We Need A Bloodbath To Tame These Arrogant Officials

"We can all share the same star hammer and sickle, as the case may be."

By Simon Heffer

The constitutional rule used to be clear: civil servants advise, but ministers decide. However, according to astonishing remarks made by former prime ministerial aide Steve Hilton, the reverse now appears to be true.

If it is correct that the first the Prime Minister knows about many of the policy decisions made in his Government’s name is when he hears about them on the news, it is profoundly shocking. This not only signals the triumph of bureaucracy, but also the defeat of democracy.

Mr Hilton stated that No 10 is frequently left out of the loop as important policy decisions are pushed through by ‘paper-shuffling mandarins’.

He added that just 30 per cent of government activity is devoted to implementing the reform programme in the coalition agreement. (This may help explain why the Government had to produce a 119-page dossier last week packed with the details of the 70 or so promises it has so far failed to implement.)

Of the rest, he said, 30 per cent of activity concerned what he called ‘random’ things that were nothing to do with the coalition programme.

But the most worrying assertion by Mr Hilton is that perhaps 40 per cent of Whitehall activity takes place on the direct order of Brussels, by-passing our representatives in Parliament altogether.

This touches on the increasingly heated debate about our future in the EU, on which Mr Cameron is scheduled to make a landmark speech in the next ten days.

Eurosceptics – and those such as Ukip who are far beyond scepticism – have long claimed that one of the main reasons for us to renegotiate our relationship with the EU or to leave it altogether is the amount of sovereignty we have surrendered.

That our own civil servants spend nearly half their time implementing Brussels regulations demonstrates this loss of sovereignty in stark terms. It is a wake-up call to the Prime Minister over Europe and the unchecked power of bureaucrats not only in Brussels but also here in Whitehall. 

In our recent history there have been several periods of what is known as civil service government. 

This is when the permanent bureaucracy of Whitehall, with its long experience of running the country, decides that the Government is simply too incompetent to give the orders itself, and requires a heavy amount of guidance.

This normally happens in times of crisis, such as around the time of the devaluation of the pound in 1967 during the Wilson government, or the industrial crisis of 1973-74 under Ted Heath, or the near-bankruptcy of Britain in the autumn of 1976 just after Jim Callaghan came to power.

For the bureaucrats to be taking charge now when there appears to be no panic suggests a profound loss of grip by politicians in the face of a rampant, unelected bureaucracy.

Dominance: Eurosceptics have long claimed that one of the main reasons for us to renegotiate our relationship with the EU or to leave it altogether is the amount of sovereignty we have surrendered

There is one other difference between now and the 1970s. In those days the people who ran the civil service were uniformly highly educated and highly experienced in the departments over which they exercised control. Now, not least because the civil service was deeply politicised in the last Labour government and used as a weapon of social engineering, the best and brightest do not inevitably end up serving their country in Whitehall.

And civil servants often spend only three or four years at most in their department, meaning that by the time they are conversant with all its particular problems, it is time to move on – which has meant a disastrous loss in expertise.

Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, by his own admission, made a hash of the inquiry into the so-called 'plebgate' incident

One only has to look at the present Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to see how second-rate leadership in the civil service has become. Sir Jeremy’s most notable recent achievement was, by his own admission, to make a hash of the inquiry into the so-called ‘plebgate’ incident concerning former chief whip Andrew Mitchell.

That Sir Jeremy has reached such a powerful position is remarkable not least because when he was Tony Blair’s principal private secretary he failed to minute meetings in Downing Street about the case of Dr David Kelly, the scientist who killed himself shortly after the Iraq war in 2003. He was even singled out for criticism in the Hutton Inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death for this failure.

Our departure from the EU – a possible outcome of the referendum Mr Cameron threatens to call – would start to resolve the problem of this coup d’etat by bureaucrats, and hand it back to our elected representatives.

With a coalition partner in the Liberal Democrats who seem determined to shore up inefficiency and regulatory activity wherever possible, Mr Cameron may struggle to turn this tide. It requires willpower and, quite possibly, a bloodbath of officials.

It also requires a really determined, intelligent and energetic minister to take up the poisoned chalice of civil service reform, and to make the civil service once more the servants of democracy rather than its wreckers.