Civil Service slandered for doing its job

There have been many silly and ill-informed commentaries out of the United Kingdom in the wake of the victory of the Brexit lobby, but none quite as stupid as that of novelist and former journalist Frederick Forsyth.

Writing in the anti-European Union bastion, the Daily Express, the 77-year-old Forsyth has urged new Prime Minister Theresa May to purge the country’s Civil Service of “blatantly partisan mandarins” who went on a “scandalous crusade” aimed at defeating the will of the people.

“Five months ago they were making plain how much they despised the rest of us from their self-arrogated superiority perches. Today they are whining it has all been so unfair. The proles have won,” Forsyth writes.

I’ll deal with that comment later, but first let’s explode the myth of Civil Service bias.

The job of Civil Servants in the UK is to serve the Government of the day. That Government, led by then Prime Minister David Cameron, had the policy of remaining in the European Union under the terms that Cameron himself had negotiated with Brussels. Thus the Civil Service followed that policy and produced statistics and information to support it.

Brexit was a lobby group, successful in the end, which put an opposite view. It had no right of access to the Civil Service and it would have been quite improper for it to have been granted.

Unfortunately Cameron muddied the water by allowing Eurosceptic Ministers in his Government to campaign for Brexit and keep their jobs. In throwing the long-held doctrine of Cabinet solidarity overboard, he gave the impression that this was a contest between equal Government groups, a standing Brexit simply did not have — perhaps the biggest of the Prime Minister’s many miscalculations.

Not content with the victory he has long campaigned for, Forsyth now demands a purge of workers who simply did their jobs. Perhaps he should read his own newspaper and other news outlets which have been consistently reporting that the Civil Service will have to go on a major recruiting drive to find the people it needs for the work of untangling the UK from the EU and facing the world as a single entity.

As an example, Britain has few trade negotiators because policy has been outsourced to the EU for the past 40 years. According to a recent report by a committee of MPs, Britain has between 12 and 20 officials “with direct knowledge of trade negotiations”.

In contrast Canada, which recently negotiated a free-trade agreement with the EU, has 830.

Where these skilled people will come from is anyone’s guess; what is certain is that they will come at a price. Every current member of the Civil Service is going to be needed, plus a significant number of recruits from the private sectors in the UK and internationally, making demands for a “clear-out” all the more laughable.

Finally, a word about Forsyth’s mocking of the pro-EU faction as “whiners” over the result of the referendum. I wonder what he and other Eurosceptics would be writing if it had been the Remain campaign that had sneaked home by 3.9 per cent?

My guess is that the whining from the columns of the Express would have reached fever pitch by now. It would be claiming the people had been hoodwinked by the scaremongering lies of all those Remain stooges, paid for by the wicked, self-interested establishment determined that the proles be put in their place.

But Forsyth would also be saying that 3.9 per cent was such a narrow margin that the fight must go on; a battle lost but ultimate victory assured.      

So perhaps the Express’s septuagenarian correspondent should be a little more tolerant of the Scots, Irish and Londoners who voted solidly for Remain and for the young professionals and skilled workers, who see their opportunities of making their mark in Europe as part of an inevitably globalising world snatched away.

And just as he would have done if Remain had won with a paper-thin majority, he should accept his opponents might consider that while the battle may have been lost, the war is still there to be won.