Loyalty and the civil service
C.H. Sisson At least one old man wrote to The Times offering to go back to work in Whitehall, where he had operated— he did not say how many years before — in the days when civil, servants had a sense of duty. The offer is unlikely to be taken up, and no doubt his successors will manage well enough without him. Nor am I pressing my own services on the authorities; I recall that what I did was not always welcome when I was of that profession.
A strike of civil servants does, however, cause one to reflect. I think it unlikely that the service as a whole has suffered any great moral decline in recent years. Honest and industrious it must still be supposed to be, and at least as full as most occupations of what ordinarily passes for a sense of duty. Yet it is not so long ago that it was an unargued matter of fact that civil servants did not go on strike. That was understood by the least of them, and not questioned unless by some dissident persons, in their secret bosoms. Indeed it is not so long ago that it was plainly said that there was no such thing as a contract of service with the Crown, that leave was a privilege, 'subject to the exigences of the service'; for all I know pay was a privilege too — though one without which, admittedly, the offices would soon have emptied themselves. The privileges were considerable, even gentlemanly, and ordinarily accorded without difficulty, though in the decade after the war there were foolishly long hours and pay for many grades fell well below what was being paid in the world said to be `outside' — an expression indicative perhaps of a certain claustrophobia. It was not, however, these adversities, but the relative prosperity which followed the Royal Commission on Civil Service Pay — of 1956 or thereabouts — and the setting up of pie Pay Research Unit, which began that ill-considered movement. for the freedom of bureaucrats of which airand sea-ports, and even some defence establishments, are now enjoying the benefits.
Pay must have been an obsession of thei best people even when that Royal Commission was set up, for to the question whether its terms of reference should cover only pay, or pay and the whole structure of the service together, the wrong answer was given. Pay alone was to be considered. When the Royal Commission had reported, the Pay Research Unit was set up, and with it a system for determining pay which was said to be objective, colourless, tasteless, anodyne and free from flaw or dispute: there was no inquiry as to whether what was to be so painlessly paid for was worth paying for. From then on, certainly, things looked up for civil servants, and it was not until that product of foolish and disastrous times, the Fulton Committee, was set up that the modernisation — ha! — of the service was engineered. Now modernisation, believe it or not, in the sense of making things seem to accord with the dominant prejudices of the moment, is something the civil service has always been good at. The Fulton Report (1968) was a document inspired by that ethos. It was exploited by the late Lord' Artnstrong(then Sir William Armstrong) to make room for every fad of management studies, which he read up in a big way to become Head of the Civil Service, his former practical experience in that field being relatively modest. Although Arm strong was almost certainly the worst head the civil service ever had, it would be foolish at this time of day to make too much of him.
He was a fashionable man, as many of the most successful careerists in the service tend to be. In dealing with public affairs it does not do tube more than half a jump ahead of popular opinion, and a whole two jumps would be fatal. There is a sense in which this has always been so; one might think, however, that the late Sixties and early Seventies brought a new delirium, stimu lated perhaps by the 'penetration of the media, or at any rate brought a less sober tone among senior civil servants, many of whom seemed more anxious to anticipate the wilder excesses of politicians than to perform the older official role of facing them with the practical objections to the realisation of their wilder dreams.
The strength of these developments was in the fact that the capital follies of the time raged in the talking world at large, including universities, and that the civil service was merely demonstrating that it was 'with it', without inquiring too narrowly what 'it' was. 'It' brought with it, certainly, a vast inflation of senior posts, which must have meant happiness for many. The mood of the times was a euphoria with all eyes set on distant horizons, SCA it is no wonder that less and less notice was taken of what was happening underfoot. It was in these times that the notion of the civil service as a Crown service, in any sense that meant anything, unobtrusively sank from sight. Armstrong's Civil Service Department let it be known that what was really meant was the service of the government of the day. Well yes, no one had ever doubted that. But the government, it used to be thought, was Her Majesty's government, and that implied responsibilities beyond the politics of the day. This was also the time when the spectre of the Common Market, so long staggering around on uncertain feet, began Spectator 11 Apri11981 to walk more steadily until it finally sat down on top of us all and proved to be heavier than spectres are supposed to be. Whatever the pros and cons of maw bership, it must now be hard to deny that the Common Market has eaten away still further at our constitutional structure, or the remains of and such dear liberties as those of civil servants to strike are not unconnected with this. It was part of the mythology of Fulton and the succeeding times that the civil service had everything to learn from industry and commerce, and that comparabilitY in more than pay, was what was to be ainlee at. This fitted the popular delusion of the last 20 years, promoted with extraordinarY unanimity by dissidents, some Conservative theorists, churches, literary gentlemen and in general by all thinking people, that governments have no rights and indeed should not be allowed to exist, more than can be helped. Yet of course governments do exist, people now need them more rather than less than ever, and the civil service had and has large cadres of people on the whole well trained and skilled in doing what has to be done. Neither the market nor the individual conscience will, alas, entirely provide for us or ensure the conditions for us to go about our lawful occasions. However, a strong predisposition to believe that government does not matter must naturally cast doubt on the duty of obedience to it, a doubt which in time was bound to penetrate to civil servants themselves. Part of the equation of the civil service with commerce and industry was of course, what is or was called a liberalisation or attitudes towards staff relations within the service. The civil service had an earlYdeveloped and on the whole excellent system of consultation with its staff — the Whitley system — where the policies or, governments were naturally not discusseo but the concerns of the staff carrying Eller out were • canvassed in great detail. or accordance with the drift of the times — With comparability, one might say — staff relations had more and more to resemble industrial relations, unattractive though these were and disastrously though these had been handled by successive governments. 'Constitutional ideas never stand still, an it might be said never go backwards, though in which direction forwards is, is another. matter. From one point of view, the civn service strike is merely a symptom ofthe, profound reluctance of the second half or the 20th century, in the West, to admit the claims of government — not of particular policies but the very existence of it and lta continuity which, in our case, is irl the Crown. To those who do not share fill reluctance, there is something very odu about it. One might say it is neurotic, rather. like the suppressions which in their crod!,J, manifestations formerly led people to fa"' as if they did not admit the existence of sex Like sex, loyalty is not so much a virtue as practical necessity.
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