The British Career Civil Service under Challenge

Abstract

For the first time in the modern history of British government it is a matter of serious public debate whether or not there should continue to be a career civil service, more particularly a career higher civil service. Important though the advent of the Conservative Government first elected in 1979 has been in bringing the matter of the career civil service to a head, discontent with the kind of service which Sir Charles Trevelyan advocated in the 1850s, and Sir Warren Fisher actually fashioned in the 1920s, for Sir Edward Bridges to celebrate later, has been rife for many years, and this discontent has been present in politicians on all sides. Fabian reformism, though, has given way to more combative attitudes generated by the revived economic liberalism which is present in the Thatcher Government, which creed threatens the bureaucratic self-interest of the career civil service, and which has helped to make that service's relationship with that Government a conflictual one. Foreign arrangements are cited in the discussion which follows about the future of the career civil service, in which it is argued that the Thatcher Government implicitly subscribes to a form of ‘capture theory’ about the role which the career civil service has come to play, with regard to which the Government's attitudes are essentially conservative.