Douglas Carswell's Blog

Government of the mandarins, by the mandarins, for the mandarins ....

Several months before the last General Election, this blog began to warn that one of the biggest problems a future Conservative government would face would be the Whitehall civil service.

In an excellent article on ConHome, it seems that Paul Goodman is coming to more or less the same conclusion.

Technocratic, self-serving, centralisers, the Whitehall mandarinate was never going to warm to the new model Tories, with their ideas for dispersing power outward and downward.  For all the lipservice to localism, they would never stand for making the executive more accountable. 

In short, they would do all that they could to prevent the vision David Cameron outlined in Milton Keynes, almost three years ago to the day, from becoming a reality.

And sure enough.  Many of the promised changes have not happened.  The man who wrote the speech has left Downing Street.  

"But it is the constraints of Coalition that is the problem" you suggest.  Hummm.... The Coalition explains the failure to deliver change only in so far as it provides the Whitehall machine with a ready-made excuse to not do things. 

Right for the outset, the mandarinate have been allowed to decide what does and what does not constitute part of the Coalition agreement.  Mandarins appear to have given themselves the power to adjudicate over differences of opinion amongst ministers.  

Thus has this administration been captured by the Whitehall mandarinate.  In crucial areas - Justice, Europe, macro economic policy, cyber snooping - it seems to be senior Whitehall officials, not the Cabinet, in charge.

After holding office in the early 1970s, Tory reformers came to realise that they could never achieve the changes they sought without doing battle with the National Union of Miners. 

A growing number of Conservatives are now starting to recognise that if we are to deliver the kind of reforms Britain so desperately needs, it is the vested interests of mandarins, not miners, we must confront.  

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