LONDON — Keir Starmer’s government is less than a year old, but the British prime minister is already venting his frustration at the machinery of state.
Since coming into office, the prime minister and his top ministers have repeatedly criticized the civil service, which prides itself on its impartial ability to serve governments of all stripes — but which has long frustrated ministers who complain their brilliant ideas are being blocked by the “blob” of officialdom.
Starmer has already complained that too many Whitehall officials are “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.” He’s started scrapping regulators. He’s tasked his top enforcer, Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden, with a “radical,” job-cutting civil service reform plan. And he makes a fresh intervention Thursday aimed at pitching his incumbent Labour party as radicals unafraid to challenge the status quo. It’s not quite Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw, but for a center-left government, it’s striking stuff.
The moves have already triggered angry pushback from Whitehall unions, who argue that the civil service has been stretched and under-resourced for years — and that clear direction from government ministers is what’s really needed. Starmer’s even been accused of taking a “Trumpian” turn by one union.
But the prime minister is not the first person in the job to beat up on Whitehall — with mixed success.
Margaret Thatcher
Thatcher sought to end Britain’s postwar consensus, which favored state intervention and strong trade unions. Under her tenure, key arms of the state — including nationalized utilities, transport and telecommunications — were moved into private hands.
In her first three years in the job, an average of 16,000 public sector posts a year were scrapped. Between 1979 and 1983, the number of civil servants tumbled from 732,000 to 630,000.
Her government was also more than happy to look into civil servants dubbed “subversives” and block their promotion. National Archives papers released years later show that 1,420 civil servants in Whitehall were monitored by spy agency MI5 and told to be kept away from computers and revenue collection rules amid fears about communist influence.
Tony Blair
Riding high with a huge majority in his first term (sound familiar?) Labour Prime Minister Blair spoke of “the scars on my back” from trying to reform and modernize the public sector.
He argued that public sector workers are too hung up on the idea that “if it’s always done this way, it must always be done this way” — although he wasn’t helped by his own, left-wing deputy John Prescott swiftly branding that speech “prattle.”
Out of office, Blair only became more confident in attacking Whitehall, saying there was a “genuine problem” with civil servants’ ability to change things and arguing that they can be “unresponsive” to reforms.
Gordon Brown
Blair’s successor was a creature of the Treasury, serving as chancellor for a decade (and axing civil service jobs while he was at it) before taking the top post he coveted.
Just months before the 2010 election, Brown — still dealing with the fallout of the global financial crisis and aiming to look tough on spending — slapped a pay freeze on the public sector, in a move described as “simply untenable” by the senior civil service union.
While Brown’s mantra was “prudence with a purpose,” it can’t have endeared him to officials.
David Cameron
After three Tory election defeats, Cameron was painted as a modernizer bringing the party into the 21st century — and back to power.
Less than a year into government, Cameron enraged officials when he slammed them as the “enemies of enterprise” who “concoct those ridiculous rules and regulations that make life impossible.” Blimey.
It’s little wonder his tough Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude rejoiced when the civil service fell to its smallest size since World War II by 2014 — although Brexit and Covid would later put paid to that one.
Theresa May
Theresa May was sometimes likened to a civil servant herself, but even this prime minister wasn’t immune to taking a pop at officialdom.
May complained about civil servants’ preference for jargon, saying she got “frustrated when the system wants to box everything in and produce an acronym that they can use.” She accused some officials of trying to “interpret what they think you want” rather than speaking their mind.
Still, under May — whose troubled administration was cut short by the Conservatives’ Brexit civil war — the number of civil servants employed in government once again began to climb.
Boris Johnson
There was little love lost between Johnson and the civil service when he resigned as prime minister in 2022. Former foreign office boss Simon McDonald had gone public to claim that Johnson knew much more about the record of his scandal-hit Deputy Chief Whip Chris Pincher than first claimed, a key factor in Johnson’s ouster by his own party.
But Johnson’s battle with bureaucracy started long before then. When he entered Downing Street in 2019, he brought in maverick Vote Leave campaigner Dominic Cummings as chief adviser. Cummings, an ex-special adviser, spoke about slashing departments and hiring “weirdos” and “misfits” instead of Whitehall old hands to shake things up. Cummings was a former aide to Tory Michael Gove, who had coined the phrase “the blob” to describe the shortcomings of the government machine.
At the height of the Covid pandemic, Johnson berated parts of a government machine that he said had “seemed to respond so sluggishly” to the crisis, likening it to a “recurring bad dream when you are telling your feet to run and your feet won’t move.” In the dying days of his administration he set out plans to cut 91,000 civil service jobs, although this never came to pass.
Liz Truss
No ex-prime minister has more beef with officialdom than Truss, who won over Tory members with regular attacks on a ballooning public sector — then accused it of plotting to bring her down.
The former Conservative leader has repeatedly blamed the abrupt halt to her 49-day premiership on the “deep state,” claiming that an establishment plot blocked her tax-slashing plans. Truss said the Bank of England, Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility spending watchdog had undermined her growth agenda and spooked the markets — a claim met with more than a few raised eyebrows from those who worked alongside her.
Truss has since gone stateside with her critique, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year that decisions “are not being made by politicians” and that “unelected bureaucrats” are really running the United Kingdom.
The post 7 times British prime ministers raged against the civil service machine appeared first on Politico.
