𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Britain is stagnating so you might think the Treasury would be recruiting the brightest and the best to get our economy roaring again. But no, our supposed “Rolls Royce” civil service has decided maths is racist so has taken numeracy tests out of its screening process. Funnily enough, once you remove the difficult bits from the assessment, it turns out more people pass it.

The revelation came after a freedom of information request was made by The Spectator. It was told: “The Numerical Reasoning Test was removed due to evidence of the test having adverse impact on candidate diversity. Subsequently, the levels of adverse impact decreased in the 2020 campaign.” The Treasury insists it is “complete nonsense” to say it had lowered its standards for the sake of diversity.

Sadly, it is not a surprise that our modern civil service is more worried about diversity than capability. It is a leaden and lethargic “can don’t” institution that values getting things done less than flexing its Be Kind muscles. Everyone is welcome and treated with respect, even when they really shouldn’t be.

So If practising witchcraft is your thing, head to the Department of Work and Pensions. The team will welcome your Wicca with open arms, with a special Paganism Network set up just to make sure you can bring your “whole self” to work. Among the many networks the DWP has is a group for vegans, because apparently what you do, or do not, choose to eat is something that should be discussed in a formal group at work.

The networks provide a “safe space” and allow colleagues to “come together and share lived experience”. They also allow for awareness raising about “what it is like being part of the community”. All of the department’s networks have two co-chairs and up to five committee members who receive a 10% time allowance to carry out their duties. That’s around 25 hours a week for each network.

Ameer Kotecha, a guest writer on these pages, quit the Foreign Office in March after a decade of witnessing the waste and the witlessness. He revealed how on the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, thousands of officials in the department were invited to mark World Afro Day by listening to a panel discussion that featured a director charged with matters of national security. Staff working on foreign aid refused pleas to regularly turn up to the office because they did not want to work in a “colonial” building.

The civil service employs 524,000 full time staff, the highest number in two decades. But does anyone feel they get a better service now when they are forced to interact with the state? The answer for anyone who has ever tried to call HMRC is surely no, to take just one example.

Few would argue that the country feels on the up as a result of the army of staff looking after our schools, transport, hospitals and social care and so on.

Dominic Cummings railed against The Blob and warned a “hard rain is coming” for Whitehall while he worked for Boris Johnson, but his feet were not under the table long enough to carry out his threat. When Keir Starmer became Prime Minister he believed not being a Tory would make the civil service more amenable.

But within six months he complained “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. Reform MP Danny Kruger is the latest figure planning to grip the problem and is preparing now for wholesale change ready for a potential general election win. He set up a survey to allow civil servants to reveal what really goes on within departments.

Kruger admits that the respondents were a self-selecting group, no doubt the good people tearing their hair out every day in despair at what they see. Some 69% reported that underperformance is rarely or never addressed.

One admitted: “I do f*** all. I sit and game [play video games] all day. The civil service breeds low productivity. The targets are far too achievable.” Another said it was a “disgrace and an embarrassment” that there were Foreign Office staff whose spoken English was worse than that of foreign diplomats.

Kruger has promised a Reform government would sack incompetent staff and recruit talent. Whoever wins next time will need to fix the civil service to have any chance of mending broken Britain.