inclined to agree with you. Although I left work in the CS long ago and am now a retired individual, I do feel strongly about the way we all get slagged off. The majority are in middling to lower grades, not exactly on stratospheric pay (despite what the social media columnists claim). They are primarily conscientious people, doing a job, just like anyone else in the private sector. I've even had people tell me I shouldn't be entitled to my government pension because I already have a state pension! people need to get their facts right before they mouth off. I can fully understand your concerns.
Liberal Democracy is drinking in the "Last Chance Saloon".
Totally correct in my view. But it goers far farther than just civil servants - of whom there are far too many. Wokery has reached every corner of the quangocracy and is unaccountable. If Reform comes up with firm policies then those policies must be acted on and reinforced with referenda if necessary: we simply do need to reclaim our country and lead the Western world back to sanity. Any criminality in the immigrant population should result in cancellation of citizenship and the deportation of the complete family. Incidentally the National Trust has become a classic nest of woke considering it as part of its remit to promote homosexuality which is definitively not part of their purpose of looking after NT properties - which they seem to have forgotten.
The National Trust was originally set up to preserve beautiful landscapes from development and urbanisation. After WWII it got into the stately home business, with more and more great houses falling into its grasp. In other words, museums. Museums became politicised under Labour, so the NT followed suit. It has greatly exceeded its original terms of reference. Unfortunately the NT is also the biggest landowner in England, answerable to no Minister and free to impose its Woke ideas, even on tenant farmers. Beatrix Potter would be horrified if she could now see the farmland that she bequeathed to the NT in the Lake District.
As always you get to the root of the issue. My father in law was a civil servant all his working life, through 1950/60/70’s. He was a manager of what were then called ‘dole offices’. He never once strayed from his neutral position - to his death we never knew who he voted for. He worked for the good of the country. He had a degree of autonomy in his job and spent time with employers working to find places for those ‘on the dole’….but on the other side, if he suspected someone was working the system he would insist they ‘sign on’ three times a day. Dole was for a designated length of time to help people back to work - it was NOT a lifestyle choice. He would be turning in his grave to see what has happened to this country and specifically to the ‘civil service’. If current members of the service feel that they cannot work to the rules of their masters in government then they should be sacked….no compensation, remove pension rights - basically show some balls you useless governments. The tail is wagging the dog and it stinks. Somewhere along the line governments and civil servants have completely forgotten who pays their wages and to whom they are responsible. The public have not forgotten though - and push us too far and the traitors will feel our wrath. Vote Reform at every opportunity. Let Britain return from insanity and push forward to greatness again. Labour out now. Starmer is a traitor to our country.
Well it will reduce the amount of redundancies Reform will have to make! There are plenty of unemployed people who would be able to step in , should they be needed. Draining the swamp must be a priority!
Voluntary leaving, far better than bloated redundancy packages
Bring it on
Best thing that could happen - I worked for the civil service 30 years ago. Well maybe not worked - who did? People came in late went early, Friday the office was empty. They spoke about their pensions most of the day - and let me be brutally honest here I spent two hours a day at the swimming pool opposite I came back had a cup of coffee and then went home. Then I left.
Certainly not tarring everyone with the same brush! My father was an engineer in the building opposite and he worked very hard spending weeks away from home. All I did was post a very true picture of where I worked it was MOD and people were ‘very elusive’ and continuing talking about their pensions? I was young and thought it was great I even got a season ticket for the pool! Tottenham Court station rush hour started at 3pm from our office Friday the building was empty. I did leave in the end through boredom - I was a secretary.
Well not me in any of the departments I worked in. I arrived at 8.00 and left at 4.00 pm in my early years in London, but after that, in Sheffield, was always in the office before 8.00 and I sometimes worked late if necessary with only a 30 minute lunch break. Please don't tar us all with the same brush, Chrissie, even though there are shirkers in almost every business, but I do wonder how much less work is now done because of mobile phones and social media.
Good thing it's not like that now, then, isn't it?
A complete disgrace we have this amount of treachery inside the civil service.
I'm actually thinking the opposite and I will sign up if Reform win.
Staggeringly important points for a mature and established civilization. There used to be such a thing as "doing your duty", which is apparently an increasingly rare virtue. That does not mean that civil servants should not have individual moral consciences. If they had, more of the "establishment employees" in Nazi Germany wouldn't have done what they did: they seemed to regard "duty" as "obedience", even to an evil state, and even against their own consciences. If Reform gets voted in, or perhaps I should start saying "when" Reform gets in, then they will have my support as long as they do not become an evil state. If they do, we take them down. But we already have an effectively evil state, although it is kind of a handful of virtuous-sounding and yet authoritarian and ideologically captured wimps, hiding behind democracy. Clearly there are plenty of "civil servants" who can also be understood as virtuous-sounding, authoritarian and ideologically captured. We need men and women of character, like the ones who built the 19th century, but with 21st century understanding of matters that were not understood fully in the 19th century (like "race" and sexual orientation).
They won't leave. There are not enough jobs in state funded charities, quangos and the BBC for even a small proportion of them.
The smart ones would be advised to find a private sector job pdq but beware, the sector is under extreme coist threats so you'll have to be good to keep a job here.
Hopefully Reform will also have a bonfire of the quangos too!