Civil Service

Madam Deputy Speaker, I am simply attempting to illustrate the problems that have arisen and the complaint that we make about the Government's approach—the way in which, on substantial issue after issue, spin trumps substance. They get the substance wrong. They are so obsessed with trying to get the spin and the presentation right, and doing it incompetently, that they get not only the substance wrong, but the presentation desperately wrong. On so many issues, decisions have been taken not with a view to the substantive merits of the argument, but on 42 days, on the income tax changes, on non-doms, on capital gains tax, ineffectively to try to wrong-foot the Opposition, rather than get the answer right. Far too much time is spent badly on presentation, and not enough time is spent on getting the substance right. The Government press on, claiming that they are slaving away solving people's problems, as the Prime Minister puts it, but that has nothing to do with the substantive need. Instead of the sober, steady focus on solving problems, we have seen a Prime Minister in a panic, hiring ever more spin and PR advisers to join the Downing street spin cycle. The rate of recruitment makes Tony Blair look like Gandhi. Hot on the heels of Stephen Carter from Brunswick, we saw David Muir from WPP—to direct political strategy, we are told. A few days later Nick Stace was appointed to beef up, we were told, the communications team. Mark Flanagan was named the head of digital communications at No. 10. Nicola Burdett was brought in to avoid visual gaffes—definitely a full-time job. There is effectively a weekly column in PRWeek charting the weekly appointment of new recruits to Downing street. Our contention is that in the face of the relentless focus on the spin machine, the morale of the civil service is at an all-time low. Its independence has been sapped by Ministers who have used it constantly to pursue their narrow partisan interests, rather than to solve the problems of the country.