Reform should target public sector unions

Forget about the ‘Cabinet Office’

Just last week the largest trade union for Civil Servants (PCS) voted to double their financial reserves in preparation for strikes to take place after a Reform government is elected – on the basis that Farage is likely to make a direct attack on the civil service once he is elected.

Danny Kruger, Reform’s head of policy has reacted to this by releasing a policy document in which he puts forward a set of changes, some of which are rehashes of old Tory policies (scrapping quangos and recruiting Top Talent from the private sector), a few which seem slightly confused (a new department to cut headcount across the Civil Service (is it Doge?)) and one that is reasonably radical the abolition of the Cabinet Office and the removal of the Cabinet Secretary (the highest ranked Civil Servant).

Probably biggest red flag that Reform have been led astray here is that Ameer Kotecha has endorsed Danny Kruger’s announcement.

Here we see Kotecha deploy the classic useless think tank strategy of claiming credit for ideas which had been percolating around the policy world when he was still in diapers, as if his ‘calling’ for the private sector to come into the civil service, performance related bonuses and for a crackdown on wayward quangos - all things that the coalition already attempted in the early 2010s under Francis Maude - was in some way influential over Kruger’s set of announcements (thus implying to potential donors that Kotecha is a person who can influence Reform).

Returning to Kruger, his set of announcements would suggest that the PCS is correct in their assessment that Farage is a threat to their membership. Which begs a much bigger question. How exactly is Reform planning to implement any of these changes if the Civil Service is prepared to go on strike as soon as they come into government?

Most people in Britain believe that The Unions were something that Thatcher dealt with in the bad old days of the 1980s, the men in Donkey jackets who disappeared around the time of the Audi Quattro. While this is mostly true of the private sector, public sector unions are just as powerful as they were in the bad old days of the brown sauce sandwiches. Public sector trade union membership has been stable for the past three decades (just under four million people) and has increased over the last few years.

It is these Unions that are much more of an obstacle to Reform than the precise arrangement of the Cabinet Office. Even if Reform was to abandon their plans to fire masses of civil servants public sector unions will still be able to block the adoption of AI automation in much the same way that RMT has successfully blocked the automation of the tube network. Reform is currently committed to automating the entire Tube Network – how they plan to do this when the RMT will simply go on strike the moment this work is announced is to be left to your imagination. These unions are also crucial organising points against technological adaptation (e.g blocking Palantir) which will only become more problematic as the political left becomes even more doggedly opposed to Technology.

One of the problems with a lot of ‘reform of government’ work is that it is generally written by ex-special advisors fresh into their first six months in a think tank who were badly treated by the civil servants in departments that they technically had power over. Most of their insights is just professional ranting, hence the monomaniacal obsession with the precise arrangement of desks in Downing Street and the availability of free biscuits there within. ‘This is how we can finally get a grip on the system’ (everything that went wrong was the fault of the civil service obstructing me). The smarter ones go straight into the private sector and write their impotent ramblings in anonymous submissions on Glassdoor.

Ministers and special advisors tend to see the public sector through a distorted lens because they meet only the crème of the crop (fast streamers who make it into a private office) and so focus on reform at an elite level (let’s make it easier to sack civil service ‘leaders’) instead of considering performance across a vast system (the Civil Service, NHS and Police combined is 3.2+ million people). When they think of a ‘civil servant’ they about people who work in prestigious departments like the Treasury in London. This means that too much intellectual power is dedicated to chasing tiny improvements and restructuring for top level departments (e.g abolish the Cabinet Office).

The special advisors and the senior Civil Servants who Kruger has access to for this consultation, most of whom will have worked in some sort of policy role will rarely have any of the ‘front-line’ experience of operational delivery within the public sector. That sort of work tends to be left to either regional managers or professionals employed by the government (e.g social workers, teachers). If Kruger is serious about reforming the public sector it is this mass of people which he needs to focus on instead of the Cabinet Office. Because these are the people who enforce dogmas around DEI across the system and they are the people whose underperformance, at scale, is making things worse. Most importantly they are the people who can completely derail your political project if they decide to go on strike.

A collective strike across the public sector will bring down a government within weeks. You cannot survive the schools shutting, the police reducing their patrols, the border staff refusing to work at airports and hospitals running at half capacity for long. There are not enough troops in the army to fill in these positions while the strikes are ongoing. For Reform it ranks with the threat posed by King Charles the Woke (who may be called upon to give his support to the strikers.)

Defeating these unions will require some guile. As a start, Kruger should shift the emphasis from mass firings to ‘recruitment freezes’ which allow you to lower the headcount over time through attrition, which as a policy is much less galvanising for public sector unions. This comes with the added benefit of avoiding DOGE-type mini disasters when politically appointed hot-heads who believe the Civil Servants responsible for Nuclear Safety are ‘blockers to Growth’ start firing the people in critical safety roles. DOGE has already been discredited by its collapse but the spectacular idiocy of Elon Musk in continuing to support the Restories in the Makerfield byelection should be the final bit of evidence that is needed to convince Reform to not only repudiate the man himself but whatever other contributions he has made to the world of politics.

Reform should also look at how they can fight back if the Trade Unions do decide on collective industrial action. As an example, they could draft emergency legislation to introduce criminal liabilities for Trade Union leaders as regards industrial action – as an example, holding the leadership of the BMA responsible for any patient deaths incurred by junior doctors going on strike in a hospital – which they can ram through Parliament quickly. They could also threaten to use an Act of Attainder to arrest and imprison the leadership of these Unions as a last resort.

The added benefit of all of this is that the average person has some idea that Thatcher was right to take on the trade union dinosaurs. There is political capital to be had from being seen to fight these far left unaccountable bodies which have Parliamentary influence (through the Labour party) and by their funding of several very unpleasant ‘charities’.

Victory against these demons of the 20^th century is also victory for progress. It will mark a doubling down on the semi successful modernisation project of the Thatcher government. Another step towards tearing up the post-war consensus which has held Britain back for more than eighty years.

Away with the welfare state. Away with levelling up. Away with the last of the Trade Unions. The future cannot wait forever.