Woke-bashing of the week: the right ramps up its never-ending war on the civil service

There is a long tradition on the British right of undermining the civil service.

Margaret Thatcher famously opened one meeting with civil servants and nationalised industry leaders by declaring: “If you were any good, you’d be working in the private sector.” Her governments sought to make the state function more like a business, fragmenting departments into semi-autonomous agencies in what officials at the time jokingly described as “Perestroika in the civil service.”

Several decades on, and the right’s instinct to remake, or simply disparage, Whitehall remains firmly intact. The targets may have changed, but the script is familiar. Where Thatcher-era critics warned of Trotskyists and bureaucratic inertia, today’s culture warriors’ rail against “woke snowflakes” and diversity workshops.

During Boris Johnson’s time in Downing Street, civil servants endured a sustained campaign of hostility from ministers, advisers and sympathetic newspapers. Dominic Cummings, in particular, made little secret of his contempt for Whitehall. He arrived promising to recruit a new breed of outsider to “shake up” the way Britain is governed, framing the existing civil service as complacent, obstructive and ideologically suspect.

This week, the Express revived the tradition with predictable enthusiasm. Splashing claims that civil servants are running a “growing list of woke workshops,” the paper pointed to Freedom of Information data showing that departments employ large numbers of internal communications staff. The Treasury alone, it reported, employs around 30 communications officials at a cost of £2.7 million a year.

The outrage was supplied by former civil servant Arthur Reynolds, who argued that many of these roles could now be performed by artificial intelligence.

“Whitehall is spending millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash talking to itself,” he complained, claiming hundreds of officials exist merely to send emails, update intranets and post staff notices.

To make matters worse, for Reynolds, many of these employees work remotely, supposedly “defeating the entire rationale for their jobs.”

“How can you assist someone effectively if you’re not in the same place?” he asked, before blasting a civil service culture supposedly dominated by endless video calls and online meetings.

And then, inevitably, comes the real grievance – diversity and inclusion. Reynolds mocked workshops on “allyship for beginners,” “dignity at work,” and celebrations for “ever more niche events,” presenting them as evidence of a bureaucracy consumed by ‘woke’ liberalism rather than serious administration.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but internal intranets are supposed to help organisations communicate, coordinate and cultivate functioning workplace cultures. And despite the fantasies of some commentators, most people would probably still prefer those systems to be run by human beings rather than algorithms generating automated emails.

Large organisations, especially those employing hundreds of thousands of people across multiple departments and regions, require internal communication systems. They require HR functions, staff coordination, training, safeguarding policies and mechanisms for resolving workplace disputes. Contrary to the tabloid fantasy, government cannot be run through a WhatsApp group and a handful of AI chatbots.

The fixation on “woke workshops” also serves a useful political purpose. It distracts from the actual causes of governmental dysfunction – chronic underinvestment, outsourcing failures and impossible workloads imposed after years of austerity.

Yes, it’s easier to blame “allyship training” than confront the consequences of hollowing out state capacity over the past decade.