Column 15 - 9.11.04

David Savvides falls on his pen

Sir Kevin Tebbit, the senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, recently said that the programmes Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister had negatively affected the reputation of the civil service in the public eye. Personally I believe this view is mistaken.

As a result of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn's sitcoms, people recognise that it is only public servants who stand between the public and the reckless plans of their elected representatives, who, once elected, then proceed to attempt to implement a whole raft of policies which weren't in their manifesto, while shelving many of those which were.

Surely the cause of civil servants' poor reputation is to be found elsewhere.

Politicians can always rely on their spin doctors to readjust public mindsets, but the civil service has no such legion at hair-trigger readiness to fire off a fuselage of press releases. Our unions and associations do a decent enough job, but cannot match this firepower.

No, Sir Kevin is aiming his guns at the wrong target, as any one of November the fifth's marching strikers will tell you. Political parties are competing in a negative bidding frenzy for the largest number of jobs they can cut.

Civil servants like us are clearly malingering penpushers - parasitical limpets, prime targets for scraping off the carbuncled underbelly of the great ship of Government so it can sail faster towards the iceberg ahead.

Civil servants appear to be the new witches and the only debate is about how many should be burnt.

We here at the Department of Humour will however not be surprised if the government finds it cannot deliver its own targets because of its job-cutting. When it preaches about corporate social responsibility to the private sector, is this what it means?

The Public and Commercial Services Union's Mark Serwotka said those who went on strike were not "your bowler-hatted Sir Humphreys" but people who keep the wheels of society turning in all sorts of essential ways who are to be sacrificed in a blood-letting ritual involving dark incantations and desperate pleas to the gods of electoral success, who mostly reside, I am told, not far from Kensington High Street.

A few issues ago I said that we in our Department were below the same axe as the rest. But, on Friday the 5th, while marching alongside those radical extremists from the British Library reading rooms, we thought: why wait for it to fall? Let us do the noble thing and fall upon our own pens (sharper than swords) first.

Perhaps, we think, by this sacrifice we can save the jobs of others more deserving than ourselves, with young babies and large families to support - after all, we are all childless and single, since no one wants to marry people as cynical as we have to be to work here.

This then, is my last column. Farewell and thank you - it's been fun and, I hope, hurt me more than it's hurt you.

Perhaps Sir Kevin has forgotten the episode "One Of Us", in which Jim Hacker relents from implementing defence cuts when Sir Humphrey presents him with the large bill he ran up in a vote-catching mission to rescue a stray dog on an army firing range.

Did somebody say, if only the real world matched this fiction?

 

This was the last column to be published before a reorganisation of Public Servant magazine pushed it out of the magazine. If you would like to see it reinstated, please email the editor or David Savvides at the address below.