The real opposition to the Government’s coronavirus response isn’t Labour but the hostile civil service.
COMMENT
- 22 Apr 2020, 21:12
- Updated: 22 Apr 2020, 21:21
FOR three long years our civil servants did everything they possibly could to prevent the UK from leaving the European Union.
In other words, to thwart the will of the people — and the policies of our democratically elected Government.
they almost succeeded, too.
Civil service insiders report that the organisation was, almost to a man, openly hostile to Brexit.
Derisive of the referendum.
Civil service reports into the effects of Brexit whipped up the worries.
Civil servants leaked whatever they could do to the Press.
Not least the foreign Press.
And now, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, guess what? Yup, they’re still doing it.
Britain’s top diplomat Sir Simon McDonald, one of the highest-paid people in the public sector, has tried to shaft the Government over Brexit and the virus.
He said that the Government took a “political decision” not to join an EU effort to buy protective equipment and ventilators.
This was wholly untrue, as the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, angrily made clear.
McDonald — still somehow in a job — was forced to back down.
'EU SPECTACULARLY FAILED'
Two things. First, the EU scheme has spectacularly failed to deliver anything.
Indeed — as I suggest below — the EU is coming apart at the seams over this virus.
And second, the invitation to join the scheme was sent, by those EU genii, to the wrong address. Duh.
It is becoming more apparent with every day that passes that the civil service is the biggest impediment to the UK reforming itself.
It is hostile to the Government, to the people — and deeply hostile to change of any kind.
It is a vast congregation of time-serving bureaucrats dedicated only to saving their own jobs. The Sun.