That indelible rogue civil service quote – “Arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters” – continues to do the rounds on the internet two years after it was first posted (and deleted) from the @UKCivilService account. The original post followed revelations about Dominic Cummings and Barnard Castle, but there has hardly been a day since when it hasn’t felt justified. One fan site, with 32,000 followers, is dedicated to reposting it twice a day, just to be sure.
The tweet – no one has discovered the source – seemed pertinent to that recent survey that showed escalating stress levels among MPs’ staff, with three-quarters suggesting their role was “emotionally draining” and a third describing it as “harrowing”. Those findings, which came as the government announced its brutal proposed cull of civil service jobs, reminded me of a correlation I discovered when researching a story on mental health: that the number of working days lost to “stress-related illness” in the UK – about 17m in 2021 – equated closely to the number of days lost annually to strike action in the first half of the 1980s. You might say that, as Margaret Thatcher designed, collective grievances in the workplace have been effectively privatised and outsourced to the individual.
