The government has announced an army of civil servants, thousands strong, is to head into the darkest provinces. White papers in future will have the tang of JB Priestley and farm subsidies the fizz of Jilly Cooper. Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby will be a Master of Foxhounds. Like all Sir Keir Starmer’s actions just now, it should be worth a few votes.
First, there is nothing new in the plan. Every government makes these token gestures of bureaucratic dispersal. Starmer is merely scaling back Rishi Sunak’s plan as chancellor in 2020, when he proposed moving 22,000 civil servants out of London by 2030. He even proposed that 400 of his own Treasury staff would move to Darlington, where a “hub” would be built to console them. They were parodied as exiles to some distant corner of empire, wondering what they had done wrong.
