The Scottish parliament’s decision to ban its staff wearing campaigning lanyards may seem like a small step, writes Stephen Webb for the Spectator. But could it set a precedent for rolling back a trend for tolerating staff activism that has spread throughout the supposedly impartial civil service in recent years?
Lorna Foreman, Holyrood’s group head for people and culture, recently wrote an email to its 560 staff warning that showing support for “social movements” and campaigns risked accusations they cannot be impartial. Banning rainbow lanyards or badges was justified, she added, “to minimise the risk of perceived bias and avoid any perception that wearing such items may be influencing our own decision-making.”
But having left the civil service as a director after a 30-year career in four departments, Stephen Webb thinks the problem of staff activism goes further than this. Here’s an extract:
Traditionally, civil servants understood their role as carrying out ministers’ policies quietly and efficiently, whether they agreed with them or not. If they were required to reverse policies they had put years into implementing, so be it: ministers have a political mandate and we do not.
Whatever the personal leanings of senior staff, the commitment to impartiality on party political grounds is strong and the top leaders pride themselves on their ability to get on with ministers from all parties. Outright partisan behaviour is genuinely frowned upon. But senior leaders have not caught up with the fact that the dividing lines are now more cultural than political, and span issues on which the civil service has plainly taken sides.
It is hard to track where this divergence began.
But the real change came since George Floyd and the rise of trans ideology, particularly from 2017 onwards. In addition to the extraordinary training courses widely reported on, we saw Black Lives Matter lanyards and even some BLM branding. Rainbow lanyards and mixed gender toilets. And the growth of ‘pronouns in bio’ on emails – initially by choice, increasingly the subject of encouragement and subtle pressure. All over the civil service, email footers became cluttered with advertising for all sorts of HR mental health drives and motivational sayings or personal mottos on the part of some. Goodness knows what external recipients made of it all.
This is all well-meaning stuff. The civil service is painfully nice – being an ‘ally’ and supportive of those we feel are disadvantaged runs right through the DNA of the organisation.
‘Bring your whole self to work’ is a cliché of civil service HR. But it comes across as gaslighting to gender critical colleagues and the dying breed of the socially conservative who know doing anything of the sort would be career limiting, particularly noticing the pronouns in the bio of the people who would oversee the disciplinary process.
Civil servants are there to serve all the public, not to lobby them, and the workplace ought to be open to people of all views and beliefs. Most of all, perhaps, ministers need to look at the whole relationship between themselves and the official machine, track the extent to which they have lost influence over it, and decide what needs to be done to reverse the trend.
Worth reading in full.
