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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30715 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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I assure you that politicians very much do have the power to shut down departments, fire civil servants, etc.

How would we confirm that unless we see it actually happen?

The obstacle you face is not that the civil service is all-powerful. It's that your fellow citizens disagree with you.

I disagree with your assertion, and point to the numerous and well-documented instances of the civil service and other centers of unaccountable power wielding massively disproportionate influence in ways I consider malign. Illegal Undercover ops to discredit elected officials and cripple their ability to govern are actually kind of a problem in a purported democracy. End-runs around the concept of a free press are likewise a problem for similar reasons.

But in the end, this comes down to opinions. you are arguing that the system is basically fine. Other people are arguing that it's broken. You can engage with their concerns, and perhaps persuade them, or trust the system and simply handwave them, in the hopes that their critiques are unfounded. The later is, obviously, the correct answer at least some of the time, for some claims. Time will tell if this is one of those times.

How would we confirm that unless we see it actually happen?

You mean like when Margaret Thatcher abolished the Civil Service Department?

Or if that's too far in the past, how about the Department for International Development, abolished in 2020.

I swear, some of you people want there to be a shadowy cabal in charge of everything.

Thanks for these examples, I didn’t see this reply before.

As far as I can see, the departments were abolished but the functions were reallocated. This would be enough to prevent a few civil servants from unduly influencing policy but I don’t think it’s enough to prevent a unified civil service from continuing their preferred policy. Note the continued presence of Stonewall in civil service departments despite the government explicitly forbidding it, or the way that ex-Tavistock personnel seem to be cropping up again in their new gender treatment facilities.

In evidence against myself, all government departments have now been dropped from Stonewall's list of morally upstanding employers. Various components of the NHS are still on there though, as are many quangos and all of the regional governments (NI, Scotland, Wales).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/18/stonewall-removes-government-departments-top-100-employers/ (paywalled)

... Both of those examples are in the United Kingdom, and the DID was merged into the Foreign Office without many firings. The CSD reforms did cashier out 140k people from the civil service before breaking the department into new groups, and some functions were privatized, so I'll give you that one, but it was also almost forty years ago and lead to massive efforts to specifically try to prevent that exact sort of thing from ever happening again.

In theory, the UK doesn't really have a 'higher pleading' in the way the United States has the Constitution, so there's nothing explicitly preventing a future PM from changing the law and stripping a new department out. But in practice the last attempt for a significantly less robust rollback ended Poorly. Which isn't strong evidence -- there's a lot of failure in the Johnson government! And yet.

... Both of those examples are in the United Kingdom

Yes, because @Corvos was specifically talking about the United Kingdom.

Personally, though, I was thinking of the Civil Service, who I very definitely can’t vote out of office. From where I’m standing Britain has been in that closed loop for at least 20 years now.

To your other points, I'm not disputing that a serious effort to gut the civil service would face stern opposition. My point is that if the voters want it to happen, it absolutely can happen.

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