What Keir Starmer gets wrong about Civil Servants
- Gordon Lundie
- Apr 13
- 2 min read
They are not “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” … they just don’t know the difference.
I used to be a Council Leader a few years ago – a Unitary Authority of the type being planned by Labour. My experience of senior Civil Servants was that they wanted the best for their areas – but the reality of their roles meant that they “played it safe”.
When the Government – a Tory one – wanted to change the way Social Care funding support was allocated to Councils it was going to cost us Millions of Pounds – at a time when we were already needing to make savings. I asked the Chief Exec what we could do about this.
He laughed and said “we could sue your Government”.
And I said “why not?”
We did sue – and we won – even though I had to take some difficult phone calls from senior Tory figures asking why a Tory Council Leader was suing a Tory Government. My answer was because the Government was taking money away from our Council and my job was to challenge this.
When I stood down as Council leader a few years later, in my last official meeting with the Chief Exec he thanked me for challenging our thinking on this. He repeated the words I said to him at the time – “that too often the Council does not play to win, but plays to avoid losing”. That is the challenge with Government – we don’t need a bigger state, but we do need leaders who will challenge their thinking. That must be both the civil servant and the political leaders.
