Inside Britain's Broken State. Part I.

A new trilogy on the people who rule Britain by Steven Edginton

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Steven Edginton is a major talent in British journalism. You’ve probably seen his devastating interviews of major political figures on GB News and his writing in the Daily Telegraph. Over the next three weeks, Steven is writing a trilogy on Britain’s broken state and the people presiding over this mess. You can follow him on social media. Enjoy. Matt.

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The British state is failing. Its prisons are overflowing. It cannot police the nation’s borders. Billions are wasted on hotels for illegal migrants. Burglaries and small thefts are now de facto legal. Crime is an epidemic. And British people who complain about these things are ignored, labelled as bigots, or simply locked up. 

It’s easy, and correct, to blame our political class in Westminster for this disaster. But they are not the only people who are responsible for this mess.

In July, after the general election, voters might have expected change, having handed power over to Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, giving them a massive majority. Yet the same people who have presided over, and who are partly responsible for the failures I just outlined, remain firmly in charge of the country.

They are, of course, the Civil Service. 

The problem with the phrase ‘the Civil Service’ or ‘Whitehall’ or ‘the Blob’ is that they are too vague. We must be specific. We must focus on who is responsible. We must focus on the people who are at the very epicentre of power in this country.

Therefore, in this trilogy of pieces —exclusively for Matt Goodwin’s Substack— I have chosen to focus on three of the country’s most senior civil servants. Why? Because I want to show you who runs our government and what their priorities are.

Let’s begin with part one: Sir Matthew Rycroft CBE

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Sir Matthew Rycroft, an Oxford graduate, is now the most senior civil servant in the Home Office, the department that is responsible for police and immigration.

Rycroft is a career diplomat.

He served as a private secretary to Tony Blair and has decades of experience in foreign affairs, including serving as Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina and Permanent Representative to the UN.

Then, in 2018, he was appointed Permanent Secretary to the Department for International Development, and in 2020 came to the Home Office. 

Sir Matthew’s career was, until 2020, entirely focused on foreign affairs. In an interview with Civil Service World, in March 2023, Rycroft stated that he still sees himself “as a diplomat who happens to be at the Home Office for the moment.”

Why am I focusing on Rycroft?

Because this mandarin, who has more experience of Bosnian diplomacy than he does of policing and migration, has overseen the Home Office at its very worst.

Record levels of illegal and legal migration, an enormous backlog of so far unresolved asylum claims, two-tier policing, crime waves, Islamist terror attacks—including the murder of Sir David Amess— and increasing societal dysfunction.

It was also under Rycroft’s watch that the Home Office repeatedly failed in its duty to protect the British public from Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai.

Had his department conducted proper background checks they would have realised that this illegal migrant from Afghanistan had already murdered two people in Serbia before coming to the UK and so, in turn, the young British man Thomas Roberts, who was murdered by Abdulrahimzai, might still be alive today.

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Unsurprisingly, Rycroft’s buzz word at the Home Office has been less “deportation” and more “diversity”. He serves as its Race, Faith and Belief Champion.

A diversity champion is a voluntary position which hundreds if not thousands of Civil Servants hold to “champion” their cause, whether on race, religion or gender.

This means he spends time meeting civil servants about their religion (for example attending an internal Ramadan event in March), their political beliefs (he once met civil servants in an official meeting to talk about transgender issues), and no doubt engaging in endless discussions about race.

Rycroft even wrote a foreword to a Home Office Race Action Plan which pushed Critical Race Theory on civil servants —a belief system rooted in the divisive claim that all Western nations are ‘institutionally racist’ and that racism and discrimination lie at the root of every disparity among different racial and ethnic groups.

Evidence suggests Rycroft had a fractious relationship with the most hardline Home Secretary in recent years, Suella Braverman. Earlier this year, Braverman told GB News that she had attempted to sack Rycroft but was blocked by then prime minister Rishi Sunak. It’s not difficult to see why she might have fallen out with him.

Under Rycroft’s watch, the Home Office has pushed radical ideas on race and gender. Last year, it was revealed that Border Force officers are allowed to wear rainbow epaulettes, that ‘non-binary’ civil servants are given two security passes so they can change their gender depending on how they identify that day, and Home Office staff have held a series of internal events for Black History Month in which staff openly supported BLM —an organisation that has since been found in both the UK and USA to be fraudulent, and supportive of the Islamist terrorists Hamas.

Under Rycroft’s watch, radical racial ideas have also been pushed by senior civil servants in departmental meetings —including one senior mandarin who claimed that she had to work “ten times harder” than her white colleagues.

In November 2023, Reform MP Lee Anderson took on Rycroft during a Home Affairs Select Committee session when he asked about the number of illegal immigrants that are being deported.

Anderson called Rycroft’s inability to provide a serious response "staggering." The committee's Chair, Labour MP Dame Diana Johnson, expressed her own surprise, asking: "Do we have any figures on anything?"

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In February of that year, 2023, Rycroft also sent an email to staff outlining the department's mission, which was to "expand global talent visa routes," support victims of the Windrush scandal, and combat violence against women.

In a year of record channel crossings and soaring net migration, his failure to mention cutting immigration as a departmental mission was telling. 

Just this month, he was also asked by civil servants about the Home Office’s shocking lack of data on migrant crime.

He refused to answer.

After the recent anti-immigration riots and protests, Rycroft also wrote an email to Home Office civil servants saying: “The last few weeks have shown the Home Office at its best.” This statement will come as a shock to many British people who watched another summer of small boat crossings in the Channel, people locked up for what they wrote on Facebook in their own home, and two-tier policing of protests.

However, the most shocking moment of Rycroft’s Home Office career came in 2021. The career diplomat hosted a Zoom call entitled: "Lunch with Civil Service Race Networks and Matthew Rycroft, race champion".

He was asked how civil servants can stand up to ministers who are critical of diversity (i.e. DEI ideology), and he replied:

"On some issues we should accept that direction – they are our democratically-elected leaders after all – but on others I think it's for us actually within the civil service to be stewards and to think about our own role in terms of the leadership of the organisation of the civil service which obviously takes account of ministerial views but doesn’t have to follow them slavishly on every particular issue.”

“Stewards”, “doesn’t have to follow them slavishly on every issue” - these statements alone should have been enough for Sir Matthew to have been fired on the spot. 

Instead, in 2023 he was given a £30,000 bonus —including £10,000 for his job performance—which is on top of his £180,000-190,000 salary.

While you, the British taxpayer, fund his pension, salary and bonuses to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, illegal migrants continue to break into Britain, our prisons and policing remain visibly chaotic, and the very department that is supposed to be dealing with all this remains a dysfunctional mess, unable to give you, the taxpayer, detailed information on what is going on in Britain.

And at the vert heart of this are people like Matthew Rycroft who in some other galaxy would simply be fired and replaced for their catalogue of failures and incompetence but who, in Britain’s Broken State, are instead rewarded and patted on the back by other members of our failing elite class.

Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 56,500 subscribers from 167 countries around the world and thousands of paying supporters who support our work. Like our stuff? Then help us expand by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can join us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook.