Firstly, I wholeheartedly recommend that you watch the show. Both Yes Minister and the sequel, Yes Prime Minister are amongst the greatest sophisticated satires of all time. The wordplay is excellent. The acting is superlative. It is a very funny show. You can also get the books, they’re nearly as good as a faithful representation of everything that happened in the show and have their own little additions. The very first episode is a little more dull and the pixels are few - those are the only problems with quality. This is one of the BBC’s greatest achievements. I imagine many if not most here have seen Yes Minister but younger people probably haven’t.
Secondly, I think it’s interesting politically.
The premise is that of a fundamentally good-natured, albeit egotistical, indecisive and self-deceiving politician (Jim Hacker), leading the fictitious Department of Administrative Affairs facing constant suppression from the Civil Service (represented by Sir Humphrey Appleby). The bureaucrats nearly always win, assisted by Bernard, Hacker’s Private Secretary who must tread a fine line between serving the interests of the Civil Service and Hacker.
The Civil Service create a system where they get all the power to decide and total freedom from responsibility. They draft all the papers, select all the information that flows through to ministers, listen in on all the telephone calls, excel at creating media crises they can use to extract quid-pro-pro deals. Their goal is to housetrain their ministers, coax them into seeing the Department’s interests as their own interests and act as disposable political shields for any errors. When the Civil Service errs, they want Ministers to pay the price.
They’re characterized as unashamedly corrupt, firmly anti-democratic, anti-meritocratic, self-interested bunglers who appease every interest group at public expense in the name of ‘harmony’ and ‘stability’. Lovable, sympathetic bunglers but bunglers nonetheless. Government spending is, in their minds, symbolic. There is no need for a hospital to actually heal the sick, it is just a nexus where bureaucratic activities can take place. Military spending is to delude the British public into thinking Britain is defended. Education is a method used to keep unemployment statistics down and appease teacher’s unions…
This is all pretty relevant to today’s world IMO.
There’s one rather illuminating episode where Sir Humphrey has to go lay down the law on a local council run by a mad middle-class socialist white woman who threatens to refuse funding to the local police force until they’re 50% black (this episode aired on 7 January 1988). They are initially in total opposition – but there is no true ideological disagreement. Her desires are to ban ‘sexist calendars’ since it’s ‘colonialism against women’, encourage adoption of children by lesbian single mothers since ‘children should not be brought up in an atmosphere of irrational prejudice in favour of heterosexuality’, allow only free-range eggs in her borough for animal rights…
In fact, she’s prepared to allow the breakdown of law and order generally, yet draws the line at allowing true democracy (which is the other plot thread of the episode). Later in the episode she cooperates with Sir Humphrey to squelch a proposal that would make local council elections more democratic, a tactic that would weaken her power. This involved street representatives, voting communities of 200 households and selection of candidates by the whole electorate.
‘Of course they would want our policies if they could understand all the implications. But ordinary voters are simple people… The people don’t always understand what’s good for them.’ Neither she nor Humphrey believe in democracy, they seek to hollow out elections so they can implement their own chosen policies rather than let people decide things for themselves. The episode ends with them in heartfelt agreement, each decrying the other as a great loss for the militant revolution/civil service.
It’s rather prescient for them to characterize the radical left and the bureaucrats as two heads of the same anti-democratic coin, potential allies. I think it shows how little the political climate has changed in over 30 years. I was also reading P. J. O’Rourke’s writing from the late 80’s and 90’s, he identifies eerily contemporary aspects of what we’d now call wokeness, liberalism and so on.
Yes Minister is also a story of asabiyyah, where the superior coordination abilities of the Civil Service let them run rings around the politicians. They’re all of the same Oxbridge class, they can freely cooperate while poor Jim Hacker has no such ability to work with his Cabinet colleagues. Half of the Cabinet are ‘house-trained’ by the Civil Service, assimilated into their worldview. All of them are competing with Hacker for power. Hacker complains in the books that the Private Secretaries and Civil Servants generally have a great grapevine but the Minister’s network is hopeless.
Perhaps the most obsolete part of the show is that the Civil Service they portray is uniformly intelligent white male Oxford graduates who hobnob at the Opera and sneer at those who aren’t fluid in Latin or Greek. There’s one episode where Hacker tries to bring in more women, only to be successfully sabotaged by Sir Humphrey. The show gives the impression that efficient, effective women are much happier working in industry where they get things done as opposed to pushing paper around.
In terms of the writer’s political views, the show seems rather unusual. While seeking more women and less Oxford classicists in the bureaucracy, the writers also seem fairly keen on conscription and the build-up of Britain’s conventional forces, vaguely Euroskeptic. Meanwhile they seem to favour school choice, joke about the excesses of political correctness. The abiding theme is a distrust in the competence of politicians and the alignment of the bureaucracy with British interests.
The show highlights the national decline that took place in the Age of Bureaucracy. The show constantly references British decline. The pound is always plunging, there are issues with inflation and high unemployment. The state-owned national industries are failing, the economy is deteriorating from disastrous to catastrophic. The army is a joke. And yet, the Civil Servants constantly remind Bernard (who has vague leanings towards democracy) that he’s naïve:
“This is the system that made Britain what she is today!”
From their vantage point, Bureaucratic government is great. They get high salaries, inflation-proof pensions, knighthoods and honours, cushy Quango sinecures for when they retire and face no responsibility for their own errors. But for everyone else it’s disastrous – after all Britain is in gross decline throughout the period. That’s the joke they’re making.
In comparison to modern political comedies like The Thick of It or Veep, it’s much less crude. Standards for vulgarity are much lower today than they were. Yes Minister also feels more political, in that it presents actual perpetrators and conspirators behind government dysfunction. While a modern show might show government to be dysfunctional, careening from crisis to crisis, they don’t home in on a reason why things go so badly other than ‘these leaders are really terrible, stupid, malign people’. The plot threads in an episode are all cleaned up nicely by the end, there’s so sense of ‘how can these people possibly stay in government if there are all these endless disasters.’
Some clips of the best parts are here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QurCB1lCHp0&list=PLRAJSUF2MG_wI0MmTPPZOzcuEI85OKXfT
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Notes -
FWIW, I don't think this necessarily gives a completely accurate impression of the show; especially as the series go on, Hacker gets his way quite a lot; just off the top of my head, he gets one over Humphrey on defending St George's island, the national database, moving soldiers to the North, Humphrey testifying about the bugging in one of the last episodes, the phone tapping petition (in the death list episode), over that bureaucracy/waste/select committee thing, the Buranda speech/oil loan, and moreover in many episodes they are working to the same ends. The Channel Tunnel, the threatened abolition of the department etc.
So, at some points in the series, it almost approaches an even contest. And iirc, Humphrey and other senior civil servants do now and again admit that if a minister, or maybe just the Prime Minister, is really dead set on something they often can't stop it. Plus, Hacker seems to be a less competent minister than the average
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