Who DO these civil servants think they are? Going on strike because they’ve been asked to go into the office three days a week? What kind of pampered prima donnas think that three days in the office is a hardship?
You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Fran Heathcote, the general secretary of the militant PCS union – which represents more than 200,000 civil servants across Whitehall – has called the demands to go into the office “Victorian”.
Is this woman auditioning to be a comedian? Or is she just living on a planet far, far away, where money grows on trees and work is magically done by fairies?
It seems that delusion runs deep in the civil service. The Office for National Statistics backed strike action against having to do two days a week in the office, with others demanding they only work four days a week but still get paid for five.
But as civil servants demand more for less, who do they think pays
for them? It’s the harder working, highly taxed, hard-pressed private sector.
It appears that civil servants are oblivious to the irony – particularly those in Defra – of only being prepared to work two days a week in the office themselves while over-
seeing a huge tax grab from farmers: people who go to work seven days a week from dusk to dawn, 365 days a year, to pay their wages.
If the civil service was working like a slick machine, with no backlogs and all the work done, then there might be an argument for working from home. But that simply isn’t the case.
Since lockdown – when slouching around at home in jogging pants, logging in to the odd Zoom meeting, and waiting for the next Amazon delivery became the norm – productivity has dropped.
The only thing on the rise in the civil service is their numbers and their pay – there are currently over half a million of them, up by more than 3.8 per cent in the last year.
We need to take a page out of President Trump’s book by getting government employees in the office five days a week and disposing of civil servants only doing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) jobs.
Sadly, Labour won’t do it. The changes that I brought in while in government, to reduce diversity numbers, ban third-party EDI
contractors, reduce costs and focus on getting a better service and more value for the taxpayer, have all been swiftly scrapped by the Labour government, which remains obsessed with quotas and appear to have money to burn when it comes to its woke agendas.
If this Labour government don’t want to follow Trump’s lead, perhaps they can follow the example of
former US President, Ronald Reagan, who sacked all the air traffic control staff when they went on strike and started again.
They won’t do it of course, but it might just be the perfect template for how best to deal with the striking civil service.
