The King is in his altogether. –
The UK civil service is in urgent need of cultural renewal and management reform.
You must listen,
to cherish the songbird's tune.
And look,
to appreciate the butterfly's wing.
To hear and to see,
yields only a fraction,
Of the wonders
that lie within.
Alongside its boast of competence and that they are the best in the world, the UK's civil service also asserts that it is politically impartial. It promotes itself as "the apolitical, independent executive branch of central government," but sadly, both these boasts and claims are no longer true. They fail to stand up to scrutiny.
Take any newspaper for any seven days or the output from the BBC for any one week over the last six months, and it becomes obvious that the British civil service, along with many of its associated institutions together with our universities, are in the grip of a political philosophy which has never been adopted by any political party and put to the people for them to vote on in any general election.
Further, the evidence shows that our civil service is overwhelmingly failing the competency test. While there is a willingness to identify problems and learn from their mistakes, there is a cultural malaise which means that the civil service lacks the vigour to make the much-needed changes to improve its performance.
If the civil service were a business, its failure in corporate renewal would have caused it to go out of business or be taken over years ago.
If change is to be made, it is important to understand these criticisms in greater detail, for it is only after proper and thorough analysis that effective remedies might be found.
The political philosophy which has, without a public vote, taken a grip of our civil service and public institutions is the ideology of Critical Theory, and more particularly, its subset, Critical Race Theory.
There are millions of words written by faux social philosophers on these theories where it is possible to understand each word on its own, but when strung together in a phrase or sentence, the sense becomes almost incomprehensible. It is as though the whole subject is written and discussed in code, with the meaning only intelligible to those within the coterie. This enables them to mock and denigrate the uninitiated in an onslaught of verbiage and thus claim the intellectual high ground – which, I would like to suggest, is not high at all.
The result is that a form of mass psychosis, which first took hold in the philosophical and sociology departments of universities, has spread into government, institutions and, more recently, large businesses. Perhaps it requires those from the outside, not inculcated with the rhetoric, and looking in to realise that, just as in the Hans Christian Andersen story, there is no magic suit of clothes but a mere concept which is as bare as the naked King.
Beyond academic snobbery, the basic concept is reasonably easy to grasp. Critical theorists argue that there are no facts and no absolute or universal truth. There are only feelings, perspectives and interpretations of situations and events which are driven by a person's interest, their personal preferences, which trump all else, and their will to power.
They go on to argue that social problems stem from social structures and cultural assumptions rather than from the individual, because these will have influenced a person's perspective and interpretation. They have the view that a person's life experiences are the result of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics rather than the explicit and intentional prejudices of individuals.
Thus, the world is interpreted through a person's lived experience irrespective of the facts. If they have suffered racial prejudice, then their society must be racially prejudiced. If they have suffered antisemitism, then the world is full of antisemites. If they have suffered from homophobia, then mankind is full of homophobes. Any evidence which might be produced to the contrary carries no weight if it flies in the face of personal experience.
Just as was the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels over 170 years ago, Critical Theory is equally political. Proponents see their task as identifying and ending the 'false' ideologies which give rise to social or economic oppression and, in doing so, change society.
Not dissimilar to Marx, who put the state ahead of the individual, critical theorists encourage the individual to put their grouping at the heart of their identity. One's sex, sexuality, race, or skin colour is more important than the individual person.
It is as though the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr, on which so much of our equality laws have been based, "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character," has been assigned to history as no longer relevant.
Martin Luther King
Under critical race theory, you are no longer judged by your prowess on the sports field but by your race. You are no longer judged on your skills as a musician but on your gender. You are no longer judged on your talent as an artist but on whether you have a disability. You are no longer judged on the basis of your ability to speak a language but on whether you are gay or straight.
Critical race theory creates a culture where everyone is a victim, as it allows a person to claim that the circumstances created their situation and not themselves. It allows a person to abrogate their responsibility creating a culture where everyone, for some reason and however minor, is a victim. "It is not my fault because … [fill in the blank]."
It becomes difficult to create and maintain a homogeneous society if victimhood, group and identity politics become the predominant force.
The social objective of the frictionless, live and let live society, with mobility of people between the classes, which has been at the forefront of public policy for the last fifty years, appears to have been abandoned in favour of one which takes life seriously and creates a division between one group and another. In the process, it sets up, rather than takes down, barriers to change.
A classic example of critical race theory in practice is how inclusion and diversity have moved into every walk of life. For example, the BBC no longer fills talent and behind-camera positions based on the best person for the job but based on quotas - 50% women, 50% ethnic minority etc.
The situation is the same on commercial television. During a study of one hour of prime-time evening viewing, the ethnicity of the main actors in television adverts was counted. Over that time, there were precisely 52 white and 52 non-white main part actors. On another occasion, measured over two hours, the ratio was 53% white and 47% non-white. You might think with these statistics, equality is working with both whites and non-whites represented roughly equally on-screen. But sadly, this is not the case. In 2020, 14% of the total population of England and Wales was non-white, yet non-white actors are taking half the acting jobs.
One might expect the BBC or the UK's TV advertising to represent the market it is addressing, but in the laudable pursuit of a diversity policy, the TV industry appears to have, en masse, decided that it should abandon the objective of equality of opportunity in favour of equality of outcome.
On the altar of critical race theory, the broadcast industries have abandoned the principle of meritocracy – the best person for the job. Instead, they are actively practising positive discrimination in favour of non-white actors while positively discriminating against white actors. This begs the question as to whether critical race theory has induced them to operate in direct contravention of the Equality Act 2010?
Perhaps the ‘diversity and inclusion’ mantra, which are the bywords of the millennials[1] who now dominate the broadcast industries, and Whitehall too, has been so readily adopted because they see the UK through the eyes of London, where one-third are born abroad as compared to one in seven for the whole nation. Clearly, in the Brexit debate, London had a different view from large parts of the rest of England.
But one has to ask, why do the broadcast industries think they need to brain wash a society with its brand of diversity and inclusion when, of the first eleven candidates who have declared their interest in becoming leader of the Conservative Party, one is black and five are British-Asian, two of whom are women, and the least important thing about any of these candidates is the colour of their skin. The debate is only about their political instincts and policies. Does this not show that, at its heart, the UK is already an inclusive and diverse society? Is there not the risk that the zeal for diversity and inclusion, rather than uniting the nation, will start to alienate and divide us as one group is seen more favoured than another.
Critical race theory, first used by critical theorists as the basis for examining social, political, and legal power structures through the lens of race, has been expanded in recent years to include gender, disability, and class to identify and explain inequality.
We now have the situation where scholars and proponents of critical race theory reject the common notion that there are just two sexes, man and woman. Instead, they view not only race but a person's sex "as a social construct with no biological basis. As a result, they insist on using gender, of which they recognise about 15 separate groups and possibly as many genders as people in the human race.
Society has for some time recognised that some feel they are a woman trapped in a man's body and want to live their lives as a woman. Or alternatively, there are those that feel they are a man trapped in a woman's body and want to live their lives as a man. The result was the Gender Recognition Act 2004 which, subject to certain conditions, enables a person to change the sex recorded on their birth certificate, either from male to female or vice versa.
Further, the Equalities Act 2010 makes it unlawful to discriminate based on age, race, religion or belief, sex, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, disability, sexual orientation or gender reassignment.
Thus, our society has already determined that people should not be discriminated against for reasons of their gender identity and gender expression.
The problem is that a tiny group of transgender rights activists have decided that the existing legislation, designed to keep transgender people safe and to allow them to participate as fully as possible in society in their chosen gender, is not as comprehensive as it should be.
This small group has decided that it is no longer acceptable for people to be classified according to their assigned sex. Rather than their biology, a man or woman should be classified depending on how they feel and what they declare – self-identification.
Thus, according to this political belief system, a woman is no longer to be a female person with two X chromosomes, a vagina and uterus but should be anyone who self-identifies as an adult female human being.
In the process, they are directly challenging those rights that women have obtained over the years as a separate identifiable sex, not least to women only safe spaces.
The trouble is that when their identity becomes the most important thing about a person, and they support their identity group, to the exclusion of almost everything else, with money or effort or both, then society becomes ever more fractionalised as one identity group pits itself against the rest of society.
With a frightening similarity to communism, where the individual was subservient and owed their loyalty to the state, critical theorists contend that the individual owes their support to their identity grouping.
The thing is – we know how this experiment of society determining that groupings are paramount while devaluing the unique importance of every individual ends.
Hitler, Stalin and Mao were each hostile to the principle of personal liberty. They put 'their' form of society ahead of the individual and became responsible for the deaths of between 100 million and 150 million people. Have we forgotten the lessons of the 20th Century so soon?
If you want an example of this group primacy and the threat to individual freedom, then look no further than the way trans rights activists have set themselves against any woman who is insistent that 'woman' is a defined sex and is not to be used as an expression of gender identity.
A J Rowling
So vituperous is the trans rights activists' rage against A.J. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, that she has been excluded from attending the 25th Anniversary celebrations of the first screening of the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone for fear of offending the LGTB community. Her offence – standing against gender self-identification and insisting that the term woman is limited to the female sex.
It is not for this paper to argue the rights or wrongs of any proposed changes that might be made to the Gender Recognition Act. That, as they say, is beyond its paygrade. Its purpose is to look at how the politics of critical race theory has entered the halls of government, but to do this the debate on gender identity cannot be ignored.
But before I go any further, I need to make a personal point. I have been fortunate enough to be chosen to work with two people who had transitioned from a man to a woman and lucky enough to have made friends with a third. Each was qualified to doctoral level in STEM subjects and were among the cleverest, most intelligent, and able people I know. Two had transgender surgery. Sadly, two are now dead, and the third has gone to live overseas after their freedom to live their life with the anonymity that most of us enjoy was destroyed when their gender became a matter of national news. I do not think these people would have willingly worked with me, as they did, if they had found me to be transphobic.
I know that to live in fear of ridicule and physical attack, as they all did, is completely and utterly unacceptable. It is why society has to be sympathetic and extend all the love, care and support to those who wish to and have changed gender.
The issue of transgender is incredibly complex. The science is new and not yet fully developed and may well turn out to be highly controversial. We know the reason given in public, because the narrative is now standard throughout all public services, and that is: while developing, the foetus grew a woman's brain inside a man's body (or visa versa). But this is far too simplistic, for it ignores all the hormonal changes a body experiences from birth.
The problem comes when there is a challenge of both opinions and rights. It is why, at this stage in the debate, everyone must go the extra mile to show restraint and tolerance.
Stonewall is an important charity which does crucial work campaigning for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans community. For example, and irrespective of your view on the argument, their legal campaign on prescribing puberty and hormone blockers to those under 16 was important in clarifying the law.
In 2019 it was estimated that there are 754,000 men and 677,000 women identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual in the UK. In total, this comprised about 2% of the population.
There is no firm data on the percentage of the UK population identifying as transgender. The UK Statistical Office does not gather any such data because there are multiple possible definitions. In 2018, the Government's Equalities Office published a document that estimated 200,000-500,000 trans people living in the UK. However, Stonewall estimates the number at 600,000. If this statistic were correct, then it would suggest that there is one transgender person for every 110 members of the population. Instinctively, this seems unreasonably high but more likely proves the definition problem.
Given that Stonewall represents a significant minority of the population, it is right and proper that it does everything in its power to influence government policy for and on behalf of the LGBT community.
However, in the eighteen months to 31st March 2021, Stonewall earned £5.4 million delivering its Diversity Champions training scheme to over 300 government departments and bodies. In addition, it received grants from the Government totalling £2.4m. Herein lies the problem.
Not only is the Government paying an influential lobbying group, which represents a tiny section of society, to lobby them on LGBT policy and practice matters, but the doctrine of that charity is being delivered deep into the civil service through its diversity training programme, attendance at which, in many departments and institutions, is compulsory.
The question is: who stands for and lobbies on behalf of the 98% of the population who don't identify as LGBT in the LGBT debate? The answer is no one, as to speak for the majority, would result in an immediate attack of being a homophobe, transphobe, or both. The result is that Stonewall has become the King in its own court, and that court has reached deep into the heart of the executive branch of Government.
Prejudice and discrimination of all kinds is insidious, nasty and very damaging. It is quite right that large employers, such as the Government, train its staff in these issues. The trouble is that the discrimination and diversity agenda has become so powerful that, through group think, government institutions have been captured with a monoculture.
For example, the Crown Estates, part of the civil service, in its determination to create an inclusive environment for their staff, prepared a nine-page guide to gender and sexual identity. This included the acronym LGBTQIAPK (which is beyond comprehension), explained such terms as hetronormativity and misgendering and taught the 'proper' use of pronouns.
Shortly afterwards, we learn that a government trainer in diversity tells 'her' civil service audience that 'she' has a vagina and uterus but also has XY chromosomes, which make 'him' a 'man'. The trainer is from a civil service trans and intersex network. They train thousands of civil servants from the NHS to the Cabinet Office each year.
I accept that a trainer sharing 'their lived experience' is helpful in diversity and tolerance training. It is what happened next which is not acceptable.
The equalities act of 2010 makes it clear that there are only two sexes. Further, the Government has, after a review, announced that it will not be changing the law to introduce self-identification and allow a person to choose their sex by simple declaration.
Nevertheless, the government trainer tells his/her audience (I don't know their preferred pronoun) that, in every case, gender identity triumphs over sex regardless of the impact on women generally. This training is contrary to both the law and the Government's declared policy.
Global Butterflies provides trans-inclusion training to trainee BBC journalists where they are taught that there are 150 genders, and they need to create their 'trans brand' by declaring their pronouns. These trainees were also told that they should use their wealth, connections, social status, etc., to change the minds of the media and influence politicians in the trans self-identification debate. They were to do this by writing articles or sharing stories and telling people what is happening. In other words, they were being instructed on how to become campaigners for a political policy in direct contravention of the BBC's Editorial Guidelines and its code of impartiality.
It is reported that in another civil service diversity training course, it is impossible to pass unless, at the end of the course, you acknowledge that, prior to the course starting, you suffered from unconscious bias.
The problem is exacerbated because civil servants readily admit that they are too scared to speak up and point out the problems in their diversity training for fear of being labelled homophobic or transphobic and then suffering professionally. They know the FDA, the First Division Civil Servants trade union, will not protect them as it passed a conference motion stating that there should be boundaries on gender critical speech and banning of trans exclusionary language.
And there it is – shockingly, the trade union of the most senior civil servants in the UK voting to ban free speech in direct contravention of the right to freedom of expression contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Of course, free speech is not an absolute. We already have the civil laws of defamation and the criminal laws of inciting violence, but it has long been a principle of British culture and custom that an individual is free to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction, but this is no more.
The trouble now is that when your group is the most important thing about you, and your group comes under criticism from an individual (whether rightly or fairly) the now habitual response is for that group to work together to boycott, ostracise, or exclude their opponent from society. A practice which is now so prevalent that it has its own term of cancel culture.
Kathleen Stock
While bullying in the workplace is thoroughly and rightly disapproved of and can result in an employee being dismissed from their job, the same is not true when the bullying is done in the workplace by a group with the political mission of cancelling someone from society and shutting down their views.
For example, Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, was forced to resign after 600 academic philosophers argued that Stock's "harmful rhetoric" contributed to the marginalisation of transgender people. Her 'crime' – to oppose self-identification of gender. So vile was the behaviour towards her that she felt it was unsafe for her to go to work.
Who is not aware of the saying misattributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." A tenet of British life thrown onto the scrap heap by critical race theory for there is a direct line which connects that, and its proposition that there are no facts or truths just a person's perception of their truth, with critical race theory, with trans self-identification and the cancel culture.
As a result of its attempts to de-sex and introduce a more gender-neutral language, we end up with the NHS no longer using the term woman when it comes to ovarian, womb and cervical cancers, albeit these diseases can only be suffered by a person born with female biology. Instead, they use terms like 'birthing person', 'birth giver', or 'pregnant person'. As though anyone other than a woman can give birth to a baby.
In the NHS, advice given to women on the menopause has had the word women omitted altogether.
A 66-year-old male, who had given 125 pints of blood over 50 years, was told by a blood donor clinic in Stirling that he could not give blood unless he answered the question as to whether he was pregnant or not on the grounds that the Blood Transfusion Service had to assume he was pregnant unless he confirmed to the contrary. At which point one can only conclude that bureaucratic form has overtaken common sense.
The situation is taken to another level when we learn that NHS contractors have more chance of winning a contract from an NHS trust, not on the quality of the service or the technology or the price but on the answer to five questions from the Stonewall UK Workplace Equality Index. This asks about diversity and inclusion strategies and if they have a transitioning at work policy. Under national guidance, each NHS trust is required to apply a 10% social value weighting for tenders so we have the situation that the NHS might accept a tender from a company offering an inferior product solely because it meets Stonewall's criteria.
And all this political correctness is taking place in the NHS, which is desperately strapped for cash. How is it that, given all the financial pressures on our health service, the Board of NHS England can determine that desexing its literature is the best use of their scarce resources, for it takes not just one person but many, many salaries for such changes to be made? The lack of pandemic preparedness has proven that the Board of NHS England has been woefully deficient at determining its priorities and allocating its resources.
John Cockcroft
I am reminded of John Cockcroft. It was he who, at the last minute and standing alone against enormous opposition, demanded that radiation filters be fitted to the top of the chimney at the Windscale nuclear reactor. It was his prescience which saved countless lives from the terrible fate of nuclear radiation poisoning as it was these filters which captured nearly all the radiation material from escaping when the core of the reactor caught fire in October 1957.
Where are our John Cockcroft's today?
Schools used to focus on teaching children with the basic educational skills needed for life and work. However, in recent years they have been seen as an instrument to address social and cultural issues. In the process, education is being squeezed out of the curriculum as schools take on subjects which used to be dealt with inside the family. The result has been that teachers have been taken away from teaching science and facts and been moved into the dangerous areas of teaching values where the values being taught are based upon critical race theory which could directly challenge parental values.
Lacking the skills to teach these 'value' subjects, schools have often resorted to bringing in third-party outside 'experts' with their ready-made teaching aides. The problem is that none of these 'experts' and their teaching programmes have been accredited or approved by the Department for Education (DfE). Instead, the teaching is done primarily by partisan political activist who have a one-sided ideological approach to their subject and whose lessons fall far short of the statutory duty that all teachers have to teach impartially.
In 2019, new sex, relationship and health education regulations were passed into law. These allow a parent to withdraw their child from a sex education lesson, but it does not allow them to withdraw their child from relationship lessons. So, while a child could be withdrawn from learning about the biology of sex, a parent could not withdraw their child from a lesson on same sex relationships or on gender fluidity taught by such organisations as Transgender Trends, All About Trans, Mermaids and Safe Schools Alliance, each with their own specific outlook on life. Proud Trust, an LGBT youth charity, produces teaching resources which asks children aged scen to 11 whether they are “planet boy, planet girl or planet non-binary.”
The result has been that those parents, who hold an equally valid opinion that there are only two sexes, find themselves being accused by their children of being bigots and transphobic.
So determined was the Department for Education to use gender-neutral language and thus not disadvantage anyone under the Equality Act that it makes only one mention of the word 'girl' and two of the word 'female' in its seven-page memo on providing free sanitary products to girls in schools, and only then in the footnotes. Instead, they refer to 'students who menstruate', 'young people menstruating' and 'learners who menstruate.'
How has our society debased itself such that the 50.6% of our population who are females can no longer be referred to as women and girls, a term which has been defined since time immemorial?
The Times recently reported that outside organisations, teaching sex education in schools, are teaching that prostitution is “a rewarding job,” are discussing “kinks” such as being flogged, caned, beaten or slapped in the face to make it appear normal and have failed to make it clear to a 14-year-old girl that it was illegal to have sex with a 16 year old boy.
How has our society debased itself such that prostitution and kinks are taught to our children in this way. It might be liberal, but it is not progressive and certainly not the best use of valuable classroom hours.
Following the death of George Floyd in 2019 and the impetus that gave to the Black Lives Movement, teachers were told that they had to 'decolonise' the curriculum. As a result, schools are now using literature that teaches about lynchings and overt and covert white supremacy. Our children are now being taught about white privilege, unconscious bias and burdened with the sins of their ancestors about a slave trade in which just one-quarter of the whole truth is shared. But this is easy in a society where critical race theory dominates for remember; there is no universal truth, just feelings.
Parents brought up to be genuinely colour blind are now told by their children's school that to do so means they are exhibiting unconscious bias. Those who passionately believe that a person should be judged on the contents of their character rather than the colour of their skin are told that they are old-fashioned and backwards.
It is as though the anti-racists have become racists against people of white skin.
Bradley Whitford who played Josh Lyman in The West Wing
Burnley College told 17-year-old student Leo Shepherd not to return to college to do his last year in the sixth form after sharing a meme on social media. It compared Jihadi Bride Shamima Begum, the Islamic State of Iraq, and the Levant in Syria (ISIS / ISIL) to the Ku Klux Klan. But this is identical to what the writers of The West Wing did in a show called Isaac and Ishmael made as a benefits programme following the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. They wrote, "Islamic Extremists is to Islamic as the KKK is to Christianity." "It's the Klan gone medieval, gone global," said character Josh Lyman."
How is it that what was once thought an acceptable comparison is no longer acceptable? How is it that what was once a pluralist society has, in the space of 20 years, moved apace towards totalitarianism where only one view counts?
Is it not cultural vandalism to remove, on the grounds of inclusion and diversity, William Owen's poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' or Siegfried Sassoon's poem 'The Dug-Out', from the list of poems in the GCSE English literature syllabus? For that is what one of the exam boards has done.
Siegfried Sassoon
These are not just poems but are a path into the teaching of World War 1 – a war which killed over 880,000 men, accounting for 6% of the UK's adult population and 12.5% of those serving in the military. It was a war which spread far into the Commonwealth Countries such as India, Pakistan, Australia, and New Zealand. As a result, it is a war which still has influence today. For this reason, it is important that everyone, who wishes to make their life in this country, understands the significance, irrespective of their heritage, and what better way than through these poets.
Instead, 15 poems have gone to make way for 15 new poets, of whom 14 are poets of colour, six are Black women, one is of South Asian heritage and includes disabled and LGBTQ+ voices.
These are 15 poems out of a syllabus of 45 poems – one-third, whereas these new voices represent just over one-eighth of our society. Why is one culture being repressed for the benefit of another?
I am not arguing that this is wrong (although I think it is). I am arguing that critical race theory, which is influencing educational decisions like this, is being implemented throughout the UK without ever having been publicly debated or accepted as a manifesto policy of any of our politicians. Yet, through the educational Blob, and divorced from the influence of public policy, a few men and women who just happen to be 'in the room' have managed to affect a culture change through their unique prism of critical race theory. A prism which the population as a whole might not share. For it begs the question: If you are to be sensitive to the few, should you not also be sensitive to the many?
Rather than uniting us into one class, one race- the human race – the black lives issue is now being articulated in such a way that it accentuates race and divides people. It has now reached a point that if you are of white ethnicity, you are no longer allowed a view on racism because it is not your lived experience.
The argument appears to be that only white people can be racists when evidently this is not the case. Do those who argue this way forget that the genocide of the Jews was one of the biggest acts of racism in human history ever – an act designed to kill off a whole people.
Let us be clear; racism is vile. It exists and must be rooted out. It is, therefore, truly dreadful to find, 55 years after the first Race Relations Act, that in June 2022, the Royal College of Nursing reported that racism is endemic in health care, with white and mixed-race nurses twice as likely to be promoted than their black or Asian colleagues.
The evidence from the Runnymede Trust, the UK's leading independent race relations think tank, whose job it is to highlight and challenge racial equality, provides equally as shocking evidence of racial disparity.
However, the April 2021 report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparity, much criticised by the race relations industry, concluded:
“Put simply, we no longer see a Briton where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. Impediments and disparities do exist. They are varied, and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism. Too often, racism is the casual explanation and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined.
The evidence shows that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture, and religion have a more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism. That said, we take the reality of racism seriously, and we do not deny that it is a real force in the UK.”
The key issue is that racism is not unique to any race or colour. As the racism index shows, the UK has done well in creating a homogeneous society, whereas countries like India and Jordon score badly with their populations demonstrating significant racial intolerance.
The solution to racism will not be found in dividing us as Critical Race Theory and the Black Lives Matter seeks to do. It is a whole society problem that only society acting together can tackle.
The trouble is that Critical Theory has also pervaded deep into our criminal justice system too as the Non-Crime Hate Incidence recorded on Harry Miller by Humberside police and his subsequent court cases against them and The College of Policing has shown.
Harry Miller
Mr Miller was a former policeman who used Twitter to comment on the gender self-identification debate. In one tweet, he asked: if a trans woman raped a woman under which sex does the police categorise the attacker [for record-keeping purposes]? He also tweeted: "I was identified as mammal at birth but now identify as a fish – Don't mis-specie me."
A Mrs B, whose identity is protected by the courts, reported Mr Miller to Humberside police saying his gender-critical tweets were hateful. She claimed they were designed to cause distress to the trans community, and she was fearful for the trans people in his workplace.
Mrs B presents 'herself' as a highly vulnerable individual, albeit she is reported to have made numerous malicious complaints to other police forces, and has even gone as far as saying that, in respect of Julia Burchill, an English writer, columnist and commentator, Hitler had the right idea, and she should go to the gas chamber.
As a result of Mrs B's complaint, Pc. Mansoor Gul of Humberside police contacted Mr Miller. While Pc Gul assured Mr Miller that he had not committed an offence, he told him that Humberside Police had a duty to challenge and check up on people's belief systems. He was there to "check-up on Mr Miller's thinking."
When the news broke that the police had interviewed Mr Miller for anti-trans tweeting, Assistant Chief Constable Young of Humberside Police, in defending the police's decision to record the report as a hate incidence, described Mr Miller's tweets as 'transphobic' and referred to the possibility of such incidents' escalating'. Such was the resultant opprobrium from trans-activists that Mr Miller and his wife were forced to leave their family home, and for a considerable period, Mr Miller was unable to go to work at the business he owned.
The seeds of the UK police forces taking on the Orwellian role of the Thought Police originate in the Macpherson Report, which followed the killing of Stephen Lawrence. This report concluded that the investigation into Stephen's death was marred by "incompetence" and "a failure of leadership within the Metropolitan Police." Most importantly, he said that the Met Police were "institutionally racists."
As a result of the Macpherson report, the College of Policing concluded that there was a five-stage path from insulting speech/tweets, through hate, to violence and beatings, then murder, eventually creating the socio-economic conditions which could result in genocide.
The argument was that without necessary intervention at an early stage, the trajectory was from trans tweeting to the creation of a trans-Auschwitz. To intervene at an early stage requires an intelligence-based policing approach. It was why Pc Gul was sent to check on Mr Miller's thinking.
Humberside Police's Standing Orders were in accordance with The College of Police guidelines which read:
Where any person, including police personnel, report a hate incident which would not be the primary responsibility of another agency, it must be recorded regardless of whether or not they are the victim and irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element.
The problem with this guideline is that it requires no evidence. If a third party perceives the incidents as hateful, then it is hateful and must be recorded. There was no degree of rationality whatsoever.
The result was that the police were recording on their crime reports non-crime hate incidences or, as they referred to them, crime-non-crime reports, a terminology which is probably as dystopian as it can get.
The police guidance went even further, for it positively supported perception-based reporting by requiring the police not to scrutinise, or make any checks, or apply any reasonableness or common-sense test as to the complainant's complaint. The argument was that to do so would create a situation of secondary victimisation. To look for supporting evidence would make the police officer another hater in the climate of hate.
It is difficult to understand why the College of Policing, which would normally expect evidence to support a theft or an attack and would expect a common-sense test to be applied to such a report, decided that no evidence and no common-sense testing was required in respect of hate incidence.
As a result of the College of Policing guidance and the way police forces were applying it throughout the UK, a situation had been created where informers were being encouraged to put in malicious complaints, which were then anonymised, to shut down public debate.
The situation becomes more serious when you realise that there was no mitigation. Nothing could be done or said to expunge or remove a police's non-crime hate incidence report.
There were two other worrying aspects identified in the Miller Case. Firstly, the police have no obligation to tell you that they have made a crime-non-crime hate incidence report in your name. Secondly, at the choice of the Chief Constable, the police might or might not release their crime-non-crime report for the purposes of an enhanced DBS check.
As Harry Miller argued, an employer looking at an enhanced DBS check and seeing a crime-non-crime trans hate incident report would give that candidate's job application short-shrift.
Mr Miller took The College of Policing and The Chief Constable of Humberside to court. In February 2020, Mr Justice Knowles found that Humberside Police had defamed Mr Miller and had breached his rights under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights on Freedom of Expression.
Announcing the court's decision, Mr Justice Julian Knowles said: "The claimant's tweets were lawful and that there was not the slightest risk that he would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet. I find the combination of the police visiting the claimant's place of work, and their subsequent statements in relation to the possibility of prosecution, were a disproportionate interference with the claimant's right to freedom of expression because of their potential chilling effect."
The judge added: "the effect of the police turning up at Mr Miller's place of work because of his political opinions must not be underestimated". He continued: "To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom. In this country, we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society."
In his judgment, Mr Justice Julian Knowles stated: "I conclude that the police left the claimant with the clear belief that he was being warned by them to desist from posting further tweets on transgender matters even if they did not directly warn him in these terms. In other words, I conclude that the police's actions led Mr Miller reasonably to believe that he was being warned not to exercise his right to freedom of expression about transgender issues on pain of potential criminal prosecution."
Clearly, Mr Justice Knowles felt strongly about the issue because he opened his judgment by referring to George Orwell's unpublished introduction to Animal Farm (1945) when he wrote: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." He closed it by referring to John Stuart Mill's treatise On Liberty (1859) when he wrote: "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
Interestingly, Mr Justice Knowles did not find against the College of Policing in respect of its guidance. Nevertheless, in October 2020, in response to Mr Justice Knowles's serious criticisms about how Humberside Police had implemented the original guidance, the College of Policing replaced its Hate Crimes Operational Guidance with a new Authorised Professional Practice Guidance on Hate Crime ("APPGHC"). However, this new guidance retained a wide definition of hate, including 'dislike' or 'unfriendliness'. Further, and most importantly, it did not end perception-based recording. It continued with the practice of taking the word of the alleged victim, who may not be questioned as to their motives or rationality.
In deciding to keep perception-based reporting within the new guidance, the College of Policing continued to claim that the police were building a vital database of intelligence to inform their operational priorities and allocation of scarce resources. They claimed it was vitally important to keep an eye on those who are likely to 'escalate' into criminality. Except, seven years after the College of Policing first issued its guidance, it has not made any kind of study to support or verify this claim. And this is an academic institution with a £50m a year budget employing 650 people set up for the very purpose of bringing academic excellence to policing.
The College of Policing chose to continue to disregard the fact that it may well be the alleged victim who was being hateful by deliberately making a false, malicious, or irrational report knowing that it would be secretly retained on the police files as being hateful, with obvious implications for that person’s employment prospects when these incidents are revealed on a DBS check.
And please do not think that crime-non-crime hate incident reports were limited to those tweeting on the trans self-identification debate. Sarah Phillimore had a non-crime religious hate incident recorded against her for tweeting: 'My cat is like a Methodist. He likes dreamies." When Ms Phillimore asked South Yorkshire Police why they thought her comments so hateful, they replied, in apparently a straight face, that cats wander and defecate in other people's gardens, and thus her tweet was implying Methodists were wandering pests that defecated in other people's gardens.
Ms Phillimore asked another pertinent question. Given that non-crime hate incident reports were designed to gather intelligence to enable the police to intervene, what crime did South Yorkshire Police think she was going to escalate to? They never provided an answer.
In December 2021, Mr Miller appealed the court's decision to dismiss his application for a judicial review of the lawfulness of the College of Policing's new guidelines. In granting Mr Miller's appeal, the Appeal Court concluded that:
“The revised guidance did not go very far, or not nearly far enough to address the chilling effect of perception-based recording more generally". The position is that less intrusive measures could be used to achieve the legitimate aims of such recording, without unacceptably compromising the achievement of those aims.”
The judges said:
“The police have a common-sense discretion not to record irrational complaints, and the police say they exercise such a discretion, but nothing is said about this in the Revised Guidance. … The Guidance should truly reflect what the police are expected to do and should not mislead, by omission, either the police who have to use it or the public.
What is most troubling about this case is that surely every academic at the College of Policing knows the dangers created by the Stasi, the East German State security force, which employed 90,000 officers and relied on 170,000 citizen informants - one for every 166 East Germans - for this occurred in their life time.
Stasi Interrogation Cells
What made the Stasi so insidious was their embrace of 'Zersetzung' ('decomposition' or 'biodegradation'). The aim of 'Zersetzung' was to destroy the psychological integrity of an individual by gathering information to damage their reputation and their personal relationships. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. Instead, it preferred to paralyse them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and so many informants.
In other words, the Stasi was operating a cancel culture just as the College of Policing was recommending to UK's police forces.
And please don't think that this secret recording is limited to the police. So pervasive has critical race theory and the cancel culture become that Cambridge University has software which allows students to report incidents of racism or harassment, including alleged micro-aggressions by staff anonymously. The site actively encourages students to report staff for raising an eyebrow when a black member of staff or student is speaking or making a backhanded compliment.
Tolerance and fair play are features of a civilised society. Unquestionably, a diverse society, which includes all the talents, is inevitably stronger than a monoculture. The problem arises when a small minority is visibly intolerant, not only against other minorities but against the majority as well.
As the Miller case above has shown, freedom of expression is a strong tenant of English life protected by law. Nevertheless, a teacher from Batley and his family remain in hiding because he showed his pupils a satirical cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. It should be noted that there have been no arrests of those that have threatened him.
Following protests by a few Islamists at one cinema, Cineworld has cancelled all screenings of 'The Lady of Heaven' over its alleged depiction of Lady Fatima, Mohammed's daughter. Both are examples of religious tyranny cancelling free-speech and recreating the law of blasphemy, which the UK gave up years ago.
As Dostoevsky wrote: "Intolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles."
Let us remember that those who try to close down debate and suppress opinions that are different to their own do a massive disservice to the public. I have already mentioned Mr Justice Knowles's quotation from Mill's treatise 'On Liberty'. However, Mills also said: Those who try to close down debate and suppress opinions that is different to their own do a massive disservice to the public.
But close down debate is precisely what the Open University has recommended in its anti-racism course called ‘Union Black’ which it is offering to one hundred other universities, including Imperial College, Bristol and Leeds. Students on this course are taught that cancel culture has, in racial and social justice matters, shown to realise benefits by holding people accountable for immoral or unacceptable behaviour.
Except the Black Union course doesn’t address the issue as to who determines what is moral or immoral, acceptable or unacceptable
Ten years ago, the thought of creating a union to protect free speech would have been thought laughable, but with the rise of social media, where anyone with a mobile phone can be a social justice warrior, the need has become so strong that, in the space of less than one year from its founding, the Free Speech Union has recruited over 9,000 members.
"We need to be fearful of living in a time when smart people are silenced so that stupid people won't be upset," said a tweet which had resonance because it was retweeted several million times.
Yet, on the grounds of religious inclusion, halal meat is foisted into schools for all children despite the substantial majority of UK society thinking that this form of animal slaughter is cruel and wrong.
And within the same theme of diversity and inclusion, the Government is developing a student loan scheme for Islamic fundamentalists because the current scheme involves interest, and interest is not allowed under Sharia Law. When did Sharia Law become a feature of English law that it requires special government action?
In the last census, 390,000 people recorded their religion as Jedi, which is four times as many as there are students affected by this 'religious' objection to interest. Are we to create special laws for Jedis too?
When 4.4% of the population writes the rules for the remaining 95.6%, one must ask, where is the voice of the majority? It has been silenced on the fear of being cancelled, labelled as Islamophobic or racist or both. I am reminded of Pastor Martin Niemöller's poem –
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
The police are sworn to serve with 'fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, according equal respect to all people'. Or, to paraphrase Adolf Ochs – the law will be practised without fear or favour. Yet on the grounds of inclusion and diversity, both features of critical race theory, we now have numerous cases of double standards in policing.
For example, Christ the King Church in Balham had its Good Friday religious service forcibly shut down by the police because it allegedly breached the Covid lockdown legislation. Yet Islamic religious services were held every Friday during lockdown throughout the land without any interference by the police.
The police shutting down Christ the King Church’s service in Balham on Good Friday.
On Fridays in Hyde Park there is an open and well- attended Islamic prayer gathering. This is despite the bylaws stating that religious services are not allowed in the Royal Parks. Yet despite knowing, the Parks Police chose to do nothing.
Just as the police and social services chose to do nothing to help the young girls who they knew were being raped and trafficked by Muslim grooming gangs. This was a group of vulnerable young women thrown to the wolves by the authorities, which went right to the top in the Home Office, on the ideology of harmonious race relations. Whenever did we, as a society, decide to rank race relations above the rape of children? But that is precisely what critical race theory has brought to this country.
And how has it got this far? Many people who work for the government and its institutions can see when the King is not wearing any clothes. Is the problem that far too few are prepared to shout: "the King is in the all-together?
The Met Police was charged with institutional racism. Would it be fair to charge the Civil Service today with institutional cowardice?
In 1995 Patrick Dunleavy of the London School of Economics wrote a paper called: "Policy Disasters: Explaining the UK's record, he wrote: "Britain now stands out amongst comparable European countries, and perhaps among liberal Democracies as a whole, as a state unusually prone to make large scale, avoidable, but foreseeable, policy mistakes, generally construed to mean significant and substantially costly failures of commission or omission by government.”
His conclusion, made 25 years ago, was that the fault rested in a system which employed an elite group who:
(i) “were highly motivated decision-makers;
(ii) were intellectually convinced of their own abilities;
(iii) were insulated from challenge;
(iv) were determined in their direction of travel.
(v) possessed and willingly used the enormous political and administrative powers their position gave them.
(vi) cut themselves off from information which undermined group moral, and
(vii) chose to ignore an abundance of critical warning voices to persevere with their chosen policy.
(viii) And who were prepared to push through decisions until the policy apparatus they had erected comes to dominate its environment or collapses in wreckage around their ears.”
I wonder if Patrick Dunleavy was not indirectly telling us then that a set of elite bullies were in charge of the civil service who cowered those around them?
The original HS2 plan was for a new high-speed rail line from London to Manchester with a Y link at Birmingham going all the way to Leeds. In 2010, the full Y link HS2 programme was forecast to cost up to £36bn. By 2019, the cost had escalated to £88bn. Subsequently, the project has been significantly reduced in scale. But here is the nub.
The 2019 revised economic appraisal was based on 18 trains an hour running each way – one train every three and a half minutes. The problem is that, because of the mass of the train and its stopping distance from full speed, the technology will only ever permit 14 trains per hour to be run. To add to the complication, trains running on the track will be both dedicated HS2 trains and hybrids capable of operating on both high-speed and existing track. It means even the 14 trains per hour is optimistic.
Because you cannot change the physics, it has been known for at least ten years that the HS2 project has no chance of meeting its proscribed economic objectives. Yet civil servants in the Ministry of Transport (otherwise known as the Ministry for pouring concrete) have pressed ahead in the full knowledge that they were doing so on fundamentally flawed data.
How can this be? Why is the civil service made up of those who, on seeing a fundamental flaw, will not shout loud enough to stop a mistake from being made?
Are we forced to conclude that not only is the civil service in the grip of a form of institutional cowardice but is fundamentally incompetent as well?
In May 2022, I wrote an essay proposing the redrafting of the law of Misconduct in Public Office which I posted on Substack. (
). In it I listed a litany of serious recent failures by civil servants which I thought should have resulted in several individuals being criminally prosecuted.
Omitted from that essay, but perhaps the most catastrophic public policy error in the last 75 years (outside of the Suez Crises and the Iraq War) was the civil service's handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic.
The risk of a pandemic was put at the top of the Government's risk register. Public Health England (PHE), an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care with an annual budget of £300m, had the job of protecting and improving our health and wellbeing. It was also responsible for ensuring that England would be well-positioned to deal with a pandemic when it came, as everyone was sure it would. To this end, in 2016, there was an interdepartmental exercise called Exercise Cygnus to test and measure the UK's preparedness to deal with a pandemic. The exercise showed that the UK was woefully ill-prepared, but the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, who has specific responsibility for the operation of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, did nothing about it.
On 22nd January 2020, Public Health England, aware of the Coronavirus pandemic in China, raised the pandemic risk level from very low to low, but only eight days later, on 30th January, the World Health Organisation declared a Global Health Emergency.
By the beginning of February, it was evident from the news reports that, for our own safety, we would each have to start reducing and regulating our social activities. On 5th February 2020, with the knowledge that the pandemic would come to these shores, I ordered a chest freezer for the garage.
By the end of February, it was apparent to anyone with the ability to use the compounding facility on a £3.00 calculator and an eye on the news that the NHS was about to be overwhelmed. Yet still, nothing was being done. You only had to take the basic infection data from the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the first cruise ship to have a major outbreak on board, to realise there was a significant problem. It was being reported that one in five passengers had caught the disease, of which 1% had died.
The Italian Government, not known for its efficiency, suspended all flights to and from China on 31st January 2020 and declared a state of emergency. In February, the Italian Government placed Lombardy and Veneto in quarantine.
Meanwhile, in February 2020, British civil servants went skiing, giving no thought to suspending flights, cancelling the Cheltenham Gold Cup due to take place on 13th March or the two UEFA Champion League matches to be held the weekend before. Both of which turned out to be super-spreader events.
As we learnt from Dominic Cummings evidence to the Joint Enquiry of the Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Select Committees of the House of Commons (The Joint Committee), it was not until Friday 13th March 2020 that No 10 Downing Street started to appreciate that the planning assumptions being used by SAGE were wrong. Only then did they begin to understand the magnitude of the Covid 19 problem facing the country.
Dominic Cummings
We are told on the same day, Helen McNamara, deputy permanent secretary to the Cabinet Office and the second most important civil service in the land, went to the Prime Minister's Private Office, where she told Mr Cummings and the Prime Minister's Private Secretary that "[We] have been told for years that there is a whole plan for this [dealing with a pandemic]. There is no plan. We are in huge trouble. I have come here to tell you all. I think we are absolutely fucked."
When the pandemic plan was eventually presented to the Prime Minister's Office by the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, it was described as "no more than a press release". None of the work which should have been done in establishing a reliable test and trace system, or in planning for the building of nightingale hospitals, or instructions for shielding the vulnerable, or securing PPE, or creating a furlough scheme had been contemplated, let alone been started.
While it might be true to say there were no detailed plans, there was a strategy to deal with a pandemic. It was based upon the WHO guidelines which were designed to balance the risk of the disease with the costs of closing the economy. It assumed there would be no national lockdown because the people would not accept one. It also assumed there would be no vaccine available for some considerable time. Because of this, the objective was to get to a state of herd immunity with 60% to 70% of the population having antibodies, at which point the virus would have nowhere to go and die out. The plan envisaged that the sick, vulnerable, and elderly would be protected until herd immunity was reached.
The initial debate amongst the scientists on SAGE was whether there should be a one or two peak strategy to get to herd immunity, using measures to control the first peak. For example, by restricting people's activity, knowing that it would give rise to a second peak later and thus delay the onset of herd immunity.
The initial model and thus planning assumption in SAGE was that peak infections would be reached in June. Therefore, taking any action that would hinder that peak would result in a second peak arriving in December 2020 / January 2021, when the NHS would be suffering from its usual winter pressures. It was argued in SAGE that a two-peak strategy could result in more deaths than a one-peak strategy.
The problem was that the data used to make these assumptions was woefully inaccurate. In mid-March 2020, Prof. Neil Ferguson from Imperial College, who was a member of SAGE, revised his estimates using current hospital data. He calculated that, based on the estimated infection and mortality rates, the NHS faced being overwhelmed in just a few weeks, with over 500,000 people dying from Covid19. But as I have already said, it didn't need a programme in C++ to forecast this. Anyone with a pocket calculator could have come to the same conclusion weeks before the Government did.
However, because Ferguson's modelling was made public, and thus open to professional scrutiny, we now know that these fell far short of the professionalism required of an academic institution, let alone one advising the Government at the highest level. It meant that the 'science' upon which the Government relied to make its decisions was, so far as forecasting was concerned, fundamentally flawed at the outset. And yet Prof. Ferguson continued to advise the Government throughout the pandemic
As an aside, it is time for a serious look at the use of modelling in decision-making, particularly when it comes to modelling for public purposes. For example, economic forecasts and the basis upon which the 'Net Zero' policy has been set.
Too many people have forgotten the global economic crisis, which started with the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. This hedge fund invested on the basis of the Black-Scholes model of financial dynamics, for which, just the year before, had shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. As was later discovered, the problem with the Black-Scholes model was that the historical data used to create the model was too short. If Scholes and Merton had gone back another two years, when the economic circumstances were different, then their model would not have stood up to scrutiny, and an international banking crisis would have been avoided
We all know the acronym GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. Far too often, modelling is being used to prove the answers that the modellers want to direct and influence the debate rather than used to inform decision making. This is a matter of international concern.
We are all aware of the history. As a result of being ill-prepared, the Government locked the country down on 23rd March 2020.
To make matters worse, to change the NHS from a health service to a covid service required freeing up hospital beds. It meant that a lot of elderly patients were discharged from hospitals back to their nursing homes, many taking Covid with them, putting other residents and their carers at risk. The Health Secretary promised that everyone would be tested for Covid before discharge, and they would stay in hospital if infectious. We know this didn't happen, resulting an untold number of extra deaths in the elderly population. Why and who was responsible is still a matter which is unclear.
At central government level, not even the most basic planning on how to shield the vulnerable had been done, and Public Health England's Test and Trace programme (sometimes called Track and Trace) was a complete shambles for it could not cope with the volume. The team there was so incompetent that they even built part of its nationally important database in an outdated version of Microsoft Excel, resulting in nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases going unreported.
Eventually, in May 2020, Test and Trace was taken out of the NHS and given to a separate task force established to oversee the implementation of a new NHS app and a mass testing and contact tracing programme.
In the first year of the pandemic, up to April 2021, PHE spent £13.5bn against a budget of £22bn. We are told that the underspend arose because the forecast demand for tests in January and February 2021 did not materialise because the country was locked down for a second time.
But this expenditure pales into insignificance when compared to the harm the Test and Trace App did to UK business in July and August 2021 shortly after it was released. The App was so badly designed that two people in adjacent hotel rooms, or two phones left in a locker, with one of the owners allegedly infectious, could be matched with both phone owners told to isolate, albeit that they had never met.
In the summer of 2021, and all over the country, people were instructed to isolate for ten days, albeit they had no symptoms and were never to become poorly. It is estimated that 56 million working days were lost by UK businesses before everyone became aware of the problems, and those who needed to work to secure their income decided to turn off the App.
As an example, the Orchard Tea Garden in Grantchester, which relies on its summer trade to survive, had to shut for one week in July 2020 because all but three members of staff were told to isolate themselves. Only one ever fell poorly. It was the same throughout the whole hospitality sector.
The incompetence and negligence at SAGE, Public Health England, The Civil Contingencies Secretariat and the Department of Health and Social Care in planning for and then the inexplicable delay in recognising that the country had a pandemic crisis on its hands was at a level which went a long way beyond the intolerable. In fact, there can be no question – tens of thousands of people suffered premature deaths due to civil service incompetence.
And the horrible reality is that if Whitehall had been properly prepared as the Civil Contingencies Act required, then there might not have been a need for the lockdown at all.
Kate Bingham
The one ray of hope in this darkness of chaos was the small, highly effective vaccine task force which was set up with Kate Bingham as its chair and Clive Dix as its deputy chair. Kate was a highly experience venture capitalist specialising in biotechnology. Clive's career was in discovering and developing novel vaccines and pharmaceuticals. Albeit they were outside of Government, two better people could not have been recruited. For example, their knowledge of vaccines was so extensive that they knew there was a strong probability that ultra-deep freeze transport and storage might be required. They were able to secure sources of these long before anyone else realised that they might be vital in vaccinating a nation. Likewise, they were well versed in negotiating pharmaceutical purchase contracts, which meant that the contracts negotiated by them were capable of withstanding a subsequent onslaught from the EU, which complained that the UK was getting preferential treatment. If one team excelled during the pandemic, it was the Vaccine Task Force. It is an exemplar of how governments might manage projects in the future.
Duncan Selbie, Chief Executive of Public Health England from its foundation in 2013, was removed from his post in August 2020. His salary at the time of his removal was in excess of £190,000 per annum, making him one of the most highly paid people in the British public sector. On leaving his job, Mr Selbie was paid £375,000 as compensation for the loss of his office. Never has failure been so highly rewarded. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative Party leader, said: "The one thing consistent about Public Health England is that almost everything it has touched has failed." Paying any sum in compensation was just another failure in a litany of failures which cost lives and livelihoods. How on earth can this be defended?
The Government has promised a public enquiry into its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. It will examine the minutiae of what happened. But we don't need a public enquiry to know that the executive branch of our Government, our civil service, that body of people who are paid to manage the affairs of our country irrespective of the political party in power, failed our nation miserably
Jeremy Hunt
If the above is not enough to depress you, then the cross-examination of witnesses at the Health and Social Care Committee of the House of Commons on 24th May 2022 would have had you reaching for Prozac. Jeremy Hunt, the Committee Chairman, was leading the committee's enquiry into the training of the medical profession seeking a simple answer to the question – Does the NHS know how many people in each category it should be training now to meet the clinical needs of the NHS in ten or fifteen years' time? For example, how many anaesthetists, surgeons, physiotherapists, dieticians etc., does the NHS expect to need in 2035, and if so, what is the recruitment and training pathway now being operated to fulfil that projection. It is the kind of manpower planning question that every large business is perpetually struggling with, and given the NHS says that it is currently short of at least ten thousand doctors, it is a vitally important question for them to answer.
The NHS's workforce planning project is known as Framework 15, because that is how long, in years, it can take to train a doctor in several of the specialities. Jeremy Hunt was seeking an answer to a simple question: Will Framework 15, when it is published, answer the question: how many doctors do we need to start training now to meet the forecast demand within an expanding range of uncertainty as the time frame moves out?
I accept that workforce planning in the NHS for medical specialities is a complex issue, but the staggering thing about this is, not only does the NHS not have a recruitment and training plan now, but the answer to Hunt's question was that it would not have one at the end of this Framework 15 work. All it will have is a document telling the NHS how 'to think' about the problems. To make matters worse, before Framework 15 could be published so people could start thinking about the issues in an informed manner, the civil servants said there had to be political input and direction. Except, NHS England was deliberately set up as an agency so that it could make these kinds of planning decisions without political input. The select committee hearing was an example of the Whitehall Blob at its very worst.
It is as though the civil service knows nothing about 'Tailing the O to get to the Q', i.e. to hit the quit button, to stop a never-ending iterative process of making and changing assumptions to get to the end of the planning process.
There comes the point where it is no longer competent or beneficial to keep going around in circles waiting for more and more input and decisions to be made, but when no one person is responsible, groupthink can be endless.
But let us take a pace back for a moment. How is it that those who are supposed to be the best, most capable people in our society and sit on NHS England's Trust Board, do not have medical training as an issue which is not constantly at the forefront of the board's thinking? The incompetence beggar's belief!
Is the solution to the NHS’s management problems, as the Messenger Review into Health and Social Care Leadership in NHS England recently concluded, that there needs to be more; "positive equality, diversity and inclusion action?
Does the NHS, already one of the most racially diverse organisations in the world, really need more Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Managers, earning twice that paid to front-line staff nurses, to meet the second of Messenger's recommendations? That:
inclusive leadership practices need to be embedded as the responsibility of all leaders with a commitment to promoting equal opportunity and fairness standards with more stringent enforcement of existing measures to improve equal opportunities and fairness.
Please, someone, tell me, how does this recommendation remove MRSA from hospitals or ensure that sterilised surgical equipment gets to the theatre so the surgeon can operate? Is this truly the correct and best response to the Royal College of Nursing's survey on racism in nursing?
The work done by Tim Knox of Civitas shows that, of the OECD countries, the UK is mid-ranking in the percentage of GDP it spends on health care, so the NHS is not underfunded. Yet its clinical outcomes - cancer, heart and stroke survival rates – are at or near the bottom. We now have one in nine of us on an NHS waiting list.
According to the think tank Policy Exchange, in the two years since Feb 2021, the number of senior officials in the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England has increased by 125%, and its total pay bill has doubled, while the number of nurses has increased by just 7%. Is this the best use of the £12bn the government has allocated to the NHS, paid for by an increase in National Insurance Contributions
On any measure, the civil servants responsible for running our health care services cannot be considered “the best in the world”.
The purpose of privatising the UK utility companies back in the late 1980s was to bring the management efficiencies of the free market to their running. It was also to bring in the much-needed capital that their modernisation required. To counteract the avarice of capitalism, the concept of regulators was created.
The Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat) is the non-ministerial government department responsible for the economic regulation of the water and sewage sectors. The Gas and Electricity Markets Authority (Ofgem), another non-ministerial government department, regulates the electricity and gas markets. Their jobs were straightforward. They were to protect the interests of the consumer - to be the consumers' champion.
In 2021, there were more than 372,000 separate raw sewage discharges into England's rivers, lakes and seas, comprising a staggering 2.6 million hours overall. This is more than 1,000 discharges a day. It is perhaps no wonder then that 50% of 'wild swimmers report becoming poorly.
How is it that, 40 years after privatisation, this is still happening?
But equally, as apposite, how can Ofwat think it is anything like appropriate to set a target of reducing the "most damaging" storm overflows by 75% by 2035 (15 years away) and only 80% of all discharges by 2050 (30 years away)
.
And why is it that, to meet this modest target, the Government is being forced to invest £7bn until 2025 to help finance the upgrade of the sewage infrastructure? One of the main purposes of privatisation was to stop the Government from having to finance these big capital infrastructure projects.
And one has to wonder what Ofgem was doing in 2017 when it allowed Centrica, part of British Gas, to close its Rough Storage facility using a depleted gas field off the coast of Yorkshire which used to store nine days' worth of the UK's gas needs. If Ofgem had properly done its job of being the consumers champion, it would have insisted that Centrica keep a strategic level of gas reserves to protect the consumer against market shocks
Naturally, British Gas doesn't want capital tied up in gas reserves, so it would want these as small as possible. The regulator needs only to be mildly interested in the balance sheet. A consistent, safe and affordable supply should have been paramount in their thinking – and it can't say it wasn't forewarned about the political risks associated with Europe's ever-greater dependency on energy from Putin's Russia, for the issue has been obvious since 2014 when Russia invaded the Crimea.
The fact is that these regulators no longer act as the consumers' champion. Instead, they have taken on the role of intermediary or negotiator between the utility, the consumer and the Government.
The list of incompetences by government and government agencies is endless, so I will end this litany of management failures with comments on the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Treasury.
Bank of England
By Autumn 2021, when the Bank of England was reporting inflation rates at twice their target of not exceeding 2.5%, and long before the devastating impact of the increase in energy prices caused by the Russo-Ukrainian war, it was obvious to everyone in the hospitality sector who was responsible for buying food and paying wages that the UK had entered a period of double-digit inflation. The Producer Price Index (PPI) was already proving that point. Yet the Bank of England was not raising interest rates at anything like the speed it should have, eventually increasing its base rate from 0.1% to 0.25% on 16th December 2021 and then again to 0.5% in February 2022.
It was hard to fathom why the Bank of England was so reluctant to do its duty to keep sound money, instead allowing inflation to devalue the government’s debt while deliberately making every citizen of the UK, particularly those on fixed incomes or with investments and savings, poorer.
That was until you thought about the huge amount of fixed interest money created by the Bank of England in quantitative easing over the last 14 years and now sitting as debt on its balance sheet with low yields.
Every time the Bank of England increases interest rates, it must write down the value of the loans it has on its balance sheet – effectively making and recording a loss. How have we got to a situation where the Bank of England has a direct conflict of interest between its statutory duty and the protection of its own balance sheet?
It is not surprising that Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England’s excuses for not raising interest rates to the level they should be, are fast becoming risible, for too little has been done too late. I am reminded of Sir Henry Wotton’s description of an ambassador as: “an honest gentlemen sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.
The other bastion of supposed financial probity is the Financial Conduct Authority, yet it has only convicted five people of insider dealing in five years. This is despite the data showing that the crime is so prevalent that share prices in nearly one in five takeovers were subject to significant abnormal movement before an announcement. Between 2012 and 2016, there were 20 convictions for insider dealing. This compares with two in the past five years. By comparison, the Department for Work and Pensions initiates about 8,000 prosecutions for benefit frauds every year. And it can be no pride that, of all the major economies, the UK is named by Bill Browder, the promoter of the Global Magnitsky Acts, "as the worst performer in sanctioning foreign government officials implicated in human rights abuses anywhere in the world."
The civil services incompetence was proved beyond doubt, in January 2022, when we learned, through the angry resignation of Treasury minister Lord Agnew, that the Government had written off £4.9bn in fraudulent Covid loans in what he described as “arrogance, indolence, ignorance” and “schoolboy errors. Of the £77bn lent in Bounce Back and other Covid Associated loans it was estimated that £17bn (22%) would be unrecoverable and nothing was being done in the Treasury to try and recover this money.
It appears that the basic, most rudimentary due diligence checks were missing. For example, loans were made to over one thousand companies registered at Companies House as being dormant.
Further, no checks were made to compare the amount that a borrower reported as their annual turnover in the loan application form with the total amount of money paid into that borrower's bank account for the previous 12 months. How can this have been? It is not as though the banks did not have the information. It is such an obvious check that it is beyond staggering that it didn't happen as part of the normal approval procedures.
Small honest, trustworthy businesses, burdened with bounce-back loans taken out to survive the pandemic, are now facing an unfair additional tax burden to cover the cost of these bad loans given to crooks that should never have been given in the first place. Why is no one taking to task the civil servants that allowed this travesty to happen in the first place?
The smell of something rotten gets more pungent when you learn that the mandate for a Public Sector Fraud Authority, which had been agreed explicitly between Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Minister of State, was radically watered down by Treasury Officials after Mr Rishi Sunak had resigned as Chancellor. In the words of Mr Rees Mogg’s spokesman: The changes made it a toothless anti-fraud body. It is fair to ask what reasons civil service officials would have for going against clear political instructions, instead choosing to sabotage the Government’s anti-fraud programme, for that is exactly what they did.
The evidence is now incontravertable. Our civil service is dysfunctional, institutionally incompetent and there to serve its own ends. It is no longer fit for purpose.
Whitehall under the guise of liberalism and social justice, but seized by the political philosophy of critical race theory is doing considerable and untold harm to the unity of our country. Confident in their moral superiority, our civil service machinery believes in the power of government over people, believes in the power of the bureaucrat over the individual and distrusts the people to make their own economic and social decisions. Hence lockdowns and vaccination passports. They know see their job as not serving but ruling us.
Lee Freeman – Chief Constable Humbeside Police
Perhaps this philosophy explains why the Chief Constable of Humberside allegedly said to Mr Harry Miller when they met to discuss the results of their court case, “Common sense is not an appropriate tool for a police officer because common sense leads to unpredictable outcomes.” But its is the failure to exercise common sense that has been at the heart of every bad Government decision. It is why state management without compassion, competence, common sense and integrity at its roots, will never allow the flower to bloom fully.
The UK civil service's incompetence might best be summed up in the words of three public officials who were involved in two of the biggest disasters in the UK in recent times. Andy Roe, Nick Hurd and Dominic Cummings.
Andy Roe is head of the London Fire Brigade. On the night of the Grenfell Tower fire he was the most senior fire officer who, arriving on the scene, gave immediate instructions for the building to be evacuated of people. He said at the conclusion of Part 1 of the Grenfell Tower enquiry: "I think every single major institution that should have kept those who lived in the Tower safe let the families down. It was the most appealing example of institutional failure in British history, and we [the London Fire Brigade] were part of that."
Andy Roe – Head of the London Fire Brigade
Nick Hurd MP, who had been in post as Minister of State for Policing and the Fire Service for just two days before the Grenfell Tower fire and became responsible for leading Whitehall's post-fire response, said at the Grenfell Tower enquiry: "I am ashamed of the failures of the system I was part of to provide fellow citizens with the most basic support and comfort that they had every reason to feel totally entitled to. It was wholly inadequate." He said this after hearing how the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, one of the wealthiest councils in the UK, which, alongside the police fire and ambulance, had failed in their Category One statutory duty to plan and respond to disasters like Grenfell Tower.
Nick Hurd
As one witness said, “RBKC were chronically underprepared, made numerous fundamental mistakes, were slow and disorganised. They were not ready for anything more than a bus crash on the high street or a minor fire.”
Dominic Cummings, Chief Advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said, at the Joint Enquiry into the Government's handling of the Pandemic:
"Senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisors, people like me, fell disastrously short of the standards the public has every right to expect of its government during a crisis like this. When the public needed us the most, the Government failed."
Highly inefficient and with service quality declining, the civil service now employs nearly 500,000 people. It accounts for almost half the entire UK economy. Whilst manufacturing productivity has grown by over 40% over the last twenty years, public sector productivity has actually fallen to a 20-year low.
Albeit exceptionally bright, it is hard to discern what management skills Dominic Cummings had to become Chief Advisor to the Prime Minister. It was true that he had run a brilliant Brexit campaign for Vote Leave. However, it is said that the former Prime Minister David Cameron referred to him as a career psychopath when he worked as a Special Adviser for Michael Gove in the DfE. As Cummings said at the Joint Select Committee hearing: "it is absurd that people like me were in senior positions in government." At least to his credit, he recognised the incompetence of Whitehall. He made it a condition of joining Boris Johnson's team in No 10 Downing Street that he be allowed to take on the task of reforming and restructuring the civil service.
Gavin Barwell
Gavin Barwell sat in virtually the same seat immediately before Cummings. He went straight from university to work for the Conservative Party prior to becoming an MP. Before becoming a Minister of State for Housing and Planning, he held numerous Junior Ministerial jobs. He became Prime Minister Teresa May's Chief of Staff after her disastrous 2017 General Election when he lost his seat as an MP. It is ironic that, having been lauded as a "campaigning guru" when he was the Party's Chief Operating Officer, i.e., Head of Campaigning, and having lost his seat, his failure is rewarded with a promotion to be Mrs May's Chief of Staff, sitting right at the heart of her government. If anything symbolises the decay in the Whitehall machinery, it is that appointment and his subsequent appointment to the House of Lords.
Given that Barwell was at the heart of the UK Government during Mrs May's premiership when she had the responsibility for negotiating the UK's departure from the EU, it is perhaps worth, at this stage, considering Whitehall's handling of the Brexit negotiations.
I will not comment on the Brexit debate, for that issue has been well fought. However, I will comment on the negotiations because, as a corporate financier working in the arena of international mergers and acquisitions for over thirty years, it is a subject I have studied and have relevant experience.
The Brexit negotiations by the UK delegation must go down as one of the worst in history. Blame must largely rest with Mrs May and her failure in political leadership as she would overturn key policy decisions of the two ministers she appointed to lead the negotiations. Her vacillations made the task of the UK civil servants responsible for the negotiations very difficult.
However, the situation was made worse by UK government officials being ill-prepared and ill-equipped. It soon became apparent that they had neither the negotiating skills, intellectual capacity, nor the resolve to deal with the rigidity of the EU's negotiating position or its negotiators. The UK civil service's reputation as fierce negotiators was quickly shown to be a myth. Our country's reputation was traduced in the process.
In large transactions, there are many workstreams that different teams must manage. Therefore, it is a golden rule of negotiations that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. You can have conditional understandings, place-markers, which some negotiators refer to as 'sticks in the sand' so they can be kicked over and replaced as the negotiations turn. What you never do is inviolably agree to anything until everything is agreed.
Except that is precisely what the UK Government allowed to happen when it conceded that the withdrawal agreement would be negotiated prior to the trade agreement. And this was in direct contravention of the Conservative Party's manifesto, which promised to negotiate a trade agreement with the EU at the same time as negotiating the withdrawal agreement.
One has to ask what powers exist in the civil service machinery which causes a prime minister to break an election promise?
One of the biggest growth areas in government has been in the number of special advisers (SpAds) employed in temporary civil servant posts within government departments. These positions are made on the grounds that it is the SpAd's job to focus on the politics of passing the government's legislative programme, but this is a misnomer. In essence, they are there to act as the eyes and ears (spies) of the minister within his department. Thus, they tend to hinder rather than enhance the sound running of the executive branch of government. SpAds are there because the politician nominally in charge cannot appoint the chief executive and senior positions in the department for which they are responsible.
Imagine being the captain of the English cricket or rugby teams and not having a say in who your fellow team members are. Imagine being the chief executive of a company and being unable to choose your senior executive team to work around you. But this is the handicap our unwritten constitution has placed upon those we elect to serve us. It is an anathema to the efficient management of government.
At present, we have a situation where the careers of politicians are dependent upon civil servants but not the other way around. For example, it is a rare politician who dares publicly criticise the civil servants in the department they run. They know that to do so would see their political agenda disappear in fairy dust. But it does not work the other way around. The senior civil service mandarins are known to brief the press against their ministers, as Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary and Priti Patel as home secretary, both found to their cost.
If a Secretary of State wishes to replace the Permanent Secretary who runs their department, then that Secretary of State must persuade the Prime Minister that they have to order the Cabinet Secretary to fire the Permanent Secretary involved. It just doesn't happen, for although the politician is nominally responsible, the actual situation is that the lines of authority are confused with no one held truly accountable. Fingers of blame are pointed in every direction, for does the fault lie in the original strategy or its operational execution? The arguments become incessant, so no one gets criticised, and no one is held responsible.
To stop all this nonsense and to bring direct accountability, two things need to happen, and fast
Firstly, Permanent Secretaries, Deputy and Assistant Secretaries in ministerial departments, all chief executives in all non-ministerial departments and in government agencies should have their contracts of employment changed so that they automatically terminate at the end of the third complete month following a general election. This means that an incoming government can ensure that people in tune with their policies head these departments. Very simply, we need an act of parliament to make this the law. It is only when the current mandarins are out of a job and looking to be rehired will the politicians get control of the civil service.
Secondly, those who are appointed as Secretary of State in any department should, in conjunction with the Prime Minister, be able to appoint that department's Chief of Staff / Chief Operating Officer/ Permanent Secretary, call him what you will. The important thing is that the appointed person has direct line authority to the politician above him and the civil servants below.
This is not revolutionary. When he was Secretary of State for Health, Frank Dobson ordered the removal of almost every single person appointed to an NHS Trust Board by the Conservative Government. It was, he argued, necessary to bring about the culture change he wanted.
There are some obvious criticisms and problems which need to be considered.
The first criticism is the loss of continuity. The civil service makes great play of their seamless service. Proudly, they refer to the Potsdam Conference held in August 1945 (77 years ago!) where the three leading Allies came together to plan the post-war peace. US President Truman had replaced the recently deceased President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Attlee replaced Churchill while the conference was in progress after he was ousted from office through a General Election. Churchill and the Attlee were supported at the conference with many of the same civil servants who had attended the previous tri-partite conferences. In contrast, Truman came with a new team who were less familiar with the detail of earlier meetings. And while it is undoubtedly helpful to have the same team in the room providing continuity of negotiations, from reading the conference's history, it is hard to see what tangible benefit Britain accrued from this continuity.
Further, this loss of continuity criticism loses validity when one remembers that civil service files are sealed on a change of government, so they are not available from one administration to the next.
Another criticism is that the political appointments of senior civil service positions could lead to massive swings, either towards the far left or the far right, in the management of the executive. This is because the top jobs will be held by those whose appointment will have been made by those who stood in an election and received a democratic mandate. While it is a risk, it does mean that the executive branch of our government will be more in tune with the people it is governing.
This political risk argument only has validity if our civil service can prove that they are politically neutral today. Except, as I have shown, this is far from the case. With the woke agenda deeply engrained, and the highly questionable politics of critical race theory gripping Whitehall, it is evident that the liberal left dominates the executive branch of our government.
It could be argued that with politicians directly making senior civil service appointments, the principle of 'good' management could be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. However, this presumes that the civil service is well managed in the first place, which is far from the case. If we elect sound politicians with good judgment, we should trust them to surround themselves with the most able people to do the required job.
As is often pointed out, the problem arises when the people don't elect sound politicians. Hitler is an often-quoted example of a man who used his political authority to appoint his coterie of gangsters to positions of authority and power to become a dictator. Further examples are found with Stalin and, more recently, with Putin in Russia.
The solution to this 'sound people' problem can be found in the USA, where an incoming President has to make over 1,000 appointments, each of which requires Senate confirmation, for example, Cabinet Secretarial posts. The US President has another 350 positions which don't need confirmation. Underneath these appointments are career civil servants, similar to those employed in Whitehall, who continue in their jobs irrespective of the change in the President.
Making the senior civil service appointments subject to the House of Lords’ confirmation would give the system the checks and balances required by good governance. To this end, I would refer you to my Substack essay suggesting that the House of Lords be replaced with a House of Peers based upon the Wisdom of the Crowd.
The last criticism is cost. The first time there is a change of government, and all senior civil servants are forced to resign, there will be a large increase in contract termination payments, and for some people, it will accelerate the date they retire and start drawing their pension. However, this should only be a one-off cost paid the first time, as the legislation should be written to make sure that anyone invited to continue in their job does so on the new terms and conditions but with full recognition of past service. I assess that this will be a sum well worth paying if it brings the culture change and efficiencies needed.
Based on history, it is safe to assume that the cost of not implementing this simple recommendation of changing the civil service appointments system is likely to exceed, by a factor of many times, the one-off cost.
Aristotle promulgated that: political systems break down when institutions produce outcomes in favour of a minority which is at odds with the will of the majority. He was referring to the extraordinary wealth gathered by the few at the expense of the many - a situation which exists at a greater extent today than at any time in the last 75 years.
Aristotle's observation also applies to political philosophies without common support. Those that fly in the face of common sense. Just as communism failed the common-sense test, and caused abject poverty for billions of people, so does the philosophy of critical race theory.
There is much wrong with the world, but critical race theory is not the solution. A political force which seeks to divide rather than unite us is not a force for good.
The UK is now examining itself through the lens of US society. For too long, the UK has taken the burden of America's social problems and started making them its own. But this is to make the fundamental mistake of assuming the UK imitates the United States. It does not.
Sadly, the US is more fractured and divided now than at any time in its post-Civil War history. It is a society where consensus on any issue is hard to find. Looking to the United States for the solutions to the United Kingdom's problems will, I fear, lead to greater division and societal upset, for our history and heritage are so very different.
For example, 13.4% of the population in the US is Black, whereas in the UK, it is just 3%. In the UK, 7.5% of the population has Asian ethnicity, whereas Asian Americans account for 5.7% of the United States' population.
There is something unique about a nation that can twice persuade its empire nations to voluntarily finance and fight in two world wars many continents away, and later turn that empire into a commonwealth of willing nations. If the UK had been an exceptionally extractive or oppressive ruler, to the extent that the revisionists now claim, then these international relationships could not, would not, have flourished as they do today.
It is nationalistic to say that the peoples of the UK have something exceptional about them, but this is not said in a harmful or jingoist way. It is simply to recognise that it was the innate good sense of the British people which not only ended slavery but used its not inconsiderable navy to end it for other nations too.
There is something about the people of the UK who, against what appeared to be insurmountable odds, stood against the tyranny of Nazism, or sent a task force to free the Falkland Islands from occupation, or even decided to vote to leave the European Union. In the overwhelming tide of globalism, the UK somehow manages to stand apart.
Irrespective of this, Britain's post-World War 2 value system of a society based upon individuals and individual freedoms, equality and fairness, which have been a beacon to other communities in the wider world, are now under an existential threat. For this reason, there must be a reset in how our civil service and our state institutions manage and lead this country. We need to return to a system where everyone is valued equally as an individual person and not made special because of their sect.
It is time for all institutions of the state to abandon the philosophy and practices of critical race theory. It has been a costly mistake. It will only lead to greater harm. There is more light in the Enlightenment than will ever be found in the dark and narrow confines of critical race theory and the wokeism which has followed it.
General elections bring a renewal of our political leaders, but there is no mechanism to renew our nation's executive leadership. This is an executive who has proven to have become politically biased and to have failed in its administrative role, and disastrously so, time and time again.
The current situation is untenable. The elites, those who sit at the heart of our influential institutions, have allowed society to believe that they are better than the rest of us. When they have proven that they are not. They have an almost messianic certainty that they are right, and the opinions of the rest of us are irrelevant. Consequently they set out and write down the rules for us, but thinks that these rules don't apply to them, as evidenced by the behaviour of Neil Ferguson, Matt Hancock, and all those at the No 10 Partygate events during the Covid-19 restrictions, is one which must be reformed.
As I wrote in my Misconduct in Public Office essay, a civil service which has a culture of excessive alcohol consumption, leading to damage, violence, vomiting and vile behaviour towards the cleaning and security staff in No 10 Downing Street, is one which is rotten at its core. It is a service which has lost its moral authority to rule over us. And when we learnt that Sue Grey, the allegedly Miss Indomitable, Miss Ethics, Miss Incorruptible of the civil service, was persuaded to remove from her report any references to the ABBA Party held by Carrie Johnson in Boris Johnson’s No. 10 flat, then we know the decay in the foundations of our civil service is so deeply rooted that only radical surgery will suffice.
Regrettably, and despite its best efforts, our civil service is not capable of renewing itself. As Einstein is reported as saying: "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
Reform of the civil service will only be undertaken when the politicians lever control of the executive away from Whitehall's mandarins and have the autonomy to appoint the best person for the job.
The politicians will not be able to leverage the executive's control and make the needed reforms one stage, one department at a time, for if they did, the blob would defeat them. It is why an act of parliament must be passed, retiring all senior civil servants and others holding senior public appointments, at the end of each parliament so that the incoming government is able to appoint the executive it chooses.
I am not being naïve. The selection process of our prospective parliamentary candidates and members of parliament is far from ideal. We know the process doesn't necessarily attract the best candidates, but who would want a job which gives you responsibility without power.
However, what sets our MP's apart is that they have sought and obtained a democratic mandate and, from my experience, the majority of those elected are well-qualified, decent people trying to do their best in difficult circumstances.
I believe that part of those difficult circumstances lies with the culture and competence of Whitehall. A problem that the proposals in this essay would help resolve.
The UK was exceptionally lucky with Covid 19. Although tragic and economically devastating, it could have been much worse. The UK managed to dodge the pandemic bullet this time. It might not be so lucky next. For example, if Ebola or another similar pathogen escaped into the UK population, as Covid-19 did, then the consequences are too frightening to contemplate. Deaths would be counted in millions of people.
We now know that we cannot rely on the current Civil Service to protect us at times like this. Not only is it in the grip of a political philosophy which is harming the fabric of society. It is institutionally incompetent. It must be reformed and renewed with new strong, and professional management, much of it brought in from outside.
I started this essay with a poem, and I will end with one. It is "The Beginnings" written by Rudyard Kipling in 1917, one hundred and five years ago - one year before the Great War was to end. The poem is about how the English people, although naturally peaceful, slowly become filled with hate. I fear there is a risk that if Critical Race Theory continues unchallenged so that our nation becomes divided on the grounds of identity, and the British culture is consumed, such that our history, customs and traditions, particularly the tradition of tolerance, are not respected by the minorities within us, then the civil peace which we currently enjoy will not endure.
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate.
They were not easily moved,
They were icy-willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the English began to hate.
Their voices were even and low,
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show,
When the English began to hate.
It was not preached to the crowd,
It was not taught by the State.
No man spoke it aloud,
When the English began to hate.
It was not suddenly bred,
It will not swiftly abate,
Through the chill years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the English began to hate.
CSB
11th July 2022
Posted Substack 24-07-2022
[1] Born between 1981 - 1996 and aged between 26 - 41)