After a hard day of woke, tofu-eating activism, many civil servants like to unwind in front of a movie. So when a colleague asked me how I felt about Labour winning the election, I couldn’t help thinking about that opening scene from Dune. You know, the one in which the oppressed indigenous Fremen people suddenly find that their obscenely wealthy overlords, the Harkonnens, have abandoned the crumbling infrastructure of the desert planet Arrakis, for something like a well earned holiday in Mustique or the Cayman Islands. Anyway, the resulting transfer of power (spoiler alert!) doesn’t go particularly well.
Dune is, of course, just a piece of space opera, but it is nonetheless a handy reminder of why, after 14 years of galloping and often otherworldly Tory chaos, it is so important that Labour are prepared for a likely return to government.
It’s easy to forget that the UK is unusual – some might say bonkers – in that the leader of the election-winning party takes possession of No 10 literally overnight. Not so in the US, which famously takes a couple of months to complete the transition process. Nor in most European countries, which (with the exception of Belgium) at least take a few weeks to hand the keys over.
But take it from someone who’s been around government since the days of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, including the first faltering weeks of the 2010 coalition government: come polling day later this year, our battered public services can’t afford anything but a smooth transfer of power.
At the heart of that process is the opposition being allowed, in advance of the election, to talk to the upper reaches of the civil service in every major government department. Early access talks are, in fact, according to the Institute for Government, an unmissable part of preparing for government. This isn’t about either Labour or the civil service trying to jump the gun. Early talks ensure that if Labour wins, critical relationships between senior officials and new ministers are already in place, enabling us worker bees to crack on with the new government’s agenda. It’s simple.
Or maybe not. Weirdly, the length of time between access talks being authorised by the incumbent government and polling day seems to have shrunk since 2010. But given the current omnicrises lashing the country, they are now urgent, as there may be less than six months before the general election.
Rishi Sunak has recently – if reluctantly – authorised those access talks. And Keir Starmer has now officially requested that they begin. But it all feels very cagey, like the opening round of hostage negotiations. We will see soon enough whether Labour has a sufficiently forensic idea about how it wants to use those talks, and how it wants to rule.
And in the meantime? As ever, in the UK’s rather informal constitutional context, this sort of stuff always seems to be at the prime minister’s discretion. Which means it is essential that Sunak is a “good chap” and doesn’t sabotage Labour’s chances of governing well.
But this Conservative government has plenty of form, and plenty of reasons to drive a horse and cart through these long held conventions. Here are my top three.
First, the general election itself. Sunak’s current shtick is that his “working assumption” is it won’t happen until November. Nobody I know is betting on anything but a May election, a scenario that the Labour frontbencher Emily Thornberry describes as “the worst kept secret in Westminster”. More persuasive is last November’s national insurance giveaway and subsequent teasers from the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, about a hefty tax cut in March that is surely calculated to buy off a large cohort of potential Tory voters a couple of months later. Add to this the prediction of a recession by the end of 2024 and a pre-summer election feels almost inevitable. For many of us, the former Tory adviser Lord Finkelstein’s proposition that Sunak should call an early election to try to prevent Labour getting a majority is an increasingly credible one. And if he can’t do that, disrupting the time Starmer has to get ready for government is surely a decent consolation prize.
Second, the attacks on the civil service are ramping up again, with the announcement of yet another crackdown on civil service “activists”. It’s the kind of McCarthyist “enemy within” rhetoric along the lines of previous tropes about an “activist civil service”. Picking up where the stooshie concerning the senior civil servant, and now Labour chief of staff, Sue Gray, left off, expect to hear more about craven officials bringing democracy to its knees by implementing Labour policies before the election has even been won. But don’t fall for it.
Finally, we have the Rwanda deportation policy. Consider the latest wheeze to change official guidance to force civil servants to choose between ignoring Strasbourg judgments halting Rwanda deportation flights (thus breaking international law), disobeying the instructions of a minister or simply resigning. Many of us agree with the union leader Dave Penman’s conclusion that government ministers “are trying to put civil servants in an invidious position by placing them between serving ministers and their professional obligations”.
In other words, there is a deliberate attempt to force civil servants to act unlawfully – which could damage our credibility with the public and create a constitutional headache that a new administration would have to spend valuable time and energy undoing.
That tactic didn’t work in the run-up to Brexit. And it won’t work now. And although civil service morale is reportedly at an all time low, know this: there is ultimately nothing the Tories can do to stop civil servants from doing the right thing, no matter who wins the election.
The author works for the UK civil service
