Public enemies within, by David Walker

7 Mar 11
Cameron is a professional PR man and his ear is well tuned. So when he says 'enemy', as in public officials are the 'enemies of enterprise', he is well aware of the echoes of his political patron saint, Margaret Thatcher.

I’ve a question for Sir Bob Kerslake, the permanent secretary at Communities and Local Government. Are you now or have you ever been one of ‘the bureaucrats in government departments who concoct ridiculous rules and regulations that make life impossible’?

Were you, when you headed the Home and Communities Agency or when you served as chief executive of Sheffield one of those ‘town hall officials who take forever with those planning decisions that can be make or break for a business’?

I suspect you may have been, in which case I can only recommend that, as an act of selfless public service, you immolate yourself at once.

Actually, it doesn’t matter if you deny the charges, as laid by David Cameron against public servants, at the Tory spring conference at the weekend. Your own political boss, Eric Pickles, doesn't think much of public officials either, and told the party faithful so. You are, by definition, a ‘bureaucrat’ and both Tory politicians larded that phrase with as much hatred as they could. You are also paid too much - even if you are notionally on less than you were at the quango or in the town hall.

So what, Kerslake may say. Politicians sound off at party conferences. Professional public servants are used to sneering references to bureaucrats. Contumely comes with the turf.

But when contempt drips from every utterance Pickles and Cameron make about government service, leaders of public officials such as Kerslake have a problem – and probably a bigger problem than the likes of Sir Howard Bernstein, the chief executive of Manchester, who was also the butt of Pickles’ ‘humour’ at the party shindig. (It’s not the first time Pickles has singled out the Mancunian magus for spite.) In his northern fastness, Bernstein can, like Alex Ferguson, fire his team up with righteous indignation – citing Pickles’ crass partisanship and evident hypocrisy in preaching localism but intervening whenever it suits.

But what does Kerslake, so close in, tell the beleaguered officials of the Communities and Local Government Department? Please continue to put all your dedication and energy into serving a minister who thinks you are overpaid, underworked, an active impediment to the good of the nation and by the way there are still too many of you even after the planned programme of staff cuts has been implemented. Please give Mr Pickles every jot and tittle of your administrative energy even when he stands on the party platform to mock you.

The speeches several Tory ministers made used emotive language about government service. Cameron is a professional PR man and his ear is well tuned. So when he says ‘enemy’, as in public officials are the ‘enemies of enterprise’, he is well aware of the echoes of his political patron saint, Margaret Thatcher and her ‘enemies within’. Is he deliberately setting up the civil service as a scapegoat if his policies fail? That might be too conspiratorial but in the dark recesses of the right-wing blogosphere, you can already discern the line of future attack.

Perhaps, lacking other opportunities, young graduates are still queuing up to join Whitehall’s ranks. But what kind of mind-set will they need to acquire if drafted to serve an administration that talks about them and their endeavours in this way? It doesn’t sound like a recipe for sincere, enthusiastic public service.

David Walker is the former managing director for communications at the Audit Commission.

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