JACOB Rees-Mogg has said that civil servants should be “completely apolitical” – but they should be free to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee.
The top Tory made the comment when asked about former permanent secretaries who had put out messaging in support of Black Lives Matter on a podcast for ConservativeHome.
Rees-Mogg said that while such civil servants should “be completely apolitical”, they should be allowed to memorialise state events such as “Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday and the Queen’s Jubilee”.
He also said officials should be able to list their preferred pronouns on their work bios if they wanted to, but also mocked the concept.
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“It is not something I choose to do personally. I am a great believer in freedom of choice for people to decide what they want to do,” he said.
“If you want to put at the bottom you should be addressed as ‘your excellency’ in normal circumstances, that is up to you.
“I wouldn’t choose to do it myself and I certainly wouldn’t enforce it on people and I wouldn’t expect them to do so.”
The Brexit Opportunities Minister, who was also handed government efficiency as part of his brief, previously said he wants to cut as many as 65,000 civil servants from the government payroll.
However, even such sweeping cuts would not return the civil service's headcount to pre-Brexit levels.
There were around 384,000 civil servants working for the UK’s governments just before the 2016 EU referendum, but that number has risen consistently since then.
In September 2019, there were 419,120 full-time civil servants, with the number having risen every quarter since the Leave vote. The Department for Exiting the European Union had 40% staff turnover in 2019.
By September 2020, with pandemic pressures as well as Brexit affecting staffing requirements, there were 430,750 full-time civil servants.
The most recent figures, from September 2021, show there were 472,700 civil servants working for the UK Government. As such, even if Rees-Mogg were to slash 65,000 jobs, there would still be more than 20,000 civil servants than there were pre-Brexit.
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