TRIGGERnometry - How the Civil Service Ruined Britain

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00:00:12.580 When you let Aero truffle bubbles melt, everything takes on a creamy, delicious, chocolatey glow.

00:00:19.240 Like that pile of laundry.

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00:00:25.020 Feel the Aero bubbles melt.

00:00:26.800 It's mind bubbling.

00:00:30.000 Every government comes in and they say, we're going to cut red tape.

00:00:39.820 It's too much red tape.

00:00:40.920 Cut the bureau. 0.95

00:00:41.580 Slash bureaucracy.

00:00:42.920 And none of them do.

00:00:44.480 Like, it's just been the story.

00:00:45.900 It just gets worse and worse and worse.

00:00:47.840 Red tape, bureaucracy, and it's easy to issue this stuff.

00:00:51.260 But when you're a business trying to implement it, it's a nightmare.

00:00:53.780 It makes you a life of misery.

00:00:55.160 Waste time and money and gives you a headache. 0.99

00:00:57.160 And it's just, you know, ridiculous.

00:00:59.060 So we wanted to do something about that.

00:01:01.340 So we had this kind of approach to it, which was rather than going in like every previous government and say, well, let's try and find the things that we want to cut.

00:01:08.280 Why don't we have a different kind of mindset, which is let's review, let's look at everything and choose the ones we want to keep and assume that everything else is gone.

00:01:17.740 Just as a kind of, so you set the default at less regulation.

00:01:20.700 And I just remember the first meeting.

00:01:22.900 I just thought we're sunk because it was, they divided all the regulations on the books, like tens of thousands.

00:01:32.160 I think it was like maybe 29,000 sets of regulations.

00:01:35.060 They went through diligently and put them into, we had different categories, you know, consumer protection, environmental, whatever.

00:01:42.240 And we had different, and we had a process for each one.

00:01:44.520 And we had the meeting.

00:01:45.760 And I think we started with consumer protection.

00:01:49.120 It was in Oliver Letwin's office, I believe, maybe for, yeah, Oliver Letwin.

00:01:53.440 And we all sat around the table and the officials from that department came in with their sort of document, which was here, you know, with the list of all the different regulations.

00:02:01.920 And it was supposed to be color coded for the ones we're keeping and the ones we think we can get rid of.

00:02:07.480 And I remember looking at them and most of them were, I can't remember which way it was round, red or green.

00:02:11.680 I said, oh, so these are the ones that we're getting rid of.

00:02:14.060 No, no, no, that's what we're keeping.

00:02:15.500 There's like two or three that they felt we could get rid of.

00:02:18.040 So I just thought, okay, let's go through it.

00:02:20.080 So we went through.

00:02:21.040 And I remember we had almost the entire meeting just on one, one thing, which I remember what it was.

00:02:26.740 It was, because it was just, I just thought, I can't believe this.

00:02:29.480 It was regulations about flammable pajamas.

00:02:34.820 Yeah.

00:02:35.560 And it was a specific regulation about flammable pajamas.

00:02:39.600 I think it was either men's or women's.

00:02:42.760 I can't remember.

00:02:44.060 And I said, well, why can't this be covered in a general duty of, you know, we had this long conversation about it.

00:02:49.540 And I remember the official from the Department of, is it trade industry, I can't remember who, whatever it was said.

00:02:55.300 Well, actually, we had like half an hour discussion just on that, whether we could, whether we really.

00:02:59.420 Just on pajamas.

00:03:00.120 And it was one gender, it was either male or, I mean, I guess today you'd have to have a, that wouldn't even be, you couldn't even have that conversation about male or female pajamas.

00:03:08.160 Too triggering.

00:03:08.620 But, but it was, it was, at the end of this whole discussion about either male or female pajamas, the official, I'll never forget it, said, well, actually, to the extent that there is an interest in this from the public, I think the pressure would be to equalize it and to add regulations for female pajamas or whatever.

00:03:27.740 And honestly, we had this whole conversation about the flapping of pajamas and going in front of a, it was mad.

00:03:36.300 It was like a parody.

00:03:37.580 And that was the first meeting.

00:03:39.500 And I just thought, this is it.

00:03:41.120 They, they, they know how to sort of grind you down and the paper, there's always more of them than there are of you and they can always generate more paper and you'll never win this battle.

00:03:52.820 And that's when I came to the conclusion that the only way that you would actually do what all these governments promise, which is to have less regulation, decentralized power and so on, is to massively reduce the number of civil servants. 0.93

00:04:07.680 Or kill them. 0.98

00:04:08.400 Like, that's the only way. 0.99

00:04:10.180 And so that led to a whole process which was parodied in the media about me wanting to fire most of the civil service.

00:04:16.780 But kind of yes, actually, because, not because they're doing a bad job, but because actually it shouldn't be so centralized.

00:04:23.580 You shouldn't have this giant bureaucracy of just this, the tentacles reaching into every single aspect of life.

00:04:31.120 It just feeds on itself, even if they've got good intentions, which they do.

00:04:34.920 I'm not, you know, doubting that in each individual person that they're bad, you know, I'm not saying they're bad people with bad intentions, just the cumulative effect.

00:04:43.180 It's just this nightmare for people and businesses and society as a whole.

00:04:47.520 Steve, you're really smiley and happy.

00:04:51.820 You live in California, of course you are.

00:04:54.900 But as I listen to you as someone who lives in the UK.

00:04:57.920 Yes. 0.99

00:04:58.320 I'm fucking furious. 0.98

00:04:59.280 Well, I think you should be, actually, because this is what, OK, especially the last few years. 0.99

00:05:04.360 Look, as you said, I'm here in California.

00:05:06.080 I'm focused on not just US politics, actually California politics.

00:05:09.700 In California, you know, we're the fifth big, we're a bigger economy than the UK.

00:05:13.860 And there's a lot going wrong in California to fix, do you know what I mean?

00:05:17.880 So it's like a big thing and that's what I'm focused on.

00:05:20.020 But, you know, I obviously keep an eye on UK politics.

00:05:24.280 And it seems to me that things are really stuck.

00:05:26.940 That's what it feels like, like for years now.

00:05:29.900 And I don't want to weigh in too strongly because I don't follow it closely.

00:05:33.660 And so I may be getting things wrong.

00:05:35.180 But it does feel like you just have one prime minister after another.

00:05:41.580 And it's all like, what's actually happening?

00:05:44.460 I mean, what, you know, where's the energy?

00:05:47.460 It just feels very stuck.

00:05:49.260 Nothing really gets solved.

00:05:51.000 Some of the problems seem to get worse rather than better.

00:05:54.280 You know, and I think a lot of it is to do with this fact that the machinery of government is really broken.

00:06:01.980 And acknowledging that, I would imagine that a lot of civil servants are very left-wing or left-leaning.

00:06:09.520 Again, nothing wrong with that.

00:06:11.100 If those are your political opinions, fair enough.

00:06:13.160 But the problem comes when you see yourself as a protector or a guardian of the UK and someone comes in with a policy that they deem to be right-wing and you say you're not going to enact it,

00:06:28.460 then what you are doing is subverting the will of the people who have elected that government.

00:06:33.160 That's exactly right.

00:06:34.280 And that's what Blair felt.

00:06:35.360 I mean, you know, he said that.

00:06:37.820 And so I think he said it publicly.

00:06:40.740 I don't think I'm revealing anything sort of, you know, greatly confidential.

00:06:43.880 But it's exactly what you say.

00:06:45.780 Because that's the theory.

00:06:48.040 And the theory of governance is that the politicians are elected by the people.

00:06:52.660 And the bureaucracy faithfully implements what they do.

00:06:57.420 But if that's not the culture, and again, I don't think it's even necessarily that they may not even be aware that that's what they're doing.

00:07:06.020 But there's this sense of, it's almost grandiosity, I think, that like, well, you know, we've been here, we know how it works.

00:07:12.200 You can't possibly do that.

00:07:13.720 There's definitely a lot of that.

00:07:14.820 I remember at the last party conference, I made a joke, and I said that 10% of civil servants are magnificent, and the other 10% should probably be in prison.

00:07:25.940 You know, leaking official secrets, obstructing ministers, and so on.

00:07:29.460 And there was this big hoo-ha that said, I want to put 50,000 people in jail, and so on.

00:07:33.500 But the point I was making...

00:07:34.480 We don't have the prison places for a start.

00:07:36.760 He'd have to release sex offenders.

00:07:38.580 Definitely not doing that.

00:07:40.840 But the point I was making is that we shouldn't put all civil servants in a bucket.

00:07:45.860 There are some great people who work in our civil service, and they are more frustrated than you or I are by their colleagues who are obstructing, because they have to live with them constantly.

00:07:57.300 And I remember talking to one official who was so good, and she was complaining about the, you know, some of these diversity policies, how they were actually unmeritocratic, and how, you know, there was a scene in the civil service that was very worried about self-ID and all the pronoun stuff that they needed to get promoted.

00:08:18.480 And I said, why don't you speak out about it?

00:08:20.340 You know, I will support you.

00:08:21.500 I will give you cover.

00:08:22.360 And she said, yeah, but what happens when you're gone?

00:08:26.040 The ministers change all the time.

00:08:27.660 What if there's an election and I get a new minister?

00:08:30.820 What's going to happen to me?

00:08:32.040 There's not going to be anyone to protect me.

00:08:33.840 So we need to empower the good people.

00:08:35.860 We need to make sure that when we have stuff that needs doing, we bring the good people forward.

00:08:41.480 And we also need to be able to sack the people who are not good.

00:08:45.500 At the moment, ministers cannot sack because that creates, it affects civil service impartiality.

00:08:51.720 So the performance management system needs to change to one where people who don't perform do get sacked.

00:08:57.920 I remember asking my department how many people have re-sacked since the department started, and I was told none, ever.

00:09:05.420 And I thought that that was extraordinary.

00:09:07.840 You know, people might be encouraged to leave or voluntary redundancies.

00:09:11.320 But actually, if there are bad eggs in any organization, and that includes parliament as well, they should be removed.

00:09:17.980 You need that performance management system.

00:09:19.800 You need incentives.

00:09:21.600 And when you have the right incentives, sometimes the incentives are pay.

00:09:24.780 Sometimes it's freedom to make mistakes.

00:09:27.260 When you have the right incentives, you can have people delivering.

00:09:30.600 But I also think that we need more politics in the civil service because the civil service has already been politicized.

00:09:38.060 All of these impartial and neutral organizations, these quangos, regulators, they've all been politicized.

00:09:43.700 And politicians have been giving power away.

00:09:46.880 You know, we'll make this independent.

00:09:48.380 We'll make that independent.

00:09:49.560 And we have so little power now.

00:09:51.420 We certainly did as ministers.

00:09:52.580 I'd want to do things.

00:09:53.540 I thought, you can't do that.

00:09:54.860 You know, Bank of England, the Competition and Markets Authority.

00:09:59.120 You know, we've created legislation that's given power away to independent organizations.

00:10:04.040 And it sounded good at the time.

00:10:06.280 But actually, what it means is that the democracy is sticky.

00:10:09.960 You vote for things and it's hard to make it happen.

00:10:11.900 If it isn't to a quango, it's, you know, a court decision.

00:10:15.440 You look at what we're dealing with on borders, for example.

00:10:19.420 Endless sort of court obstruction.

00:10:21.120 You look at this Rose Bank and Jack Dorr oilfield issue.

00:10:24.320 That's courts saying, no, we want to do net zero.

00:10:27.120 We've got to get some of that power back.

00:10:29.380 Britain isn't really run by politicians.

00:10:31.420 It's run by our civil service.

00:10:32.780 Our civil service is enormous.

00:10:34.800 How's the NHS run?

00:10:36.180 It's not run by a Secretary of State for Health.

00:10:38.140 It consists of 1.1 million people.

00:10:42.860 There are 350 million GP appointments a year.

00:10:47.380 The numbers are kind of staggering.

00:10:50.720 So the only way of running a good country is by improving the quality of those people.

00:10:55.920 How they are recruited, how they are promoted, how they are trained.

00:11:02.720 And that is a 20-year process of investment.

00:11:06.520 Of really thinking about how you create a really elite professional civil service.

00:11:13.140 And that also requires some very tough conversations.

00:11:15.760 Because a lot of the things that I found as a minister that were getting in the way,

00:11:20.140 I'll give you an example, that I don't think I put in my book, but, you know, mattered to me.

00:11:25.520 And sort of illustrates some of the paradoxes.

00:11:27.540 So when I was the minister responsible for part of our effort during the Syrian war,

00:11:35.040 I discovered that my Syrian team was moved from London to East Kilbride near Glasgow.

00:11:43.740 400 miles away.

00:11:45.840 Why?

00:11:47.400 Because somebody thought it would be great for the economy of this depressed area near Glasgow to have these civil servants moved up there.

00:11:57.460 So I say, well, wait a second, we're fighting a war.

00:12:00.500 Right?

00:12:00.660 Who's going to be in the meetings with the Minister of Defence?

00:12:02.800 Who's going to be in the meetings with the Foreign Office?

00:12:04.360 All these meetings are happening in London.

00:12:05.420 Oh, don't worry, Minister, people will always be able to fly down.

00:12:11.380 Sorry, first they say they can do it on Zoom.

00:12:13.080 Then I say, no, but that's not the point, right?

00:12:14.580 A lot of this stuff is happening in the margins of meetings.

00:12:16.920 It's not just happening on the Zoom call.

00:12:18.500 Oh, don't worry, they'll be able to fly down.

00:12:20.420 Then I notice they're not flying down.

00:12:22.760 So then I go up to Glasgow, I'm like, what's happening?

00:12:24.880 And they say, oh, Minister, we've just done a carbon audit and we've discovered that all these people were taking these flights.

00:12:33.100 So we've banned anybody from taking flights down from Glasgow to London and said people can do all this stuff virtually.

00:12:41.780 Now, there are two very valuable things happening here, right?

00:12:45.760 Regeneration, revitalization, employment near Glasgow and climate policy.

00:12:49.740 But what's lacking is what is the point of what they're doing?

00:12:55.180 The point of what they're doing is they're trying to get involved in our biggest national security priority, which is fighting a war in Syria.

00:13:00.680 And they're not there.

00:13:01.800 And they're not helping.

00:13:02.880 If the number one question you're asking yourself, which is what is the most effective practical way to make a difference in Syria, it is not to move these people up to Glasgow.

00:13:12.460 But our civil service machine is brilliant at prioritizing secondary issues.

00:13:19.740 And taking away from the fundamental question, which is what is the most effective way of delivering what matters to the country?

00:13:27.400 The thing that civil servants hate most is when they're named.

00:13:31.500 They never want to be named in stories.

00:13:33.860 They always want to remain anonymous, whether they're senior or junior.

00:13:37.200 Particularly, they say, civil servant press officers say to journalists all the time,

00:13:40.680 Oh, no, you can't name that civil servant who may have done something egregious, who may have said something outrageous, who may have done something completely against political impartiality or whatever.

00:13:50.980 Oh, you can't name them because they're too junior.

00:13:53.000 And they say you can't name them because there's a rule or there's some sort of agreement between journalists and the civil service that you don't name junior civil servants.

00:14:00.980 There's no such rule. There's no such law. There's no regulation that says that.

00:14:04.740 It's an ethical judgment by editors to say, does this person really have the responsibility and the authority over what they've done?

00:14:12.000 And how egregious is it and how much in the public interest is it for us to name this civil servant?

00:14:16.200 And the reason they don't want to be named is because they claim it's because they might be bullied or something like that.

00:14:22.240 No, it's because of their career progression.

00:14:23.720 And if an employer, even in the civil service, is Googling their name and suddenly they're mentioned in an article, that doesn't look great for them.

00:14:30.760 That looks like they're a bit of a troublemaker or at least they've done something wrong for us to be reporting on it.

00:14:34.660 And they've got to do something pretty wrong for us to actually name them if they're a junior guy.

00:14:38.140 If they're senior people, it's a slightly different situation because those people have responsibility and authority and there's a stronger public interest in naming those individual civil servants.

00:14:46.000 So I think as journalists, we can have a big impact, I hope, on some of the decisions that we're making inside various Whitehall departments.

00:14:54.220 But interestingly enough, actually, the fight back within the civil service is occurring independent of journalists and independent of pressure from people like me and newspapers.

00:15:04.820 There's an organization called Scene in the civil service, which represents gender critical civil servants.

00:15:10.780 It was set up in October 2022. It was the first of its kind.

00:15:15.700 And this was following the Meyer Forestarter case, which I'm sure you guys are very aware of, where gender critical beliefs are now protected against discrimination under law, under the Equality Act of 2010.

00:15:24.920 And this means that civil servants can generate their own network, their own group across Whitehall to talk about gender critical beliefs.

00:15:34.060 And they're enabled to do this because of the Meyer Forestarter case in law.

00:15:38.020 So the cabinet office agreed that they could set up this organization.

00:15:41.360 There's over 700 members I've seen now across the civil service, which is very impressive.

00:15:45.060 They've ran surveys of their members discussing sort of widespread bullying, harassment of civil servants for holding gender critical beliefs.

00:15:51.820 Some of the stories that I've reported on have exposed some of this harassment.

00:15:55.160 For example, a gender critical civil servant was accused of holding beliefs similar to the Nazis in a call in which senior civil servants were there and said nothing to defend them.

00:16:03.380 In another situation, a gender critical civil servant in the DWP was in a call about International Women's Day, sort of discussion about that.

00:16:12.080 And she said, quote, there are two sides to the trans debate.

00:16:17.300 That was used in an official investigation against her.

00:16:21.780 Someone complained that that was bullying and harassment and discrimination, saying there are two sides to the trans debate.

00:16:27.540 And in an official investigation by the department, she was given an official warning.

00:16:32.620 And that quote was used as evidence against her as harassment. 0.63

00:16:35.540 So what Sina doing is they're pushing back against this stuff.

00:16:39.440 They've written to Simon Case, who's the cabinet secretary, the head of the civil service, to raise their concerns.

00:16:44.340 They're meeting with senior civil servants.

00:16:45.860 They recently met with the permanent secretary at the home office called Matthew Rycroft, who is what they call, it's a ridiculous name, the gender, no, no, the faith and belief champion of the civil service.

00:16:59.040 Now, just a very quick side note, Matthew Rycroft is the man in charge of our police and our border policy, and he spends time being a faith and belief and a race champion in the civil service to talk about trans issues.

00:17:12.440 Why he's wasting any time on that, I don't know.

00:17:14.700 But anyway, so Sina have done some fantastic things where they've really been pushing back internally against some of these woke policies.

00:17:21.440 They found documents that they're upset about.

00:17:24.540 They sent it to senior civil servants, pro-trans stuff, for example.

00:17:27.440 And to give you an example, one of the things they found recently in a letter they wrote to Simon Case, agender. 0.80

00:17:34.000 Now, agender is a network for pro-trans civil servants.

00:17:37.200 So there's lots of different networks across the civil service.

00:17:39.220 As I mentioned earlier, there's 93 networks in the MOD specifically for talking about diversity and inclusion, 14 for race.

00:17:46.420 So all across Whitehall, there are all of these groups, which, by the way, I don't think should exist, but they're a total waste of time.

00:17:51.500 But anyway, they exist, and that's the reality.

00:17:54.140 Agender is the pro-trans group in the civil service.

00:17:58.240 They came up with training slides which compared gender-critical people to the KKK and racist nationalists.

00:18:05.560 Now, that's totally unacceptable.

00:18:06.900 Civil servants should never say that sort of thing.

00:18:09.560 I mean, it's discriminatory.

00:18:11.040 It's bullying.

00:18:12.000 It's horrible.

00:18:13.420 So they're, again, exposing these things internally.

00:18:15.940 They're having those conversations, which is really impressive.

00:18:18.260 On the race front, and I think generally, and I know maybe you guys disagree with this, but I think generally the people who are opposed to the critical race theory and the civil service, at least in my experience, the people who approach me about these stories, tend to be more conservative-minded, less focused on, let's say, being feminists and sort of TERFs, and more focused on, you know, kind of this anti-white propaganda.

00:18:36.720 It could be leftists, it could be conservatives, but generally it's conservatives.

00:18:39.580 Those people are far less organized.

00:18:41.000 They don't have their own organization, partly because there is no protection in law for anti-critical race theory beliefs yet, and that actually could change soon.

00:18:48.460 There's some interesting legal cases that are going through the system now where that may become a protected belief under law, and I hope it will.

00:18:55.840 I think there was a recent success, I can't remember the exact details, but a recent success in one of the courts to do with that.

00:19:00.400 So they don't have their own organization.

00:19:01.680 They don't have their own network, the anti-critical race theory.

00:19:03.800 But they do speak to each other to a certain extent.

00:19:06.820 They do blow the whistle on a lot of stuff that's going on in Whitehall.

00:19:10.620 And again, they're having an impact externally through newspaper reports and so on.

00:19:14.500 So I am, that was a very long-winded answer, but I am basically hopeful that there are some successes going on.

00:19:20.400 But unfortunately, the other side of it is Labour about to come into the Parliament very, very soon, probably.

00:19:25.060 So things are going to get better.

00:19:26.400 So things, I suspect, will get a lot worse, unfortunately.

00:19:29.000 But, you know, there are some brave civil servants out there who are fighting this stuff, and I think we'll continue to do so.

00:19:33.860 Consecutive governments over decades now have absolutely not delivered on the things that they have told and promised the British people.

00:19:40.680 Why is that?

00:19:41.360 I hear various rumors, you know, the civil service ideologically just won't let it happen.

00:19:46.100 You know, the Treasury is more interested in growth than delivering on the promises about we just care about the economy,

00:19:52.060 or rather the numbers that we can then sell to the British public so much that this issue goes by the wayside.

00:19:57.940 You've been there.

00:19:59.060 You've been in charge of the department that is there to control this issue.

00:20:03.220 And you, the government, previous governments have failed to do it.

00:20:07.220 Why?

00:20:07.540 Why is it happening?

00:20:08.620 That's what so many people say to us.

00:20:10.440 Like, we keep voting.

00:20:11.500 We keep saying we want to deal with this issue.

00:20:14.120 Nothing happens.

00:20:15.000 Why?

00:20:15.180 Well, having served as Home Secretary, I think ultimately there has been a political resistance

00:20:26.240 to seriously grapple with the challenges posed by unprecedented and unprecedented levels of migration.

00:20:40.740 So, sorry to interrupt.

00:20:41.520 What does political resistance mean?

00:20:43.560 Who are you talking about?

00:20:44.360 Is it the civil service?

00:20:45.520 Is it your own party?

00:20:46.680 Is it the media?

00:20:47.820 Who is causing this not to happen?

00:20:50.580 Well, I can speak only from my own experience and what I've observed.

00:20:53.740 You know, I think that, you know, for my part, I've been very eager to deliver on that policy to lower net migration.

00:21:06.580 And technically, it's very easy to do, actually, from a home office or government point of view.

00:21:11.860 You don't need to pass a law.

00:21:13.480 You don't need to worry about human rights or the court in Strasbourg.

00:21:18.320 You don't need to get any new votes on it.

00:21:21.920 You actually just have to take an administrative and executive decision to do it.

00:21:28.220 And I had the hope that I would be able to do that.

00:21:34.560 And unfortunately, I was met with a lot of resistance from around the cabinet table.

00:21:38.540 And the prime minister, you know, didn't want to engage in this subject and didn't want to deliver on it.

00:21:46.540 You'd have to ask him.

00:21:48.160 Why do you think?

00:21:48.900 Why?

00:21:49.220 You say the cabinet table, that means more than one person, right?

00:21:52.540 So we're talking about a conservative party elected on the promise to lower migration in 2010 to the tens of thousands.

00:22:00.640 We are so far off that.

00:22:02.400 And yet you're saying people within the cabinet of that very government are not keen.

00:22:06.520 And I don't think they're bad people.

00:22:08.220 I don't think the people in the Labour government necessarily were bad people.

00:22:12.100 So the question is, why?

00:22:13.560 Is it because we just care more about importing cheap labour to staff the NHS?

00:22:18.880 And so the other departments are like, well, if you do this, we're not getting enough foreign students.

00:22:23.020 We're not going to have enough of an economic boost.

00:22:24.600 Is that what's happening?

00:22:25.460 That is effectively the wall of the character of the resistance I came up against.

00:22:31.080 So the economic departments, mainly the Treasury, would be very resistant to my proposals to cut net migration.

00:22:39.720 So, for example, on workers, you know, my proposal for over a year was we needed to raise the salary threshold.

00:22:48.420 It was 20,000, 25,000.

00:22:51.560 That's below the average salary in the UK.

00:22:54.540 It should have been, I put forward, 40,000.

00:22:57.640 There was a huge mountain of resistance that I was met with from the Treasury itself.

00:23:04.160 We elect leaders to enact certain policies.

00:23:08.040 If those policies can't be enacted because the powers that be, the forces, quote unquote, refuse to let them be enacted, I mean, do we have a democracy?

00:23:17.640 Really?

00:23:18.200 Well, it's not democratic enough.

00:23:20.300 There's no doubt about that, in my view.

00:23:22.940 But that's a very, very serious problem because...

00:23:26.160 It is a serious problem.

00:23:28.580 It's an absolutely serious problem.

00:23:31.100 And, you know, the other side of this argument, we'll talk about things like institutions.

00:23:37.160 They'll talk about, you know, tram lines that politicians should be operating in.

00:23:44.560 But what they fundamentally mean is that politicians need checks and balances against enacting things that are democratically decided.

00:23:56.160 And what we've seen, and not just in Britain, right across the free world, is we've seen a growth in the power of unelected bodies.

00:24:09.160 There's no doubt in my mind.

00:24:11.080 You know, and it's not just the Office of Budget Responsibility or the Bank of England.

00:24:15.840 It's also the Environment Agency.

00:24:17.920 It's the Climate Change Committee.

00:24:20.720 It's people who are not democratically accountable are effectively making decisions.

00:24:28.200 And I think that's a problem.

00:24:29.540 I don't think it's democratic.

00:24:30.900 It's a massive problem.

00:24:31.980 And I think as an ordinary person looking at this, which I am, I'm going, I didn't vote for the civil service.

00:24:38.420 I didn't vote for the OBR.

00:24:40.000 I didn't vote for the Bank of England.

00:24:41.520 I didn't vote for the Environmental Agency.

00:24:43.400 So, at the same time, I'm also thinking, well, the Conservative government has been in power for 14 years.

00:24:51.340 Surely they would have been aware of all of this.

00:24:53.080 Why haven't they done anything?

00:24:55.540 I don't think.

00:24:56.280 Well, so, I first got elected in 2010.

00:24:59.000 And when you get elected as an MP, you assume a lot of things about the level of power and influence you're going to have.

00:25:08.160 And those are not always true.

00:25:10.840 And, you know, I became a minister in 2012.

00:25:14.940 I was a junior minister.

00:25:18.120 I found it frustrating that it was difficult to get things done.

00:25:21.020 But I assumed it was because I was junior in the organisation that if I was a secretary of state, it would be easier to get things done.

00:25:28.940 And as a secretary of state, I was able to do some things.

00:25:33.020 But it was still the case.

00:25:35.420 It was hard going.

00:25:37.060 It was hard going implementing Conservative policies when that was not the broad view of the system.

00:25:44.380 Can you give an example?

00:25:45.860 Sorry to interrupt this.

00:25:46.840 Could you give an example where you had a policy that you wanted to be enacted and then for whatever reason it was scuppered or diluted down to the point where it was simply unrecognisable?

00:26:01.700 So, the first job I had was in the education department and I wanted to deregulate childcare to make it cheaper.

00:26:09.680 However, we've got some of the most cumbersome childcare rules in the world and we've got some of the most expensive childcare.

00:26:17.020 So, I wanted to change that.

00:26:19.680 And what you find is that no one ever says, no, we're not going to implement the policy.

00:26:24.840 What they do is they take a long time about it.

00:26:28.200 It's sometimes called consent and evade.

00:26:31.040 So, just say, yes, minister, we'll go and look at that.

00:26:33.340 We need to do a bit more work on this, blah, blah, blah.

00:26:35.740 So, what you'll find is it takes a long time to do things and often the civil servants in the department will be in touch with the so-called sector, which is generally the vested interest within which other area you're talking about, whether it's environmental NGOs or the nursery sector or whatever.

00:26:57.720 And you find yourself ending up having to compromise to get things done quicker.

00:27:06.900 This is also true of things like appointments as well.

00:27:09.480 But you'll have to compromise to get things done quicker.

00:27:13.460 You'll find there's a lot of opposition from the sector or the organisation you're dealing with.

00:27:19.780 So, in the case of the childcare reforms I wanted to do, before I even got them out, I'd had to make quite a lot of compromises.

00:27:29.960 So, they weren't as good as what I would have wanted to do and what I think is right, making them more like the system in France, for example, which is actually better than the system in Britain.

00:27:43.120 So, it's hard to describe the process, but it's all very long-winded, driven by endless layers of people having to look at things.

00:27:56.640 So, it just takes a long time.

00:27:58.480 And then by the time I'd finally got the policy out, Nick Clegg had been so lobbied by the childcare sector and by Mumsnet that he blocked the policy.

00:28:09.580 And, therefore, a policy which would have made lives better for families across Britain, would have given them more flexibility, didn't happen.

00:28:19.000 So, that's the kind of thing that happens on each policy you were looking at.

00:28:26.340 There's two very big challenges for Nigel Farage, right?

00:28:29.800 First challenge, win the election.

00:28:31.960 I mean, an astonishing thing for him to win the general election.

00:28:35.500 People are starting to speak about it as if it's normal, obvious.

00:28:37.780 It's not normal, it's not obvious.

00:28:39.580 It's a massive challenge for him.

00:28:41.660 The moment it looks like he might be able to pull it off.

00:28:44.200 But the second massive challenge is that he'd have to seize control of the British state and actually impose the sort of change, you know, once in a generation, frankly, once in a hundred year level of change.

00:28:57.560 The kind of stuff you saw in the 1940s.

00:28:59.440 It's a more radical, more compressed period of change than even the 1980s under Thatcher.

00:29:06.620 You'd have to change everything, right?

00:29:07.960 Scrap tons of laws, restructure the constitution, complete a change of civil service, which is completely broken.

00:29:13.740 You know, get rid of the Human Rights Act, quit the ECHR, quit all these international treaties, right?

00:29:21.040 And you'd be declaring total ideological war on the blob, on the ruling dominant ideology of this country.

00:29:28.660 And that's going to be very, very tough.

00:29:30.120 So that is Farage's massive challenge.

00:29:32.700 Prepare.

00:29:33.580 How can you prepare?

00:29:34.420 How can you find lots of very talented people outside of politics to bring them in so that they can effectively launch a hostile takeover of the British state after the general election and actually push through change rather than be defeated?

00:29:47.600 Like Liz Truss came along and she was crushed.

00:29:50.220 She was gone within weeks.

00:29:51.700 How do you avoid that sort of scenario?

00:29:53.360 Trump won in America, was largely defeated by the blob, by the civil service and so on.

00:30:00.520 Trump too, on the other hand, has seized control of the machinery of state.

00:30:03.940 He was very well prepared in advance.

00:30:06.260 You know, he had orders, he was just ready to sign on day one, day two, day three and so on.

00:30:10.620 That's how you do it.

00:30:12.120 But you need quality people and there's not enough quality people currently in British politics.

00:30:17.620 So we're looking for a compromise candidate.

00:30:21.640 Malleable.

00:30:22.720 Flexible.

00:30:23.460 Likeable.

00:30:24.120 No firm opinions.

00:30:25.220 No bright ideas.

00:30:26.100 Not intellectually committed.

00:30:29.340 Without the strength of purpose to change anything.

00:30:31.960 Someone who you know can be manipulated, professionally guided.

00:30:36.660 Can't leave the business of government in the hands of the experts.

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TRIGGERnometry - February 19, 2026

How the Civil Service Ruined Britain

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