Plus ca change ...
Sir: Your issue of 3 Novenlber contained three articles which in total paint a depressing picture of contemporary Britain — Mr Mount on the wetness of water boards, Mr Waugh on the inefficiency, corruption and squalor at Heathrow and Mr Booker's account of the triumph of trade unionism over musical standards. May1 fully endorse all these articles, and add a note from my own experience?
I have been a civil servant for 30 years. In my early years I wrote clever papers suggesting new ways of extending bureaucratic empires, and from a 'poorboy' non-university background was made Assistant Secretary by the age of 35.1 then began asking why the state needed to do so much, and why it was so inefficient in what it did. I challenged union pressure to do less and less for more and more, and management's supine response to this. I criticised permanent secretaries for their obsession with the minutiae of parliamentary business and their lack of managerial nous, or even interest.
For the past 15 years my career has stagnated. It was explained that my strong commitment to cost-cutting and the reduction of state intervention was 'out of line with [Labour] Ministers' thinking'. Mrs Thatcher's campaign offered a ray of hope. While in no way sharing her faith in market values, here seemed to be a statesperson who put courage and commitment before opportunist place-seeking, and who gave some prospect of sweeping out the state stables and regarding their customers as a raison d'être rather than as an annoying interruption to union meetings.
1 can only say, with regret, that it just isn't happening. Ministers have not troubled to look for their advice beyond the same old gang of senior civil servants who allowed — indeed encouraged — overmanning and waste in previous years. Not surprisingly, the cuts options put to them are not the massive and radical ones which could be made for the benefit of the community but those cynically calculated to cause political embarrassment.
At the moment, Whitehall purports to co-operate, since the Govern ment is new and an election is a long way off. But having delayed real cuts for two to three years, it will dig in. The Government will go to the country having failed to achieve anything worthwhile; the Labour left will present a moderate face to the electorate; and we shall have a government of shop-stewards by shop-stewards.
For obvious reasons I must sign myself A Civil Servant Whitehall, London SW1
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