Civil Servants

I was asked to appear on the Mark Dolan Show (GB News) last week to discuss the proposition ‘Are Civil Servants Inherently Left Wing?’

Irritatingly a technical hitch my end scrapped the debate.

The proposition is actually rather more complex than most might imagine.

I have been seconded to civil service departments on a few occasions over the years, usually but not always in my financial services career to bring expertise in the regulatory field. An out going colleague with an investment bank background gave me some advice “If you have never worked with civil servants you must understand they are a completely different species to those in the wealth creating sector. They neither think nor behave as we do, they see the world from a totally different perspective. You will never make progress, they have no interest in achieving the mission, just a vague promise to embark on the journey”.

He was absolutely right, I offer my assessment here as to why & how they are so different.

To begin you must bear in mind that most employees in the public sector decided quite deliberately at university to avoid working in the wealth creating world, which they regard as vulgar & potentially threatening. This attitude forms their professional & psychological attitude, it is a form of hopelessly unjustified superiority complex, quite Gallic in point of fact.

Imagine the arrogance of rule making civil servants, forming regulation of markets of which they have no knowledge or experience. Most working in the public sector have no training in data interpretation, which gives ample scope to their sociopathic tendencies. Covid restrictions give evidence of this, civil servants love mathematical projections which gives their lack of critical thinking skills free reign, lockdown was a classic demonstration.

The Mises Institute would identify the absurdity of perfect knowledge of a market, essential to regulate. A claim I would not make of financial services notwithstanding over forty years experience in The City. But caveat emptor is an anathema to politicians & civil servants.

They love trade delegation boondoggles, yet they have never even run a whelk stall. They love to ‘negotiate’ but lack even the elementary skills, it is painful to watch properly trained French functionnaires trained at the Ecole Nationale d’administration run rings around them.

They are neither left or right wing in the accepted sense, sure they prefer the Labour Party but these days that doesn’t mean left wing. They are Statist, ironically as is the Conservative party.

They deeply believe the world would be a better place if a massive civil service administered the world regulated corporations, institutions, health care, education, social care, pensions, academia , broadcasting, museums in fact anything you could conceivably imagine. This explains why 100% of the public sector voted Remain.

A European wide civil service controlling the lives of everyone, of course with implied pro bono publico. Who would pay for all this ? They never really ponder that but presumably if they did, heavily regulated & taxed corporations in the wealth creating sector whose salaries, benefits & jargon they ape, without accepting the market discipline that goes with it. But money printing can always pick up the slack. In lockdown they enjoyed full pay home working, uninterrupted index linked pensions contribution , no loss of bonuses, fake backlog target commitments, none of the wealth creating sector pain. All this with a deep rooted sense of entitlement.

I have really just outlined the concept of fascism, I don’t use the term in the pejorative sense, but it is an unholy alliance of the State, banks, MSM & big business, forget right or left wing. These days civil servants & politicians are joined at the hip. They think the same way share the same ideals, ordinary people cannot be trusted to run their own lives. As a genre they were non sporting kids with a note from matron excusing games on a permanent basis whilst their aspirations were aimed at milk monitorship. They get drunk on power quickly because they are new to it.

Tax & spend, with a complicit media & a cowed Treasury & Bank of England. Civil servants simply enact strategic directives from globalist institutions after gold plating them. The World Economic Forum, World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund & United Nations are the real masters.

They accept without question these modern day Papal Bulls, it expands their power, they care not about the rationale of such directives. They are Empire builders by definition which is how the already over staffed administrators have added another 400,000 to their merry band just since 2018.

They are comfortable in their role as it requires no critical thinking, risk assessment or cost benefit analysis, for which they see no need or indeed are trained to do. Nor are they bound by targets, assessed on performance or subject to shareholder discipline as is the wealth creating sector. They exist in a bubble of their own design, protected from inflation they created even unto death.

Was it ever thus? Certainly not pre war. There was an Empire to run.

When the world map was three quarters red the civil service had an important role to play, the recruitment bar was high, acceptance had vocational implication. School boy or university applicants were top drawer with a sense of noblesse oblige. At provincial level town hall staff were of the same genre led by councilors with a strong sense of responsibility to the public purse. There were significantly fewer of them.

Where do they come from now? I trawled the Internet & it seems largely from State education & very ordinary universities & hopelessly bourgeois families. Often with shoulder chips ruthlessly exposed by recent WhatsApp revelations, Simon Case being a classic example with his vendetta against first class passenger quarantine (as if he didn’t travel first class at the taxpayer’s expense)

I worked for an international investment bank for some years where top professional expertise was the norm in all departments, the civil service & town halls in Britain are populated with journeymen administrators devoid of original thought. Those who reach the top, with some noble exceptions wouldn’t last a week in the wealth creating world.

The private sector wealth is with small & medium size businesses where entrepreneurs work their magic, it is 80% of the British economy. Government hates it.

Retail bank compliance departments, energy companies, The National Trust & company health & safety mafia are all hiding places for the civil service mentality, where wokery holds sway & original thought is unwelcome. Google all the senior civil servants we have seen in the last three years, look at them, Vallance, Whitty, Case & the rest, did you ever see such a cohort of excused boots, ‘note from matron’ bunch of pigeon chested losers?

They represent institutions which are amoral by definition, HMRC the classic example, tax is theft yet they sleep easy. Public Health England, ‘No you can’t visit your dying mother, more than my job’s worth’. Hospital administrators with their futile mask enforcement.

Yet they have the badge of office, they run our lives because we let them.

For Britain to prosper they must be culled along with the regulations they enforce with such zeal.

I would sack four million tomorrow.