In case there was any doubt that civil servants are biased against Conservative administrations and prefer Labour policies, a series of Guardian columns by a Labour superfan civil servant should put the matter to rest. Michael Deacon has more in the Telegraph.
Anyone who dares to suggest that civil servants hate the Tories is invariably accused of paranoia. Such airy dismissals, however, are going to be rather harder to sustain following the latest in a series of columns for the Guardian by an anonymous Whitehall figure.
Its headline: ‘After Years of Being Gaslit by Government, We Civil Servants Can Breathe Again Under Labour’.
Underneath, the author reveals how jubilant he or she is about the election result – because, for example, “the Rwanda policy and other fatbergs of accumulated economic and political dysfunction” can now be “dissolved”. This glee, it seems, is shared by many of the author’s colleagues. One civil servant is quoted as saying: “I’ve never been so glad to see the back of a Government.” Another expresses relief that “I won’t face each day wondering what nasty bit of policy we’ll be told to enact… I feel professionally revitalised knowing that the adults are back in charge.”
What’s striking about these comments is not just that they fall quite a long way short of neutrality. It’s that they were expressed at all. Clearly these civil servants felt confident they could voice such views to colleagues without getting in trouble. Which means they knew their colleagues felt the same.
Still, this will have come as little surprise to anyone who has read this anonymous civil servant’s columns before. In 2020, someone used an official civil service Twitter account to call the then Tory government “arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?” In response, the anonymous columnist filed an article headlined, ‘The Rogue Civil Service Tweet Spoke for Most of Us’. This “brave heretic”, we learnt, “has already become something of a civil service legend… The resistance continues.”
Curiously, an investigation by the Cabinet Office never did identify the culprit.
Worth reading in full.
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