Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing
Second AC civil servant replying again:
"BSE was clearly a political failure, but if it wasn't also a Civil Service failure, you're going to have to convince me that the Civil Service wasn't also traumatized by the Egg Outrage"
You have to allow that the Civil Service is the administrative branch of government, and that all policy decisions are made by ministers. No matter what our view of a government policy, a Civil Servant's job is to keep our mouths shut about the behind the scenes stuff, and to administer the will of elected politicians. There is even a code of conduct that's part of our wider employment T&Cs that says as much, in politer terms. As individuals, all Civil Servants have opinions, have political beliefs, but it's our job to be absolutely impartial.
So any major decision goes up the tree to the relevant minister, and each night they'll get a box of documents to review and either select an option, approve a course of action, query or reject. This can be 70-200 documents per day. You may already have a view about most minister's prior knowledge of the department they head up, but now consider that after the requirements of eating, washing, sleeping, how much time does each decision get? A couple of minutes for most. Bigger policy choices will be the subject of meetings between Civil Servants and ministers and multiple policy papers. There's also the sometimes helpful, often malign influence of special advisors to give things a further stir. Often, even the minister's choices are constrained by a commitment made by some higher ranking but even more clueless minister, or an election campaign pledge. Look at the mess Labour have got into by pledging not to put up individual tax rates or NI.
There's many things that are utterly stupid that ministers choose to do, things that Civil Servants can see will not work, investments not supported by a credible business case or decisions not supported by (or even contrary to) evidence and data. Behind closed doors Civil Servants will often point that out, but the minister has absolute authority over their department, and when they make a decision it isn't within our gift to challenge. Look at Net Zero, a wildly expensive policy that has been committed to by Labour, Tories, Libdems, Greens, and parochialist parties; Yet there's no modelling of what this will actually require in terms of investment, how much it will eventually cost, nor what the most sensible way of achieving it is (and it certainly isn't solar, and probably not wind either). Think as well of the ministers who are too angry, nasty people who won't listen and just shout at their staff (a certain Tory Home Secretary for example), or are simply so stupid that they can't understand anything behind the decisions they're being asked to make (a certain Tory minister for culture, media and sport).
Taking the eggs>BSE debate, I agree, many Civil Servants will have been dismayed by the backlash, but I doubt that affected the BSE-enabling decisions. Those were driven by the intensive farming interests who wanted to turn vegetarian animals into cannibals, and were making an economic case for it - but the important point there is that started back in the 1970s, and the first known human fatality was circa 1994. Remember also that it was Edwina Currie who held out on salmonella in eggs, it was instrumental in her downfall, and it was John Gummer who was the minister feeding burgers to his daughter to show how safe they were (again, before it was recognised as transmissible to humans, but at a point when cross-species transmission had been observed). The 1970s decision was clearly wrong, but that's mostly with the benefit of hindsight. The Thatcher/Major governments' handling of it as it emerged as a problem was based on limited and unclear science, and a lack of due caution, but as already stated, it is always the minister's decision.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
