Civil Service ‘wokers’ are more interested in activism than serving the public

Every so often, it becomes apparent that ministers are as perplexed as anyone about the operations of government. Most civil service work, after all, takes place entirely without political supervision. By and large, this is acceptable – except when the Civil Service goes wildly off track and starts devoting manpower to tasks that are irrelevant or contrary to the Government's programme or beliefs.

One such example from the Coalition era was the existence of "pilgrims" – trade union officers paid a full Civil Service salary to work mostly on union work instead of government business. Lord Pickles famously outlawed the practice. But "pilgrims" now have a worthy heir: a type of employee we might dub the "staff network pilgrim" or "wokers", as opposed to workers. The Telegraph has published data from the Taxpayers' Alliance showing that some departments allow civil servants to devote an entire day of the week to workplace activism.

For some wokers, however, this may be a minimum. Take this example, which I came across recently, from an online conference or "trans summit" hosted by Pink News in May 2021, which featured a panel discussion on "leadership in the workplace" between four trans-women. One of them worked at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

The FCDO official had come out as trans in 2018 and relayed how she "suddenly felt a kind of mission to do something to help others to come out and make the workplace as trans inclusive as possible". She joined the Foreign Office LGBT+ staff network just as it was "prioritising trans awareness". She soon gained a leading role at the network and its activities began to take up more and more of her time until, she said: "I come to the office virtually or actually and really I'm motivated by doing that trans inclusion work and the actual proper job title is my excuse for being able to do all that stuff, so I've turned everything in my mind anyway on its head. I hope I just about earn my pay check every week."

If she really was only just earning her pay check, what was she doing instead? Well, outside of work, she was in 2019 campaigning to be elected as a councillor for the Green Party.

At work, she was busy celebrating the flying of the " transgender flag " over the Foreign Office. (Incidentally flying that flag would have been unlawful if the department didn't secure planning permission, and is either way a clear breach of the civil service code on impartiality. From what I can see online, it has been flown on at least three occasions since 2017 and when I asked whether the FCDO had permission, it wouldn't answer).

The FCDO official was also developing "inclusion policies" and lobbying for civil service managers to be forced to "embrace that culture". The good thing about doing this sort of activism in the civil service, she said, is "we're a big employer… it's a Soviet model that you can kind of command and control a bit, saying you know these are our people policies and these are our inclusion policies and we expect senior leaders to model those behaviours".

What sorts of behaviours? The official indicated that she thinks a worker's trans identity should be a factor in considering them for promotion. There are four people (out of 17,000) out as "gender diverse" among FCDO staff, she said, yet "we still don't have a trans ambassador".

"Our UK diplomatic service should reflect modern, diverse UK society," she said, "so the obvious lesson you draw from that is we should have trans people representing us around the world." Well, fair enough – except perhaps in countries where to do so could be illegal, dangerous or damaging to UK diplomacy. Some people in the FCDO had argued that this might not be a great idea, she said, but she wasn't worried: "I suspect dinosaurs of that sort won't get very far." As of this year, however, it seems that this particular official no longer works at the FCDO.

The Government says it wants to cut 90,000 from the Civil Service payroll . Perhaps it could start with an audit of who is actually engaged in delivering public services and who is using taxpayer-funded time to pursue other interests.