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by dxbydt
1208 days ago
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Total agreement. As a longtime anglophile, I believe the UK governance literally conforms to Yes Minister.There exists a strong bijection between any ongoing UK crisis and a corresponding Yes Minister episode. I have discovered a wonderful proof for this theorem but the HN margins are too narrow. |
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1. The civil service has been hollowed out; it is now largely reliant on external consultancies and outsourcing firms for many important functions (e.g., Crapita).
2. It’s lost power at the same time. Simon Case is the weakest cabinet secretary in living memory. The last reasonably powerful cabinet secretary was Sir Jeremy. It’s not so much that parliamentary parties are in charge—though they’re not blocked; rather, nobody is in charge at all.
3. Political advisers now no longer find their path blocked to the same extent, but end up burnt out by political events: see the farce of Cummings’ plan to hire some mathematicians ending up cancelled because he couldn’t be bothered to filter out people unironically advocating the sterilisation of the Untermenschen. Since the SPAD system is so ad hoc, it of course manages even less than the Butskellite civil service did.