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Originally Posted by Pierre
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I just wasted an hour of my life for him to say - somewhere around 10 mins from the end - he found his encounters with the civil service to be professional and he didn't think they were on a crusade to subvert the Government.
He invokes Blair a number of times as some kind of shield for his own views for smaller Government/less civil servants. What struck me throughout is that seemingly neither he, nor politicians, had realistic expectations of how Government actually works.
He gives an example at the start where they looked at Government announcements over a week - 30% in the coalition agreement, and the other 70% in a 40/30 split between EU directives and things outside the coalition agreement. The EU directives, rightly or wrongly, were the constitutional arrangement at the time. The rest will be legislation or programmes that existed before that Government came to power.
The whole point of a Civil Service is to manage the transition. Governments don't come to power on day 1 with a clean slate - there will be baked in commitments and funding for programmes or projects that will date from before (and in some cases, go on after) Governments come and go. Ministers have to decide whether to stop those - civil servants can't just abandon them of their own accord.
The segment on immigration was quite funny, it seamlessly transitioned from illegal immigration to immigration and ignored that the vast majority of immigration (and thus, Conservative governments failure to control net migration) is legal migration. He almost gets to the point that politicians shouldn't lie to the electorate on the campaign, but never quite says it.