Though Cowards Flinch

Due to moving house and thus having no internet connection for the last several weeks I have missed many of the main news stories, or at least been unable to blog about them. During my ‘down’ time, I read a biography of Tony Benn and dipped into the diaries of both Benn and Richard Crossman. How fitting then that when I emerge, there should be a prominent story about a Civil Servant, fired for voicing her opinions openly on a political website. The political bias of the Civil Service is a recurrent theme of Benn and Crossman.

Of course as ministers, Benn and Crossman came into contact with senior Civil Servants – not people like Miss Lisa Greenwood. Greenwood wrote on the website of Hazel Blears that MPs had swindled the public. A fair point to make, one would have thought, and not at all deserving of sacking. The whole issue is rendered a bit preposterous when one sees through the eyes of Tony Benn how senior Civil Servants used to fiddle with written parliamentary answers that Benn was to deliver to the House of Commons in his own name, because they didn’t like the policy!

Even today, the senior members of the Civil Service are quite evidently not impartial. For example, there’s Sir John Elvidge, who essentially acts like the running dog of the SNP. Or Phil Wheatley, who owes his position to Labour and the disastrous attempt to introduce NOMS; Wheatley was recently accused of telling a Union leader not to criticize the government, not to mention attacking the Conservatives. There is a long standing question over how Civil Servants prep their ministers to answer questions, and whether it is even possible to do so impartially.

The Bickerstaffe correspondent to Ye Olde Socialist Blogosphere writes of Steve Bundred, head of a Quango, who came out and attacked the government’s handling of the financial crisis. Let’s not even mention Mervyn King and the row he stirred up not too long ago. It seems quite clear that the Civil Service can be as partial as it likes, so long as the person speaking publicly about it already has the political clout to resist being fired or otherwise silenced by the government of the day or their immediate ass-covering prig superiors.

Lisa Greenwood’s only crime was to be poor. A worker earning £16,000 a year is unlikely to be able to pay high flying lawyers to sue for wrongful dismissal – especially for the censure of “gross misconduct” which was registered against her by a disciplinary committee that was organised within seven days of the offence. For Lisa Greenwood too, there is no cheque of compensation to rival that received by Hazel Blears following her self-righteous and ultimately disastrous resignation from the Cabinet. The whole thing is utterly ridiculous.

Our Civil Service is biased. The stories that hit the media reinforce the points repeatedly made by Cabinet Ministers who range from Far Left to Far Right in political outlook. It would be summary and superficial to dismiss this bias as not political but rather an institutional conservatism, a desire not to have the boat rocked. Every study released (e.g. The British System of Government) confirms the Oxbridge bias in the senior echelons of the Civil Service; how nice to see one of the real workhorses of the Civil Service get her chance to speak out.

The follow up act should be for Lisa Greenwood to stand for Parliament against Ms Blears.

A wider issue is raised, however, by this notion of bias within the Civil Service. Whether one accepts Nicos Poulantzas’ view that Civil Servants at the more ‘political’ end of business become prisoners of the capitalist ideology by virtue of the function of the State, or the view of Miliband that the background of these senior Civil Servants influences them in the execution of their jobs (rendering them relatively friendly to mainstream Tory and Labour, well inculcated into Oxbridge by now, but hostile to the extremes) how to implement socialist policy is a real question.

What about some industrial democracy? Tony Benn once said that we should ask any powerful person the following five questions; What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? The problem comes from questions 2 and 4. Civil Servants derive their power from the institutional memory, of which they are the keepers, and from connections developed over years in the political frontline. This has a knock on effect as regards their accountability.

I’m not arguing, of course, that Civil Servants aren’t accountable. In theory, they are eminently accountable. On the other hand, anyone who has followed the HP Sauce column of Private Eye for the last ten years will clearly see that Civil Servants can be as adept as any elected politician at obfuscation and evasion. Moreover, as I think the political biography of Labour 1997-2010 will show, it is easy to develop alternative structures to the traditional Civil Service when Cabinet Ministers or particularly the Prime Minister think it opportune.

The ‘Central Government’ chapter by Fawcett and Rhodes in Anthony Seldon’s Blair’s Britain 1997-2007 seems to bear me out on this one.

However, this government hasn’t been interested in pursuing socialist policy. Its special advisors and various other alternative structures of governance have been able to call in a vast amount of politically sympathetic individuals from across the private sector. This would not be the case for a government that was elected with a mandate to curb market forces, raise taxation on the wealthy and basically restrict capitalism to the greatest extent possible. Unlikely as that seems, in the current climate, what to do on Day 1 of such a government is something to think about.

Yes, I’m all about making preparations to overthrow the government by violent, democratic revolution and install a system of workers’ deputies. But we’ve seen from other examples of revolutionary states just how easily power can be wielded behind the scenes when questions like this aren’t discussed and resolved. A system of industrial democracy, where rather than being central appointees, different branches of the civil servants elect their own line managers right the way to the top seems like a system admitting of more checks on the arbitrary wielding of power.