A new Government-backed report has debunked claims that the United Kingdom Public Service is becoming more inclusive, claiming senior bureaucrats are “more posh than they were in the 1960s”.
The report said the key to Whitehall success was to have “an arsenal of Latin jokes, received pronunciation and an obsession with Twitter”.
The Social Mobility Commission (SMC), which advises Ministers on how to make Britain fairer, has said a series of unwritten rules — including having the right accent — barred many staff from moving up the ranks.
The report, Navigating the Labyrinth: Socio-economic Background and Career Progression within the Civil Service, describes a culture that favours “polish over performance”.
It said an invisible class ceiling prevented people from lower socio-economic backgrounds landing the top jobs.
The Report found that senior Public Servants were “even posher today than in the 1960s”, revealing that almost three-quarters (72 per cent) of the most senior officials were from privileged homes, up from two-thirds (67 per cent) in 1967.
More junior officers complained to the Commission that working-class accents held them back, commenting there was a “definite style of speaking” in the senior ranks.
One Public Servant said she resorted to putting on “a bit of an accent” and trying to enunciate better to improve her prospects; this, she told the Report, was “ridiculous and humiliating”.
Another worker from a less affluent background described how he felt there was a “secret code as to how to get on” while working in the Treasury, telling the commission that only those who “knew about the velvet drainpipe” could work their way up and through the Department.
The Report also heard how officials would sometimes break into Latin during meetings.
“I know that is a bit of a stereotype, but it is so real,” one Public Servant said.
“You’ll be in a Ministerial meeting and they’ll sort of talk in Latin, but they’re making what you’ll realise later is a sort of joke about Brussels that everyone sort of understands, and laughs,” the said.
The Report also revealed a preoccupation with social media site Twitter, with one senior official divulging that a common piece of feedback was that conversations focused too much on politics “and about people on Twitter that everyone’s following”.
“You know, the majority of the country are not reading these tweets; probably the entire audience for this tweet that we’re discussing at the moment is in this room,” the official said.
London, 23 May 2021
