RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Get back to work? Solve the migrant crisis? No, Prime Minister… The days when the civil service unquestioningly carried out ministerial instructions are long gone
Civil servants are threatening to go on strike to stop the Government deporting cross-Channel migrants to Rwanda.
Staff at the Home Office have attacked the plan as ‘totally unethical’ and asked if they can refuse to work on it.
Outright opposition to the scheme has been expressed on an internal online noticeboard. Hysterical comparisons have been drawn with Nazi Germany, along with calls to ‘organise and resist’.
None of this should come as any surprise. Earlier this year, the union representing Border Force officials joined legal action aimed at preventing the Government turning boats back to France.
Civil servants a plotting to go on strike to prevent Priti Patel’s plan to off-shore asylum seekers in Rwanda
Under cover of Covid, the civil service institutionalised ‘hybrid’ working. At any given time, anything up to three-quarters of staff are still sitting at home watching daytime TV, mowing the lawn, taking the dog for a walk, working out at the gym or strolling down the pub for a swift pint or two while pretending to be taking part in a Zoom call or a ‘professional development session’
It’s no secret that the standing bureaucracy at the Home Office is disgusted by the Rwandan deal. They will move heaven and earth to stop it ever happening
For years, ministers have complained that when they pull the levers of government, they get the full Del Amitri. Nothing ever happens
Priti Flamingo must realise what she is up against. The days when the civil service unquestioningly carried out ministerial instructions are long gone. That’s if they ever existed at all.
In the past, mandarins would manipulate ministers subtly, a style so brilliantly satirised by Nigel Hawthorne’s Sir Humphrey Appleby in the BBC series Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.
More from Richard Littlejohn for the Daily Mail…
Today, even the upper echelons of the civil service treat Cabinet members with overt contempt. So it’s no wonder that their underlings believe they can refuse to implement any policy with which they disagree.
It’s no secret that the standing bureaucracy at the Home Office is disgusted by the Rwandan deal. They will move heaven and earth to stop it ever happening.
Expect all manner of administrative hurdles to be thrown in the way, while their compadres in the taxpayer-funded yuman rites racket drag Priti through the courts.
Just look at the way in which Whitehall tried deliberately to derail the Brexit referendum vote. Unelected pro-EU fanatics within the civil service were determined to thwart the democratically expressed will of the British people.
Their primary loyalty was not to the voters who pay their fat salaries and gold-plated pensions, but to Brussels and the Left-wing freemasonry of Common Purpose, which has infiltrated every single branch of government and so-called ‘public service’.
Even a nominally Conservative Government with a 75-seat majority in the Commons can’t cut through the civil service thicket.
For years, ministers have complained that when they pull the levers of government, they get the full Del Amitri. Nothing ever happens.
In the past, it was put down to incompetence and excessive caution. Today, there’s no pretence. Senior civil servants openly defy their political masters.
Despite being told to get staff back to work, most Whitehall departments still resemble the deck of the Mary Celeste.
Under cover of Covid, the civil service institutionalised ‘hybrid’ working. At any given time, anything up to three-quarters of staff are still sitting at home watching daytime TV, mowing the lawn, taking the dog for a walk, working out at the gym or strolling down the pub for a swift pint or two while pretending to be taking part in a Zoom call or a ‘professional development session’.
They are getting away with it because of a complete lack of supervision, while their bosses are peddling away on their Pelotons, or sunning themselves in the garden. So no change there, then.
To my mind, the definitive work/life balance story of lockdown was the Mail on Sunday’s revelation that while the Civil Service Club in Whitehall was deserted during the week, it was booked solid at the weekend when members and their wives/husbands/significant others travelled up to Town for dinner and a show.
There is a solution, which this column has long advocated. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan sacked thousands of striking air traffic controllers and recruited a whole new workforce
The idleness at the Foreign Office is well documented. During the retreat from Afghanistan, the most senior FO official Sir Philip Barton failed to return from his Dordogne chateau until 11 days after the fall of Kabul. So it’s little wonder that his minions are under no pressure to return to their own desks.
Same story elsewhere, with 2,000 DVLA staff getting paid for sitting at home, while a mountain of driving licence and vehicle registration applications piles up in their inboxes.
With the summer holidays looming, passport renewals are taking up to three months because officials are still ‘working from home’, despite all Covid restrictions being lifted weeks ago.
Yet despite their refusal to turn up for work, civil servants are still being paid lucrative London weighting allowances.
And their union leaders have condemned Jacob Rees-Mogg’s attempts to persuade permanent secretaries to order a return to the office as ‘vindictive’ and a ‘slap in the face’.
You couldn’t make it up.
No doubt arrogant mandarins think that they can ride it out. After all, ministers are here today, gone tomorrow. The civil service is dug in for the duration, surrounded by sandbags.
As the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band put it in their fabulous Viv Stanshall/Neil Innes number, worthy of Ray Davies in his Kinks heyday or Madness in their Norton Folgate pomp:
‘No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.’
Even when staff do occasionally grace the office with their presence, they seem to spend half their time on fatuous woke training courses.
Ministers may have told the civil service to cut all the diversity drivel, but that hasn’t stopped the Home Office insisting that workers attach their pronouns to all official emails and documents.
Sorry, but the Home Office is a shambles, as demonstrated by the fiasco over granting visas to refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine.
With most of the staff WFH, sifting through the applications appeared to fall on a hapless clerk sitting hundreds of miles away behind a makeshift desk in Warsaw, Poland, with half a dozen leaking Biros in his top pocket, a rackety sit-up-and-beg Underwood typewriter (circa 1957), a Thermos flask full of stewed tea and a half-eaten packet of Hobnobs.
There is a solution, which this column has long advocated. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan sacked thousands of striking air traffic controllers and recruited a whole new workforce.
Boris Johnson should follow suit. Civil servants who refuse to return to their desks by Monday should be dismissed summarily without compensation.
The solution is staring him in the face in India this week. Plenty of properly educated, highly motivated, English-speaking Indian citizens would jump at the chance to come to Britain and take up a secure job with the civil service.
In the short term, they could genuinely work from home while their visa applications are being processed. If civil servants can work efficiently from their kitchens in Maidenhead, then why not from Mumbai?
Boris could bring a few mandarins back with him, too. The Indian civil service is modelled on the British system established during the Raj, so the transition shouldn’t be too difficult to manage.
We used to be told that our civil service was a Rolls-Royce machine. No longer. These days it’s a clapped-out Cortina, up on bricks in the front garden of a council house in Swansea.
Our modern Sir Humphreys are emboldened to treat elected ministers with utter disdain, to pick and choose which policies they deign to implement.
Their juniors are more Wolfie Smith wannabes than Appleby’s subordinate sidekick Bernard Woolley, played superbly by Derek Fowlds.
Why else would they think they have the right to scupper Priti Flamingo’s Rwandan migrant deal, which enjoys the support of a majority of the British people?
The civil service is long overdue the ‘hard rain’ once promised by Boris’s former Svengali, Dominic Cummings.
It can’t come too soon. Otherwise, if Jonathan Lynn and the late Antony Jay had revived their signature show, they’d have had to call it:
No, Prime Minister!
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