In this episode of the podcast, we talk to the man who started it all, the guy who got it all started, and who started to make a name for himself as the guy to get rid of all the red tape and bureaucracy that's choking us all.
00:00:59.060So we wanted to do something about that.
00:01:01.340So 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.
00:01:08.280Why 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.
00:01:17.740Just as a kind of, so you set the default at less regulation.
00:01:20.700And I just remember the first meeting.
00:01:22.900I just thought we're sunk because it was, they divided all the regulations on the books, like tens of thousands.
00:01:32.160I think it was like maybe 29,000 sets of regulations.
00:01:35.060They went through diligently and put them into, we had different categories, you know, consumer protection, environmental, whatever.
00:01:42.240And we had different, and we had a process for each one.
00:01:45.760And I think we started with consumer protection.
00:01:49.120It was in Oliver Letwin's office, I believe, maybe for, yeah, Oliver Letwin.
00:01:53.440And 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.
00:02:01.920And it was supposed to be color coded for the ones we're keeping and the ones we think we can get rid of.
00:02:07.480And I remember looking at them and most of them were, I can't remember which way it was round, red or green.
00:02:11.680I said, oh, so these are the ones that we're getting rid of.
00:02:14.060No, no, no, that's what we're keeping.
00:02:15.500There's like two or three that they felt we could get rid of.
00:02:18.040So I just thought, okay, let's go through it.
00:03:00.120And 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.
00:03:08.620But, 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.
00:03:27.740And honestly, we had this whole conversation about the flapping of pajamas and going in front of a, it was mad.
00:03:41.120They, 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.
00:03:52.820And 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.
00:04:10.180And so that led to a whole process which was parodied in the media about me wanting to fire most of the civil service.
00:04:16.780But kind of yes, actually, because, not because they're doing a bad job, but because actually it shouldn't be so centralized.
00:04:23.580You shouldn't have this giant bureaucracy of just this, the tentacles reaching into every single aspect of life.
00:04:31.120It just feeds on itself, even if they've got good intentions, which they do.
00:04:34.920I'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.
00:04:43.180It's just this nightmare for people and businesses and society as a whole.
00:04:47.520Steve, you're really smiley and happy.
00:04:51.820You live in California, of course you are.
00:04:54.900But as I listen to you as someone who lives in the UK.
00:06:11.100If those are your political opinions, fair enough.
00:06:13.160But 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,
00:06:28.460then what you are doing is subverting the will of the people who have elected that government.
00:06:48.040And the theory of governance is that the politicians are elected by the people.
00:06:52.660And the bureaucracy faithfully implements what they do.
00:06:57.420But 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.
00:07:06.020But 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.
00:07:14.820I 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.
00:07:25.940You know, leaking official secrets, obstructing ministers, and so on.
00:07:29.460And there was this big hoo-ha that said, I want to put 50,000 people in jail, and so on.
00:07:40.840But the point I was making is that we shouldn't put all civil servants in a bucket.
00:07:45.860There 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.
00:07:57.300And 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.
00:08:18.480And I said, why don't you speak out about it?
00:11:47.400Because somebody thought it would be great for the economy of this depressed area near Glasgow to have these civil servants moved up there.
00:11:57.460So I say, well, wait a second, we're fighting a war.
00:12:00.660Who's going to be in the meetings with the Minister of Defence?
00:12:02.800Who's going to be in the meetings with the Foreign Office?
00:12:04.360All these meetings are happening in London.
00:12:05.420Oh, don't worry, Minister, people will always be able to fly down.
00:12:11.380Sorry, first they say they can do it on Zoom.
00:12:13.080Then I say, no, but that's not the point, right?
00:12:14.580A lot of this stuff is happening in the margins of meetings.
00:12:16.920It's not just happening on the Zoom call.
00:12:18.500Oh, don't worry, they'll be able to fly down.
00:12:20.420Then I notice they're not flying down.
00:12:22.760So then I go up to Glasgow, I'm like, what's happening?
00:12:24.880And they say, oh, Minister, we've just done a carbon audit and we've discovered that all these people were taking these flights.
00:12:33.100So we've banned anybody from taking flights down from Glasgow to London and said people can do all this stuff virtually.
00:12:41.780Now, there are two very valuable things happening here, right?
00:12:45.760Regeneration, revitalization, employment near Glasgow and climate policy.
00:12:49.740But what's lacking is what is the point of what they're doing?
00:12:55.180The 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.
00:13:02.880If 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.
00:13:12.460But our civil service machine is brilliant at prioritizing secondary issues.
00:13:19.740And taking away from the fundamental question, which is what is the most effective way of delivering what matters to the country?
00:13:27.400The thing that civil servants hate most is when they're named.
00:13:31.500They never want to be named in stories.
00:13:33.860They always want to remain anonymous, whether they're senior or junior.
00:13:37.200Particularly, they say, civil servant press officers say to journalists all the time,
00:13:40.680Oh, 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.
00:13:50.980Oh, you can't name them because they're too junior.
00:13:53.000And 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.
00:14:00.980There's no such rule. There's no such law. There's no regulation that says that.
00:14:04.740It's an ethical judgment by editors to say, does this person really have the responsibility and the authority over what they've done?
00:14:12.000And how egregious is it and how much in the public interest is it for us to name this civil servant?
00:14:16.200And the reason they don't want to be named is because they claim it's because they might be bullied or something like that.
00:14:22.240No, it's because of their career progression.
00:14:23.720And 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.
00:14:30.760That looks like they're a bit of a troublemaker or at least they've done something wrong for us to be reporting on it.
00:14:34.660And they've got to do something pretty wrong for us to actually name them if they're a junior guy.
00:14:38.140If 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.
00:14:46.000So 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.
00:14:54.220But 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.
00:15:04.820There's an organization called Scene in the civil service, which represents gender critical civil servants.
00:15:10.780It was set up in October 2022. It was the first of its kind.
00:15:15.700And 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.
00:15:24.920And this means that civil servants can generate their own network, their own group across Whitehall to talk about gender critical beliefs.
00:15:34.060And they're enabled to do this because of the Meyer Forestarter case in law.
00:15:38.020So the cabinet office agreed that they could set up this organization.
00:15:41.360There's over 700 members I've seen now across the civil service, which is very impressive.
00:15:45.060They've ran surveys of their members discussing sort of widespread bullying, harassment of civil servants for holding gender critical beliefs.
00:15:51.820Some of the stories that I've reported on have exposed some of this harassment.
00:15:55.160For 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.
00:16:03.380In another situation, a gender critical civil servant in the DWP was in a call about International Women's Day, sort of discussion about that.
00:16:12.080And she said, quote, there are two sides to the trans debate.
00:16:17.300That was used in an official investigation against her.
00:16:21.780Someone complained that that was bullying and harassment and discrimination, saying there are two sides to the trans debate.
00:16:27.540And in an official investigation by the department, she was given an official warning.
00:16:32.620And that quote was used as evidence against her as harassment.
00:16:35.540So what Sina doing is they're pushing back against this stuff.
00:16:39.440They've written to Simon Case, who's the cabinet secretary, the head of the civil service, to raise their concerns.
00:16:44.340They're meeting with senior civil servants.
00:16:45.860They 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.
00:16:59.040Now, 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.
00:17:12.440Why he's wasting any time on that, I don't know.
00:17:14.700But anyway, so Sina have done some fantastic things where they've really been pushing back internally against some of these woke policies.
00:17:21.440They found documents that they're upset about.
00:17:24.540They sent it to senior civil servants, pro-trans stuff, for example.
00:17:27.440And to give you an example, one of the things they found recently in a letter they wrote to Simon Case, agender.
00:17:34.000Now, agender is a network for pro-trans civil servants.
00:17:37.200So there's lots of different networks across the civil service.
00:17:39.220As I mentioned earlier, there's 93 networks in the MOD specifically for talking about diversity and inclusion, 14 for race.
00:17:46.420So 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.
00:17:51.500But anyway, they exist, and that's the reality.
00:17:54.140Agender is the pro-trans group in the civil service.
00:17:58.240They came up with training slides which compared gender-critical people to the KKK and racist nationalists.
00:18:13.420So they're, again, exposing these things internally.
00:18:15.940They're having those conversations, which is really impressive.
00:18:18.260On 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.
00:18:36.720It could be leftists, it could be conservatives, but generally it's conservatives.
00:18:41.000They 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.
00:18:48.460There'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.
00:18:55.840I 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.
00:19:00.400So they don't have their own organization.
00:19:01.680They don't have their own network, the anti-critical race theory.
00:19:03.800But they do speak to each other to a certain extent.
00:19:06.820They do blow the whistle on a lot of stuff that's going on in Whitehall.
00:19:10.620And again, they're having an impact externally through newspaper reports and so on.
00:19:14.500So I am, that was a very long-winded answer, but I am basically hopeful that there are some successes going on.
00:19:20.400But unfortunately, the other side of it is Labour about to come into the Parliament very, very soon, probably.
00:22:51.560That's below the average salary in the UK.
00:22:54.540It should have been, I put forward, 40,000.
00:22:57.640There was a huge mountain of resistance that I was met with from the Treasury itself.
00:23:04.160We elect leaders to enact certain policies.
00:23:08.040If 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?
00:25:46.840Could 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?
00:26:01.700So, the first job I had was in the education department and I wanted to deregulate childcare to make it cheaper.
00:26:09.680However, we've got some of the most cumbersome childcare rules in the world and we've got some of the most expensive childcare.
00:26:19.680And what you find is that no one ever says, no, we're not going to implement the policy.
00:26:24.840What they do is they take a long time about it.
00:26:28.200It's sometimes called consent and evade.
00:26:31.040So, just say, yes, minister, we'll go and look at that.
00:26:33.340We need to do a bit more work on this, blah, blah, blah.
00:26:35.740So, 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.
00:26:57.720And you find yourself ending up having to compromise to get things done quicker.
00:27:06.900This is also true of things like appointments as well.
00:27:09.480But you'll have to compromise to get things done quicker.
00:27:13.460You'll find there's a lot of opposition from the sector or the organisation you're dealing with.
00:27:19.780So, 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.
00:27:29.960So, 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.
00:27:43.120So, 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.
00:27:58.480And 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.
00:28:09.580And, therefore, a policy which would have made lives better for families across Britain, would have given them more flexibility, didn't happen.
00:28:19.000So, that's the kind of thing that happens on each policy you were looking at.
00:28:26.340There's two very big challenges for Nigel Farage, right?
00:28:41.660The moment it looks like he might be able to pull it off.
00:28:44.200But 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.
00:28:57.560The kind of stuff you saw in the 1940s.
00:28:59.440It's a more radical, more compressed period of change than even the 1980s under Thatcher.
00:29:06.620You'd have to change everything, right?
00:29:07.960Scrap tons of laws, restructure the constitution, complete a change of civil service, which is completely broken.
00:29:13.740You know, get rid of the Human Rights Act, quit the ECHR, quit all these international treaties, right?
00:29:21.040And you'd be declaring total ideological war on the blob, on the ruling dominant ideology of this country.
00:29:28.660And that's going to be very, very tough.
00:29:30.120So that is Farage's massive challenge.
00:29:34.420How 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?
00:29:47.600Like Liz Truss came along and she was crushed.