Not Just Doing Their Jobs

High-ranking civil servants are more than tools for carrying out the will of their political masters. The very continuity of their service to changing Executives has caused these outstandingly clever men and women, with their experience, education, and honed skills, to be pushed aside in favour of political appointees with narrower learning and inferior training, by the current Executive in its almost paranoid suspicion of the Home Civil Service having its own agenda, separate from that of the New Order.

Senior civil servants act under at least two kinds of constraints from which the New Order is wholly free: the constitutional and legal structures of the United Kingdom, which the Labour Executive sees as an obstruction to their purposes and to be peremptorily removed from their path whenever encountered, rather than the product of centuries of controlling and blocking despotic tendencies in the use of power; and an awareness of their service to the state itself, i.e. us, in a pluralist democracy, and our political and cultural longterm objectives and achievements, rather than to temporary holders of elected office.

Unsurprisingly it is the lawyers and the very senior civil servants who have broken ranks first. Elizabeth Wilmshurst's resignation from the Foreign Office and her distinguished career there, on 18 March 2003 ended ...' I cannot in conscience go along with [this] advice - within the Office or to the public or Parliament...' and '... am therefore discussing ...whether I may take approved early retirement. In case that is not possible this letter should be taken as constituting notice of my resignation ...I joined the Office in 1974. It has been a privilege to work here. I leave with very great sadness.'

What of the lawyers who are Parliamentary Counsel? One has remarked, [The]'analytical function of the drafter is vital. The capacity to stand back and to question is one of the greatest qualities needed in legislative drafting. But it is not enough simply to destroy ideas. The capacity to contribute fresh and constructive ideas is also important. Of course the basic policy is for others - ultimately for ministers. But it is a definite part of the drafter's job to point out any traps inherent in the policy, and where possible to offer solutions. It is sometimes surprising how much the drafter contributes in this way to the formulation of policy.'

How are they reacting to drafting the measures that abolish our civil liberties? What do they do when the policy they are helping to formulate puts people in prison without any of the legal or constitutional former safeguards that are being legislated away? Does the belief that '..members of Parliament want to avoid any possible injustice. For instance, if a Bill infringes people's liberties safeguards will be needed.', hold now ?

In the higher echelons of the Foreign, Diplomatic, and Home Civil Service people have resigned, been sacked, spoken out to newspapers in frank language. “Stalinist ruthlessness”, "Brown, like Blair, requires not just loyalty but total obedience ".

If, as all the evidence shows, the objective and determination of the Labour Executive is to retain power permanently, these people are as much in the way as the electorate and the judiciary. Cleansing a professional and highly competent administrative class requires time, so that at entry level there can be vetting on conformity (usually accompanied by a fall in achievement quality of entrants), at intermediate level a promotions policy that favours the acquiescent and disappoints innovative and independent thinkers, and at senior level the favouring of early retirements, and/or forced resignations.

Ten years. Nearly there.