Civil Service: Politicisation

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, we all remember senior civil servants openly in tears the morning after the Brexit vote, or the Civil Service union threatening to go on strike over the Rwanda scheme. Those are troubling examples of a politicised Civil Service, but I will focus on a more insidious trend that is in denial.

The Civil Service is drowning in identity and diversity groupthink. However, there is an obstinate refusal to acknowledge that a particular outlook on, for example, gender or race is political at all, let alone one that could compromise impartiality. It is hiding in plain sight. Every time you get an email with pronouns in the signature, or see civil servants wearing those rainbow progress lanyards, it is a one-sided display of an allegiance to a contentious political ideology. You might agree or disagree with the ideological positions that these markers point to, but there is no doubt that signing off “She/her” is as partisan as ending an email with the slogan “Adult human female” or “From the river to the sea”.

This is not to just blame the blob; the politicisation is perhaps the unintended consequence of policies and legislation initiated by politicians. Take the public sector equality duty in the Equality Act: by obliging public bodies to focus on staff action plans around protected characteristics, expansive and monolithic HR departments have created an internal culture dominated by EDI priorities. In typical mission-creep fashion, there is an ever-growing plethora of diversity training courses, identity-based staff networks and allyship schemes.

But inclusion does not include dissent. I have two brief examples. The relatively new Civil Service Sex Equality and Equity Network—SEEN—believes that biological sex is binary and immutable, and operates across 50 government departments, including here in Parliament. SEEN has not been welcomed to the network fold, and is regularly subject to obstruction and persistent abuse. Earlier this year the chair of SEEN, Defra lawyer Elspeth Duemmer Wrigley, faced legal action, accused of harassment for expressing at work gender-critical views such as “only women menstruate”—which is true, by the way. While that vexatious complaint was eventually dropped, Elspeth’s anonymous accuser is now suing Defra for allowing SEEN to exist at all, claiming it creates an intimidating, humiliating and offensive work environment.

In the second example, the hostility is not from a grievance-mongering colleague but is top-down. In 2023, DWP civil servant Anna Thomas won a £100,000 settlement after she was wrongfully fired by her department. Her alleged gross misconduct was that she whistle-blew about the DWP’s embrace of political ideologies, such as critical race theory, which she feared breached the Civil Service Code. Part of her complaint was an all-staff memo from the Permanent Secretary about transforming the department into an “anti-racist organisation” in the wake of the George Floyd killing. This included circulating BLM-inspired materials asking white staff to assume they were racist.

Do we really believe that such white privilege-obsessed officials or the Defra complainant provide objective and impartial advice to Ministers? Would they think to seek out diverse opinions on any given policy area? Kemi Badenoch recently revealed that when she wanted to investigate problems at the Tavistock clinic, officials repeatedly lined up the usual progressive charities, academics, NGOs and experts. The civil servants were not being malign, but their worldview is so narrowly focused that they could not conceive of why anyone would want to hear counternarratives as well. The consequence was that both officials and Ministers missed evidence of the awful harms being done to children—a terrible price to pay for this aspect of a politicised Civil Service.