Civil Service Strike? Bring it on

Now is the summer of our discontent made wintry by flat-footed government. As the Spectator leading article put it last week: “Johnson has weighed down the economy by presiding over a government that is now 55 per cent larger than it was even in the Blair years.” So he announced 20 per cent cuts in the civil service which prompted Liz Truss to demand a 10 per cent increase in her staff and a majority of cabinet ministers to panic about a civil service strike. That was the end of that idea so far as we have heard since.

When Mrs Thatcher was faced by the near certainty of a coal strike, she stockpiled coal and told Scargill to bring it on. Johnson should learn from that. 

The absence of most parts of the civil service would actually be welcomed by the public: we want the armed forces (who would not strike) and be delighted by the rest of the MoD taking their leave. Likewise a holiday from the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, BEIS, HMRC and the rest of the Treasury, DCMS, Department for Education, DHSC (the NHS staff are not civil servants), Department for International Trade etc. etc. would be a welcome relief.  Not paying them during the strike would achieve exactly the savings we need. 

Mrs Thatcher’s lesson is preparation: we need to provide cover for the civil service we would miss–not actually that much. Firstly, we need the law the government has been talking about to allow “agency staff”, i.e. any people prepared to do the work, approved by government, to cover for strikers. We need them actually to pass the law, not just talk about it. 

The good news is that IT systems do not strike and require relatively few staff to operate them.  On some pretext or other, Mr Putin’s threats will do, a Minister should create a very small “National Emergency Service” which would be essentially a Dad’s Army to back up the civil service in the event of a major crisis with enough expertise in each of the key protected areas to keep the show on the road. The “key protected areas” would be the civil service areas the public cares about, i.e. the parts that hand out short-term money (pensions and welfare payments) and security (borders and prisons). Licences would be automatically extended for the duration of the strike. The leading banks would be expected to provide the National Emergency Service for financial matters and the armed forces could be called on for security manpower. 

Johnson’s call for a 20 per cent civil service reduction was too modest. 55 per cent would be better and we are publishing a discussion paper this week showing that the Cabinet Office headcount should be reduced by 90 per cent and be the better for it. Watch this space.