How the Civil Service Ruined Britain

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2:46Every government comes in and they say, we're going to cut red tape. It's too much red tape. Cut the bureau, slash bureaucracy. And none of them do. Like, it's just been the story. It just gets worse and worse and worse. Red tape, bureaucracy, and it's easy to issue this stuff. But when you're a business trying to implement it, it's a nightmare. It makes you a life of misery. Waste time and money and gives you a headache. And it's just, you know, ridiculous. So we wanted to do something about that. So we had this kind of approach to it, which was rather than going in like every previous government and say, well, let's try and find the things that we want to cut.

3:18Why don't we have a different kind of mindset, which is let's review, let's look at everything and choose the ones we want to keep and assume that everything else is gone. Just as a kind of, so you set the default at less regulation. And I just remember the first meeting, I just thought we're sunk because it was, they divided all the regulations on the books, like tens of thousands. I think it was like maybe 29 ,000 sets of regulations they went through diligently and put them into. And we had different categories, you know, consumer protection, environmental, whatever. And we had a process for each one.

3:54And we had the meeting. And I think we started with consumer protection. It was in Oliver Letwin's office, I believe. Maybe for, yeah, Oliver Letwin. And we all sat around the table and the officials from that department came in with their sort of document, which was here, you know, with the list of all the different regulations. And it was supposed to be color coded for the ones we're keeping and the ones we think we can get rid of. And I remember looking at them and most of them were, I can't remember which way it was, red or green. I said, oh, so these are the ones that we're getting rid of.

4:23No, no, no, that's what we're keeping. There's like two or three that they felt we could get rid of. So I just thought, okay, let's go through it. So we went through and I remember we had almost the entire meeting just on one, one thing, which I remember what it was. It was because it was just, I just thought, I can't believe this. It was regulations about flammable pajamas. Yeah. And it was a specific regulation about flammable pajamas. I think it was, it was either men's or women's. I can't remember. And I said, well, why can't this be covered in a general duty of you? We had this long conversation about it.

4:59And I remember the official from the Department of... Is it trade industry? I can't remember who it was. Whatever it was said. Well, actually, we had like half an hour discussion just on that, whether we could... Just on pyjamas. And it was one gender. It was either male or... I mean, I guess today you'd have to have a... That wouldn't even be... You couldn't even have that conversation about male or female pyjamas. Too triggering. But it was... It was at the end of this whole discussion about either male or female pyjamas, the official, I'll never forget it, said, well, actually, to the extent that there is an interest in this from the public, I think the pressure would be to equalize it and to add regulations for female pajamas or whatever.

5:38And honestly, we had this whole conversation about the flapping of pajamas and going in front of a... It was mad. It was like a parody. And that was the first meeting. And I just thought, this is it. They know how to sort of grind you down. and there's always more of them than there are of you and they can always generate more paper and you'll never win this battle. And that's when I came to the conclusion that the only way that you would actually do what all these governments promised, which is to have less regulation, decentralised power and so on, is to massively reduce the number of civil servants.

6:17Or kill them. That's the only way. And so that led to a whole process which was parodied in the media about me wanting to fire most of the civil service, but kind of yes, actually, because, not because they're doing a bad job, but because actually it shouldn't be so centralised. You shouldn't have this giant bureaucracy of just the tentacles reaching into every single aspect of life. It just feeds on itself, even if they've got good intentions, which they do. I'm not doubting that in each individual person that they're bad, I'm not saying they're bad people with bad intentions, just the cumulative effect.

6:52It's just this nightmare for people and businesses and society as a whole. Steve, you're really smiley and happy. You live in California, of course you are. But as I listen to you as someone who lives in the UK, I'm fucking furious. Well, I think you should be, actually, because this is what, okay, especially the last few years. As you said, I'm here in California. I'm focused on not just US politics, actually California politics. In California, you know, we're a bigger economy than the UK, and there's a lot going wrong in California. So it's like a big thing, and that's what I'm focused on. But, you know, I obviously keep an eye on UK politics, and it seems to me that things are really stuck.

7:36That's what it feels like, like for years now. And I don't want to weigh in too strongly because I don't follow it closely, and so I may be getting things wrong. But it does feel like you just have one prime minister after another and it's all like, what's actually happening? I mean, where's the energy? It just feels very stuck. Nothing really gets solved. Some of the problems seem to get worse rather than better. And I think a lot of it is to do with this fact that the machinery of government is really broken. and acknowledging that i would imagine that a lot of civil servants are very left-wing or left-leaning again nothing wrong with that if those are your political opinions fair enough but the problem comes when you see yourself as a protector or guardian of the uk and someone comes in with a policy that they deem to be right-wing yeah and you say you're not going going to enact it, then what you were doing is subverting the will of the people who have elected that government.

8:43That's exactly right. And that's what Blair felt. I mean, he said that. And so I think he said it publicly. I don't think I'm revealing anything sort of, you know, greatly confidential, but it's exactly what you say, because that's the theory. And the theory of governance is that the politicians are elected by the people and the bureaucracy faithfully implements what they do. But if that's not the culture, and again, I don't think it's even necessarily that they may not even be aware that that's what they're doing. But there's this sense of, it's almost grandiosity, I think, that like, well, you know, we've been here, we know how it works.

9:21You can't possibly do that. There's definitely a lot of that. I remember at the last party conference, I made a joke and I said that 10 % of civil servants are magnificent and the other 10 % should probably be in prison. You know, leaking official secrets, obstructing ministers and so on. And there was this big hoo-ha that said, I want to put 50 ,000 people in jail and so on. But the point I was making... We don't have the prison places for a start. He'd have to release sex offenders. Definitely not doing that. But the point I was making is that we shouldn't put all civil servants in a bucket.

9:55There are some great people who work in our civil service And they are more frustrated than you or I are by their colleagues who are obstructing because they have to live with them constantly. And I remember talking to one official who was so good and she was complaining about the, you know, some of these diversity policies, how they were actually unmeritocratic and how, you know, there was a scene in the civil service that was very worried about self-ID and all the pronoun stuff that they needed to get promoted. I said, why don't you speak out about it? You know, I will support you. I will give you cover.

10:32And she said, yeah, but what happens when you're gone? The ministers change all the time. What if there's an election and I get a new minister? What's going to happen to me? There's not going to be anyone to protect me. So we need to empower the good people. We need to make sure that when we have stuff that needs doing, we bring the good people forward. And we also need to be able to sack the people who are not good. At the moment, ministers cannot sack because that creates, it affects civil service impartiality. So the performance management system needs to change to one where people who don't perform do get sacked.

11:07I remember asking my department how many people have re-sacked since the department started, and I was told none, ever. And I thought that that was extraordinary. You know, people might be encouraged to leave or voluntary redundancies. But actually, if there are bad eggs in any organization, and that includes parliament as well, they should be removed. You need that performance management system. You need incentives. And when you have the right incentives, sometimes the incentives are pay. Sometimes it's freedom to make mistakes. When you have the right incentives, you can have people delivering.

11:40But I also think that we need more politics in the civil service because the civil service has already been politicized. All of these impartial and neutral organizations, these quangos, regulators, they've all been politicized. And politicians have been giving power away. You know, we'll make this independent. We'll make that independent. And we have so little power now. We certainly did as ministers. I'd want to do things. You can't do that. You know, Bank of England, the Competition and Markets Authority. We've created legislation that's given power away to independent organizations. And it sounded good at the time.

12:15But actually, what it means is that the democracy is sticky. You vote for things and it's hard to make it happen. If it isn't to a quango, it's, you know, a court decision. You look at what we're dealing with on borders, for example, endless sort of court obstruction. You look at this Rosebank and Jackdaw oilfield issue. That's court saying, no, we want to do net zero. We've got to get some of that power back. Britain isn't really run by politicians. It's run by our civil service. civil service, enormous. How's the NHS run? It's not run by a Secretary of State for Health. Consists of 1.1 million people.

12:52There are 350 million GP appointments a year. The numbers are kind of staggering. So the only way of running a good country is by improving the quality of those people, how they are recruited, how they are promoted, how they are trained. And that is a 20-year process of investment, of really thinking about how you create a really elite professional civil service. And that also requires some very tough conversations, because a lot of the things that I found as a minister that were getting in the way, I'll give you an example that I don't think I put in my book, but, you know, mattered to me and sort of illustrates some of the paradoxes.

13:37So when I was the minister responsible for part of our effort during the Syrian war, I discovered that my Syrian team was moved from London to East Kilbride near Glasgow, 400 miles away. Why? Because somebody thought it would be great for the economy of this depressed area near Glasgow to have these civil servants moved up there. So I say, well, wait a second, we're fighting a war. Who's going to be in the meetings with the Minister of Defence? Who's going to be in the meetings with the Foreign Office? All these meetings are happening in London. Oh, don't worry, Minister. People will always be able to fly down.

14:20Sorry, first they say they can do it on Zoom. Then I say, no, but that's not the point. A lot of this stuff is happening in the margins of meetings. It's not just happening on the Zoom call. Oh, don't worry, they'll be able to fly down. Then I notice they're not flying down. So then I go up to Glasgow. I'm like, what's happening? And they say, oh, Minister, we've just done a carbon audit and we've discovered that all these people were taking these flights. So we've banned anybody from taking flights down from Glasgow to London and said people can do all this stuff virtually. Now, there are two very valuable things happening here.

14:55Regeneration, revitalization, employment near Glasgow and climate policy. but what's lacking is what is the point of what they're doing point of what they're doing is they're trying to get involved in our biggest national security priority which is fighting a war in syria and they're not there and they're not helping if the number one question you're asking yourself which is what is the most effective practical way to make a difference in in syria it is not to move these people up to glasgow but our civil service machine is brilliant at prioritising secondary issues and taking away from the fundamental question, which is what is the most effective way of delivering what matters to the country?

15:37The thing that civil servants hate most is when they're named. They never want to be named in stories. They always want to remain anonymous, whether they're senior or junior. Particularly, they say, civil servant press officers say to journalists all the time, oh no, you can't name that civil servant who may have done something egregious, who may have said something outrageous, who may have done something completely against political impartiality or whatever, oh, you can't name them because they're too junior. And they say you can't name them because there's a rule or there's some sort of agreement between journalists and the civil service that you don't name junior civil servants.

16:10There's no such rule. There's no such law. There's no regulation that says that. It's an ethical judgment by editors to say, does this person really have the responsibility and the authority over what they've done and how egregious is it and how much in the public interest is it for us to name this civil servant. And the reason they don't want to be named is because they claim it's because they might be bullied or something like that. No, it's because of their career progression. And if an employer, even in the civil service, is Googling their name and suddenly they're mentioning an article, that doesn't look great for them.

16:40That looks like they're a bit of a troublemaker or at least they've done something wrong for us to be reporting on it. And they've got to do something pretty wrong for us to actually name them if they're a junior guy. If they're senior people, it's a slightly different situation because those people have responsibility and authority and there's a stronger public interest in naming those individual civil servants. So I think as journalists, we can have a big impact, I hope, on some of the decisions that we're making inside various Whitehall departments. But interestingly enough, actually the fight back within the civil service is occurring independent of journalists and independent of pressure from people like me and newspapers.

17:14There's an organisation called SCENE in the civil service, which represents gender critical civil servants. It was set up in October 2022. It was the first of its kind, and this was following the Meyer Foresarter case, which I'm sure you guys are very aware of, where gender critical beliefs are now protected against discrimination under law, under the Equality Act of 2010. And this means that civil servants can generate their own network, their own group across Whitehall, to talk about gender-critical beliefs, and they're enabled to do this because of the Meyer Forsyter case in law. So the cabinet office agreed that they could set up this organisation.

17:50There's over 700 members I've seen now across the civil service, which is very impressive. They've ran surveys of their members discussing sort of widespread bullying and harassment of civil servants for holding gender-critical beliefs. Some of the stories that I've reported on have exposed some of this harassment. For example, a gender-critical civil servant was accused of holding beliefs similar to the Nazis in a call in which senior civil servants were there and said nothing to defend them. In another situation, a gender critical civil servant in the DWP was in a call about international women's day, a sort of discussion about that.

18:22And she said, quote, there are two sides to the trans debate. That was used in an official investigation against her. Someone complained that that was bullying and harassment and discrimination, saying there are two sides to the trans debate. And in an official investigation by the department, she was given an official warning and that quote was used as evidence against her as harassment. So what Sina doing is they're pushing back against this stuff. They've written to Simon Case, who's the cabinet secretary, the head of the civil service, to raise their concerns. They're meeting with senior civil servants.

18:55They recently met with the permanent secretary at the home office called Matthew Rycroft, who is what they call, it's a ridiculous name, the faith and belief champion of the civil service. Now, just a very quick side note, Matthew Rycroft is the man in charge of our police and our border policy, and he spends time being a faith and belief and a race champion in the civil service to talk about trans issues. Why he's wasting any time on that, I don't know. But anyway, so Sine have done some fantastic things where they've really been pushing back internally against some of these woke policies. They found documents that they're upset about.

19:34They sent it to senior civil servants, pro-trans stuff, for example. And to give you an example, one of the things they found recently in a letter they wrote to Simon Case, Agenda. Now, Agenda is a network for pro-trans civil servants. So there's lots of different networks across the civil service. As I mentioned earlier, there's 93 networks in the MOD specifically for talking about diversity and inclusion, 14 for race. So all across Whitehall, there are all of these groups, which by the way, I don't think should exist, but a total waste of time. But anyway, they exist and that's the reality. Agender is the pro-trans group in the civil service.

20:07They came up with training slides which compared gender critical people to the KKK and racist nationalists. Now that's totally unacceptable. Civil servants should never say that sort of thing. I mean, it's discriminatory, it's bullying, it's horrible. So they're again exposing these things internally. They're having those conversations, which is really impressive. On the race front, and I think generally, and I know maybe you guys disagree with this, but I think generally the people who are opposed to the critical race theory and the civil service, at least in my experience, the people who approach me about these stories tend to be more conservative minded, less focused on, let's say, being feminists and sort of turfs and more focused on, you know, kind of this anti-white propaganda.

20:46It could be leftists, could be conservatives, but generally it's conservatives. Those people are far less organized. They don't have their own organization, partly because there is no protection in law for anti-critical race theory beliefs yet. And that actually could change soon. There's some interesting legal cases that are going through the system now where that may become a protected belief under law. And I hope it will. I think there was a recent success, I can't remember the exact details, but a recent success in one of the courts to do with that. So they don't have their own organisation, they don't have their own network, the anti-critical race theory.

21:13But they do speak to each other to a certain extent. They do blow the whistle on a lot of stuff that's going on in Whitehall. And again, they're having an impact externally through newspaper reports and so on. So that was a very long-winded answer, but I am basically hopeful that there are some successes going on. But unfortunately, the other side of it is Labour about to come into the Parliament very, very soon, probably. So things are going to get better. So things, I suspect, will get a lot worse, unfortunately. But there are some brave civil servants out there who are fighting this stuff, and I think we'll continue to do so.

21:43Consecutive governments over decades now have absolutely not delivered on the things that they have told and promised the British people. Why is that? I hear various rumors, you know, the civil service ideologically just won't let it happen. You know, the Treasury is more interested in growth than delivering on the promises about we just care about the economy or rather the numbers that we can then sell to the British public so much that this issue goes by the wayside. You've been there. You've been in charge of the department that is there to control this issue. And you, the government, previous governments have failed to do it.

22:16Why? Why is it happening? That's what so many people say to us. It's like we keep voting, we keep saying we want to deal with this issue. Nothing happens. Why? Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts. Why did I search the internet for answers to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic sores in various stages of ooze. I can clear my search history, but I can never unsee that. Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Healthcare just got less painful. Well, having served as Home Secretary, I think ultimately there has been a political resistance to seriously grapple with the challenges posed by unprecedented

23:18and unprecedented levels of migration. Sorry to interrupt. What does political resistance mean? Who are you talking about? Is it the civil service? Is it your own party? Is it the media? Who is causing this not to happen? Well, I can speak only from my own experience and what I've observed. I think that for my part, I've been very eager to deliver on that policy to lower net migration. And technically, it's very easy to do, actually, from a home office or government point of view. You don't need to pass a law. You don't need to worry about human rights or the court in Strasbourg. You don't need to get any new votes on it.

24:01You actually just have to take an administrative and executive decision to do it. And I had the hope that I would be able to do that. And unfortunately, I was met with a lot of resistance from around the cabinet table. And the prime minister, you know, didn't want to engage in this subject and didn't want to deliver on it. You'd have to ask him. Why do you think? You say the cabinet table, that means more than one person, right? So we're talking about a conservative party elected on the promise to lower migration in 2010 to the tens of thousands. We are so far off that. And yet you're saying people within the cabinet of that very government are not keen.

24:46And I don't think they're bad people. I don't think the people in the Labour government necessarily were bad people. So the question is, why? Is it because we just care more about importing cheap labour to staff the NHS? And so the other departments are like, well, if you do this, we're not getting enough foreign students. We're not going to have enough of an economic boost. Is that what's happening? That is effectively the character of the resistance I came up against. So the economic departments, mainly the Treasury, would be very resistant to my proposals to cut net migration. So, for example, on workers, you know, my proposal for over a year was we needed to raise the salary threshold.