advertisement


The Premiership of Mary Elizabeth Truss.Sept 2022 - Oct 2022

Seanm said:
I don’t think there’s a stitch-up as such there’s just bound to be some institutional inertia and I think there should be ways to counter that, and one way would be for elected representatives to choose who they want to implement their policies. I’m no expert either so I don’t really know what that would involve, I’m sure there are legitimate objections, but I’d like to hear them voiced explicitly, so that they can be distinguished from less legitimate objections. I think in times like these we want bodies like the civil service to save us from the nutters and while that’s understandable it’s also not good for democracy.
Click to expand...
The role of the Civil Service has always been to implement Government policy. This requires that some or sometimes many people do things that are discordant with their personal principles. If they find the policy so offensive, they can ask for a transfer to another Dept. or resign. What they cannot do is in any way try to frustrate the will of Government.

This has worked very successfully for god knows how long and works because the Civil Service is not politicised, it is impartial and free from direct political interference because of it.

I do not know the reason for Scholar's removal so if anyone has a definitive and corroborated details?
 
Cav said:
The role of the Civil Service has always been to implement Government policy. This requires that some or sometimes many people do things that are discordant with their personal principles. If they find the policy so offensive, they can ask for a transfer to another Dept. or resign. What they cannot do is in any way try to frustrate the will of Government.

This has worked very successfully for god knows how long and works because the Civil Service is not politicised, it is impartial and free from direct political interference because of it.

I do not know the reason for Scholar's removal so if anyone has a definitive and corroborated details?
Click to expand...
I understand civil servants’ professional pride in their impartiality but these things are not a matter of individual will or even collective norms and values. In some cases, especially where some degree of expert knowledge is required, and even more so when a particular theoretical framework is involved, it’s easy to imagine some people simply not knowing how best to do what’s asked of them. Multiply that across the board and down the line and the initiative doesn’t need anyone to intentionally hobble it. So why not get someone in who understands what you’re trying to do, and how to communicate it to others, what the potential pitfalls are and so on?

More broadly I’m not convinced that everything is working just fine. The last few years suggest norms and traditions are not up to the job of managing the relationship between government, experts and civil service. And then there’s the Home Office.
 
Seanm said:
I understand civil servants’ professional pride in their impartiality but these things are not a matter of individual will or even collective norms and values. In some cases, especially where some degree of expert knowledge is required, and even more so when a particular theoretical framework is involved, it’s easy to imagine some people simply not knowing how best to do what’s asked of them. Multiply that across the board and down the line and the initiative doesn’t need anyone to intentionally hobble it. So why not get someone in who understands what you’re trying to do, and how to communicate it to others, what the potential pitfalls are and so on?

More broadly I’m not convinced that everything is working just fine. The last few years suggest norms and traditions are not up to the job of managing the relationship between government, experts and civil service. And then there’s the Home Office.
Click to expand...
This isn't reserved to the civil service. What you describe is just working for a living. All jobs are like this.

Edit - WRT being asked to do the wrong thing, this happens to me all the time too. I get told to bro stupid things. I advise accordingly and sometimes get listened to. Other times I get told to JFDI. The only time I refuse is significant law breaking or any infringement of food safety or personal safety. The CS will have this every day.
 
Cav said:
The role of the Civil Service has always been to implement Government policy. This requires that some or sometimes many people do things that are discordant with their personal principles. If they find the policy so offensive, they can ask for a transfer to another Dept. or resign. What they cannot do is in any way try to frustrate the will of Government.

This has worked very successfully for god knows how long and works because the Civil Service is not politicised, it is impartial and free from direct political interference because of it.

I do not know the reason for Scholar's removal so if anyone has a definitive and corroborated details?
Click to expand...
Governments often ignore evidence based research. This often leads to conflict with the CS. Ministers range from fairly agreeable to incompetent.
 
Seanm said:
It’s mental that he’s been resurrected but he’s not wrong about some things - borrowing, chiefly - and by all accounts he’s not wrong that Treasury orthodoxy would be an obstacle to correcting longstanding mistakes.
Click to expand...
It should be remembered the government borrowing is just government borrowing from itself so there is no debt that needs to be paid off. But yes, within that context the Tory ‘borrowing’ plans are more credible than Labour’s which seeks to pay off the debt year on year.

Not sure that Minford is right to say that the Treasury should be modelling the economy, that is surely the job of government while correcting longstanding mistakes has to come, initially at least, from the ballot box?

Good video on QE/borrowing here…

 
Seanm said:
I understand civil servants’ professional pride in their impartiality but these things are not a matter of individual will or even collective norms and values. In some cases, especially where some degree of expert knowledge is required, and even more so when a particular theoretical framework is involved, it’s easy to imagine some people simply not knowing how best to do what’s asked of them. Multiply that across the board and down the line and the initiative doesn’t need anyone to intentionally hobble it. So why not get someone in who understands what you’re trying to do, and how to communicate it to others, what the potential pitfalls are and so on?

More broadly I’m not convinced that everything is working just fine. The last few years suggest norms and traditions are not up to the job of managing the relationship between government, experts and civil service. And then there’s the Home Office.
Click to expand...
Ministers propose a policy and the Civil Service finds a way to implement it. Often this means putting option papers (with input if necessary from experts) to said Ministers to decide which of various option they want implemented.

Once decided, detailed guidance is issued to departmental staff as to what the procedures are and how they are to be implemented. That does not guarantee that all will understand or exactly follow those procedures but that is an issue of management.

Do you have any specific examples of where "norms and traditions are not up to the job"?
 
Del monaco said:
Governments often ignore evidence based research. This often leads to conflict with the CS. Ministers range from fairly agreeable to incompetent.
Click to expand...
Government is entitled to ignore recommendations made to it by anybody. Not sure this "often leads to conflict" because the Civil Service will try to deliver whatever the Government asks it to.
 
Cav said:
Government is entitled to ignore recommendations made to it by anybody. Not sure this "often leads to conflict" because the Civil Service will try to deliver whatever the Government asks it to.
Click to expand...
And they often do usually for personal political gain. An example is an MP blurting out a made up figure on News At Ten and then the CS has to substantiate figures that don’t exist. It leads to much conflict, hiring and firing etc.
 
I think it's a fanciful notion that 12 years of Tory rule has left them with a bunch of radicals in senior positions in the Civil Service. While Lord McDonald is an exception in going public about matters, it's fair to say that it's the Tories who have moved to the right and no longer want to hear messages that warn of potential problems. https://www.theguardian.com/politic...ervant-who-accuses-no-10-of-misleading-public
The 61-year-old also had stints advising prime ministers and foreign secretaries, thus getting to know his way around the nitty gritty politics of his trade.

It is, however, more or less unprecedented for such an establishment figure, especially one whose previously public interventions have been mainly to support the status quo, to formally complain that Downing Street has been, in his view, misleading the public.
Click to expand...
 
stevec67 said:
This isn't reserved to the civil service. What you describe is just working for a living. All jobs are like this.

Edit - WRT being asked to do the wrong thing, this happens to me all the time too. I get told to bro stupid things. I advise accordingly and sometimes get listened to. Other times I get told to JFDI. The only time I refuse is significant law breaking or any infringement of food safety or personal safety. The CS will have this every day.
Click to expand...
Yes that’s the basis of my claim, really, since I don’t have any special insight into how the civil service works: I’m just assuming it works much like other places. Other places, a change in leadership and strategy is likely to result in some changes in personnel, this on the assumption that commitment to and understanding of the change will increase the likelihood of success. The civil service is *not* like other organisations in certain key respects, not least because of professional codes around impartiality which I'm sure go a long way. But I'm sceptical that they can compensate for a lack of knowledge and commitment in every case, and given the high stakes of some of these cases ISTM it might be good to have formalised ways of dealing with them. Otherwise you get this: unfairly derailed careers, accusations of partiality on the one hand and government tyranny on the other.
 
Cav said:
Ministers propose a policy and the Civil Service finds a way to implement it. Often this means putting option papers (with input if necessary from experts) to said Ministers to decide which of various option they want implemented.

Once decided, detailed guidance is issued to departmental staff as to what the procedures are and how they are to be implemented. That does not guarantee that all will understand or exactly follow those procedures but that is an issue of management.

Do you have any specific examples of where "norms and traditions are not up to the job"?
Click to expand...
Well, there’s the current incident, which seems a clear case of norms being strained or transgressed, opening up quite serious questions about the relationship between government and civil service that no one has any answers to.

There’s the Greenshill scandal, which seems to me like a good example of norms taking up the slack left by rules that aren’t fit for purpose, and not doing a good job of it.

During Covid it seems like a more formal delineation of role of the Chief Scientific Officer might have avoided scenes where the CSO went on TV declaring himself to be a scientist whose job was to speak scientific truth to power, while selling a government policy we later found it he had serious concerns about.

And then there’s Brexit, and while I wasn’t paying much attention I do remember friction between the civil service and government, with government figures making all sorts of accusations in a way that surely ran counter to the norms. More formal rules might have provided civil servants with more protection. I also remember reports of the dilemmas faced by civil servants when the government threatened to break the law over Brexit. That’s actually a really big example of norms and traditions simply not being up to the job of managing the relationship between government and civil service.

I'm not coming at any of this from an anti-civil service perspective. All I'm saying is that it does seem quite dependent on largely unwritten norms about The Way We Do Things that are coming under increasing strain because they weren't built for government by reckless spivs and morons. That stress-testing does also seem to be revealing some things about what we expect from the civil service, and how its relationship with government might be improved and made clearer.
 
With the system we have where an MP can be placed into a ministerial role they have zero education, training, aptitude or skill to understand and are so often tainted by backhanders and other obvious corruption before we get to ideological idiocy (e.g. right-wing religion and anti-science) I have to admit I value a civil service based upon a more rational skillset fit with the role in hand. The bottom line is the minister allocated a particular office is often the least qualified or experienced person in the building to comment on it. That is not a great situation even if it is in theory democratic (or would be if we lived in a proper democracy). I’m certainly somewhat skeptical when unhinged right-wing ideologues immediately start firing people with an obvious understanding of the department they have been positioned into by a novice PM who wasn’t elected by anyone other than a tiny handful of Tory party members.
 
Tony L said:
With the system we have where an MP can be placed into a ministerial role they have zero education, training, aptitude or skill to understand and are so often tainted by backhanders and other obvious corruption before we get to ideological idiocy (e.g. right-wing religion and anti-science) I have to admit I value a civil service based upon a more rational skillset fit with the role in hand. The bottom line is the minister allocated a particular office is often the least qualified or experienced person in the building to comment on it. That is not a great situation even if it is in theory democratic (or would be if we lived in a proper democracy). I’m certainly somewhat skeptical when unhinged right-wing ideologues immediately start firing people with an obvious understanding of the department they have been positioned into by a novice PM who wasn’t elected by anyone other than a tiny handful of Tory party members.
Click to expand...
I’m sure things mostly work out fine like that, with the CS providing much needed expert and administrative support. But then this thing about ideologues seems like a different point, implying that you’d like the CS to provide moderation and restraint rather than support. It’s asking too much from them and also the wrong thing.

We’re obviously in a very bad place with our elected government but we are where we partly because a lot of our political processes are done on a nod and a wink and being the right sort of chap. It’s a system wide open to abuse and you can’t really address the problems it’s helped create with more of the same.
 
Mrs Overall…two soups…genius!

84621-F69-529-C-41-AC-B64-A-FBFD211-F8196.jpg
 
Being a Royalist creep could well swing the next election. Support for the monarchy will be sky-high.

Sir Keir is doing what is needed. The majority of voters will want to see it.

Looks like he's smarmed charmed his way to being Charles' favourite.

FcTodwuXEAYEM1z
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top