The Privileged Adviser
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 1983
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Former Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury, Sir Douglas Wass explores the concept of authority in his series 'Government and the Governed'.
In his third Reith Lecture entitled 'The Privileged Adviser', Sir Douglas Wass explores the role of British Civil Servants. By tradition they should be neutral in their political philosophy, offer impartial advice to their political chiefs and pursue policies with energy, even when they disagree with them. In reality their definition is not so clear-cut; Ministers and civil servants often are in partnership and can only work together if there is mutual trust. That trust has now been questioned and Sir Wass asks which Civil Service reforms would strengthen it and which would weaken it.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.1 | This lecture in the series Government and the Governed, given by Douglas Was, was originally broadcast in 1983. |
| 0:11.5 | In the competition I took in 1946 to enter the civil service, the candidates were asked to give their reasons for applying. |
| 0:19.4 | Most of us gave fairly conventional answers, |
| 0:22.4 | but one, perhaps a little less orthodox with his background in the commandos, |
| 0:26.8 | said quite simply, |
| 0:28.5 | to stop the worst excesses of the Labour government. |
| 0:32.1 | The constitutional niceties of this remark, |
| 0:35.5 | and taking a rather wider canvas, |
| 0:38.4 | the role of the civil service in helping to deliver efficient and responsive government, are the questions I shall |
| 0:43.0 | be considering in this lecture. |
| 0:46.1 | Whatever the form it has taken, the civil service has played for a long time a key part |
| 0:51.6 | in the government of this country. It existed long before we had any politicians, at least as we understand the term today. |
| 1:00.3 | What distinguishes a civil servant from a politician is not only the degree of his |
| 1:05.4 | involvement in the political process, the struggle for power and office, but equally important the degree of public responsibility |
| 1:13.1 | he must accept for the acts of government. |
| 1:16.4 | Though we now try to draw a sharp distinction in this country between the politician and the |
| 1:20.6 | civil servant, the dividing line can easily become blurred. |
| 1:25.4 | In some countries, notably the United States, the senior civil servant has many of the attributes of a politician and vice versa. |
| 1:34.8 | For the past hundred years or so, we have sought in this country to sharpen the separation of the official from the politician by requiring of the official two qualities, political neutrality |
| 1:46.3 | and recruitment on the strict basis of merit. The aptness of this was argued in the Northcote-Trovelian |
| 1:54.0 | report of 1854, a report which had been prompted by public disquiet over the inefficiencies |
... |
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