Do you remember Sir Humphrey Appleby? If so – do you think this was a very funny, over-the-top portrayal? Think again! Mrs Thatcher thought it was more fact than fiction, and she knew a bit about the inner workings of Whitehall. Do you remember a certain Tony Blair? In his resignation speech he darkly said that he could have achieved much more if Whitehall hadn’t blocked him. So what is this walk down Memory Lane about?
It’s about the fact that our politicians, especially our Ministers in the four big offices of State (Home, Foreign, Defence, Treasury) have been and still are being domesticated, if not dominated, by the Mandarins of Whitehall, the Sir Humphreys.
That’s why we suddenly get to hear news such as this latest proclamation of the “Brexit Minister”, David Davis*), that yes, we would “consider making payments to the EU after it leaves the bloc to secure the best possible access to the EU single market”, (BBC News), or these ‘private’ mutterings from Boris Johnson to his ambassadors that he actually backs ‘free movement’.
That’s why it feels as if we’re still in the middle of a vicious campaign for Brexit. It feels as if June 23rd never happened, as if 17.4 million voters had never voted, as if we need to be told again to stay within the embrace of Brussels.
While our disdain for the politicians is growing daily by leaps and bounds, we must however be fair: it’s not all the fault of our Ministers and MPs! There are others who are not in the limelight, who are much more deserving of our ire: the Mandarins of Whitehall.
Haven’t we heard over the years Ministers telling the Commons that there is nothing they can do when it comes to EU directives and laws affecting our lives? How do these Ministers know that? Because the civil servants, the Mandarins of Whitehall, tell them so!
Haven’t we all wondered how come the French agree to EU Laws but don’t apply them, whereas we always comply, to the detriment of our country? Wonder no longer: our Mandarins have decreed that the EU is good for us, and that’s that.
Any politics nerd who has read the memoirs or diaries of past ministers knows that it’s the Mandarins of Whitehall who give them the advice, the arguments and the data on which to base their decisions, which they then ‘recommend’ to the House. This has not changed in seventy years. In fact, thanks to the EUrification of our country, it has become worse.
Any politics nerd who has followed debates in the HoC will have noticed how politicians, once they become a Minister or secretary of State, slowlly lose their previous attitudes to issues they have campaigned on, and even lose their fiery language. They are being domesticated by the Mandarins in their departments. The best “domesticators” must sit in the Foreign Office: the examples of William Hague and Boris Johnson before and after they became Foreign Secretary are striking!
Any politics nerd who has followed the news after June 23rd knows that the Mandarins had not prepared a ‘Plan B for Brexit’, just in case us peasants happened to actually vote to Leave. They never once thought that maybe their predictions might be wrong. They never doubted that we peasants would of course do as we were told – by them.
One of our arguments for Leave was that we did not want to be governed by faceless, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
Well, I have got news for you: we are governed by faceless, unelected bureaucrats, the Mandarins of Whitehall!
We don’t know who they are – unless we’re moving in highly elevated circles, and I don’t mean the Islington Dinner Club. Those who scan the Honours lists will get a glimpse of their faces and names – after they have been pensioned off and given their gong.
Over the decades, these Mandarins have developed extremely cosy relationships with their counterparts in Brussels. The systems of administration and the bureaucracies on the Continent are hugely different from ours. The bureaucrats on the continent can move seamlessly from the executive to the legislative and back. The administration of the EU, from its inception, is based on the French and German models, with the French one being the most impressive, the model which all other wish they could adopt. It was, naturally, created by that lover of democracy, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
The top French Mandarins get their education at the world-renowned school, the “Ecole Nationale d’Administration” (ENA). Alumni of that school, the ‘Enarques’, move from administration into politics and back as a matter of course – M Hollande being the latest example, and it’s these Mandarins who have influenced the way the EU is run.
Of course our Mandarins love this system! Formerly just ‘civil servants’, they have now become the unelected holders of power in our country. They direct policies, not our elected politicians whom they despise. They are the secret ‘elite’. They speak the language the bureaucrats speak in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. They have more in common with their counterparts in those countries’ administrations than they have with us and our representatives, the MPs.
The continuing befuddlement about Brexit, hard Brexit, soft Brexit, no Brexit, or a little bit of Brexit, but not really – that is what they are working on so hard, feeding their friends in the MSM. Obviously they are not at all working on real Brexit, the Brexit we voted for!
What we really need is a concerted action to shine bright lights into these secretive corridors of power.
We must insist that the Mandarins become our “civil servants” again. After all, we pay for them, as we pay for the Ministers and MPs.
We the people are the sovereign, not Parliament and especially not the faceless, unelected Mandarins of Whitehall.
It’s time we reminded them all of that fact!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*) It is of course entirely possible that David Davis is using obfuscation to confuse the Remoaner enemies at home and in Brussels …
This is right. The Brexit vote for me wasn’t just about getting out of the EU it was also about draining the swamp of Westminster and getting rid of all those sycophantic EU lot in that place and replacing them with people who would work for the British people!
Thank you Vivian,
Your article hits to the heart of how personal careerist self interest and contempt for the taxpayers has resulted in the obvious institutional incompetence we now come to expect as ‘normal’. The adjective ‘parasitical’, I would argue, is appropriate to these ‘Mandarins’.
Donald J Trump was elected, partly, because he promised to ‘Drain the Swamp’. We have need of such a clean up in Britain. UKIP need policy offers to address these phenomena of institutional, incompetence – not just in Whitehall I might add!
Regards
James Dalton
Thanks, James. This parasitism pervading all institutions, especially those relying on vast inputs of taxpayers’ money – from Al Beeb to any NGO and ‘charidee’ – illustrates well how the ideology of ‘self before institution/party before country’ has become the norm.
Perhaps a new sort of puritanism – this time from the ‘right’ – is needed to achieve any change at all.
It’s another thing which is up to us …
Terrific article Viv (as in terrifying)
All the commentators have got it right and we all know there isn`t a hope of our terminating this (as Panmelia rightly says); self perpetuating, I would add oligarchy – they truly are a tribe of self aggrandising parasites
However………..they, in general, are our children, we are said to get the governments we deserve so could it be that we are pre-conditioning a race of civil servants?.
Since the pen is mightier than the sword isn`t it a method of self preservation that we bring children up to major in Jaw-Jaw not War-War?.
What hope of change is there? who runs the country when parliament is on holiday? when Ministers come and go (even of the great offices of state) they can imbibe all the briefs in the world, but these civil servants and their predecessors have centuries of information and procedure behind them who better than them to tell you where you are going – they know where we have been (in spades)
But this is a brand new situation, we have never lost our sovereignty before and so there is no endemic Civil Service methodology for regaining it. The big problem is that the Civil Service instinct is conservative – the object is to wrest by sheer force if necessary freedom from the grasping hands of this illegitimate, duplicitous, vicious, filthy conservative bureaucracy , I`m not sure May and her cohorts have got the devil necessary to go in for the kill, but it certainly is only going to be achieved by the sword not the pen and certainly won`t be helped by the West Minster pen pushers.
“Haven’t we heard over the years Ministers telling the Commons that there is nothing they can do when it comes to EU directives and laws affecting our lives?”
Perhaps ministers and other politicians should remind themselves of the old saying that Parliament can do anything except change a man into a woman. (And with recent advances in technology, even that exception may have disappeared).
Knuckling under to their civil servants is cowardice, and deserving of deselection. We the people are sovereign (with apologies to Her Gracious Majesty the Queen); and our servants in Parliament had better do what we tell them to.
Yet another reason for government to require its ministers to have some relevant professional experience and qualifications; then they could spend less time blowing hot air in the HoC and actually manage their departments.
As for the mandarins it is clearly well past time for a clear out, peraps best accomplished by the suggestion of Man in a Shed.
Mandarins, major and minor, live in the leafy suburbs of London and a popular one is the ultra middle class enclave of Richmond of recent by-election fame. It is commutable to and from Charing Cross Station which is just a walk up Whitehall for mandarins hence its popularity. Richmond was 70% remain so they breathe europhilia at home as well as at work.
The interesting thing is : the present crop of top Mandarins, ie men ( mostly ) in their 50’s, will only be able to reside in Richmond for historical reasons – ie because 25 years ago it was still just about possible to purchase a house, or decent flat, there on an upwardly mobile Whitehall civil servant’s income, at least if supplemented by that of a spouse.
No current civil servant in her late 20s or 30s will have any prospect whatever of moving out of her parents’ house schoolgirl bedroom.
Perhaps when the catastrophe of mass uncontrolled immigration ( aided and abetted throughout the last 20 years by the Sir Humphreys unable to think outside the Guardianista / BBC / LeftLiberal Consensus ) at last impinges on the class who created it, and indeed STILL AT THIS WRITING indulge and continue it, we might see some inkling of a dawning realization of the need to change the policy ????
This dawning realization would be helped into existence by a substantial ( I mean three figures ) influx of UKIP MPs at the next General Election, so I hope very much that such will be Paul Nuttall’s declared ambition, and not his current , over cautious, but self fulfilling, aspiration for ‘double figures’ of UKIP MPs.
http://www.lawyersforbritain.org
http://www.ukipdaily.com/proposed-policies-ukips-leadership-membership-consider-part-one/
The State has no civil servants trained to negotiate bilateral trade treaties. It hasn’t needed any for the past 40 years because it hasn’t had the power to negotiate. All we can expect from the politicians is what the civil servants tell them, namely waffly variations on the themes of “All very complicated,” and “Can’t be done”.
Especially “Can’t be done” – the Whitehall lot always finds a huge number of reasons for why something cannot be done, while nearly never finding any reasons for doing something. Unless it’s in the EU/Brussels playbook, of course …
I used to have an answer to ‘just can’t be done’.
It went like this:
JFDI
At that point, I had better go back to my library…
Then they need to co-opt negotiators from the private sector who deal with complex contracts every working day.
Man in a Shed,
I will second your recommendation and will hope to see to see it very soon in our UKIP manifesto. This is a disease that needs to be brought into the light.
An excellent and timely article by Vivien.
It plays to my theory of a Metropolitan Elite which has Internationalised.
One big club, so big in fact that nobody really knows what is going on. None of these people has any experience whatsoever of making money – in fact they could not run a whelk stall.
The problem is that the corporations and banks are also run by people who have not got the slightest idea as well.
There are three options, as I see it:
1.) They rant and rave but when the moment to give notice finally arrives, they all fold like a pack of cards
2.) A general election is called to decide finally who is going to prevail: the people or the aforementioned Elite
3.) Pitchforks and piano wire… Plenty of lamp-posts.
It is not impossible to envisage the likelihood of your last choice and despite my love of democracy and rule of law we may be edging towards a cliff.
By the time of the Netherlands General Election in Spring next year we may still be in the EU and with no longer a recourse to Article 50 caused by Mandarin puppet string pulling. Meanwhile the situation in France will be very hostile to the EU project and the €uro could be in tatters with ourselves be inveigled to help bail out the project to a tune of hundreds of billions (“because children are starving in Syria, Greece, Italy, Timbuktoo”).
At some point the awkward truths of 2ndWW lies will begin to circulate openly and then you can expect fireworks.
Thanks, Schrödinger’s cat: they are part of that international elite, interfering and running countries according to their wishes, but while such ‘elite’ has always existed, they did not have their hands on the levers of power as our (and e.g. French) Mandarins have nowadays.
Also, that international elite is quite happy to parade in the limelight, whereas Mandarins are extremely sensitive to light and prefer to work where nobody can see them or hold them to account.
I do like the pitchfork-and-piano-wire option …
Perceptive article.
Ultimately governmental power resides in England & Wales with the elected not the bureaucratic official:
“Civil servants advise, ministers decide”
as someone once said. The problem is that most politicians are 3rd raters who don’t exercise political office’s full orbit of authority once they possess it and allow the clerkocracy to rule the roost, working instead on climbing the greasy pole of political office title attainment and enjoying the perks and money it brings en route (increasingly so with the financial corruption that’s now in Whitehall, both among the political and clerical orders, an unwelcome malaise from the America East coast financial & political centres that we’ve contracted since the 1990’s):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/24/georgeosborne-paid-320000-delivering-speeches-america/
https://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/component/k2/item/5426-revolving-doors-revealed
Whilst the corruption may be reformable, the domination of central government by the civil service probably isn’t given the nature of our democratic system and the kind of person who is generally attracted to being an elected politician within it (I always find the spectacle of a grown man or woman walking from doorstep to doorstep at election time with a brightly coloured rosette pinned on to their chest, pretending to be interested in other people’s problems/views once every few years, & asking them at the end of the pretense to “vote for me”, amazing).
The best way to counter this bureaucratic malaise is to gut Whitehall of as much governmental power as possible and transfer it downwards to the local councils, where the voters can control it far more effectively thru the election cycle at micro-scale than they ever can by trying to engage a macro central national bureaucracy.
Perhaps it’s time to stop worrying about these people and start preparing for the fight that is coming. This is all going to end in only one very unpleasant way, time to wake up and accept it.
Sadly Flyer you may well be right; policies are needed which the politicians will never implement.
It is perhaps time to consider s politicised civil service that reflects reality, and is replaced every time the govt is replaced. This is the US system. It would be a good anti elite policy for UKIP.
Man in a Shed, your suggestion makes sense. We watch as President-Elect Trump selects his spokesmen, advisors and staff, presumably all willing to work with him and implement his policies. He has four years to convince people to vote him back into office and if he can’t, the lot go with him to be replaced with the next President’s staff.
At least all of this is above board and if the Americans don’t like certain of the new President’s decisions, they will be aware of who is influencing him on what policies, who can be blamed and eventually got rid of.
What do we have here in the UK? Nameless, faceless members of a body with its own agenda, the Whitehall Mandarins. People with jobs for life unless they step outside the groupthink that prevails. They are supposed to be politically neutral, but who believes that? Everyone has political views and most people enjoy having influence even if it has to be secret. Tony Blair immediately set about politicising his ‘neutral’ civil servants and turning them into his private poodles.
How much respect do these mandarins have for the politicians elected by the voters? About as much as they have for the electorate I should imagine. They see politicians come and ago, but they are a self-perpetuating constant, accepting into their ranks only those will conform to the acceptable mindset.
Yes, they should be chucked out en masse after every election and their replacements publicly listed with names and photos, so that WE, THE PEOPLE know exactly who is carrying out the work our elected representatives give them to do. This would be an ideal reform to go alongside electoral reform which rids us of the unfit-for-purpose fptp system.
Like it, Man.
Wouldn’t it be good if our own hierarchy read these comment pages.
Yes, I agree.
There is an awful lot of good sense, and particular expertise, demonstrated in many ( of course, not all ) of the postings on this website.
It is a great pity that no-one in the UKIP hierarchy ( with the sole, occasional, exception of Jonathan Arnott ) seeks to respond to or engage with, this collective wisdom.
And my ‘open letter’ to Jonathan received not so much as a polite acknowledgement.
So…………perhaps time to give up, and cultiver mon jardin……
🙁