The Scottish parliament’s decision to ban its staff wearing campaigning lanyards may seem like a small step. But could it set a precedent for rolling back a trend for tolerating staff activism that has spread throughout the civil service in recent years?

In an email to staff, the move was justified ‘to minimise the risk of perceived bias and avoid any perception that wearing such items may be influencing our own decision-making.’ But the problem of staff activism goes further than this.

The real change came since George Floyd and the rise of trans ideology

I have recently left the civil service as a director after a 30-year career in four departments. Traditionally, civil servants understood their role as carrying out ministers’ policies quietly and efficiently, whether they agreed with them or not. If they were required to reverse policies they had put years into implementing, so be it: ministers have a political mandate and we do not.

This was an unglamorous life, which the former cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell presumably felt needed a bit of modernisation when he told civil servants we needed to have ‘passion’ for our roles, passionately implementing and passionately reversing.

Whatever the personal leanings of senior staff, the commitment to impartiality on party political grounds is strong and the top leaders pride themselves on their ability to get on with ministers from all parties. Outright partisan behaviour is genuinely frowned upon. But senior leaders have not caught up with the fact that the dividing lines are now more cultural than political, and span issues on which the civil service has plainly taken sides.

It is hard to track where this divergence began. It was obvious at Brexit. I attended a ‘high leadership potential’ scheme for director level colleagues across the service, where over 40 excellent senior colleagues regretted the outcome of the vote to my one dissent – highly improbable odds if the civil service actually represented the wider country.

But the real change came since George Floyd and the rise of trans ideology, particularly from 2017 onwards. In addition to the extraordinary training courses widely reported on, we saw Black Lives Matter lanyards and even some BLM branding. Rainbow lanyards and mixed gender toilets. And the growth of ‘pronouns in bio’ on emails – initially by choice, increasingly the subject of encouragement and subtle pressure. All over the civil service, email footers became cluttered with advertising for all sorts of HR mental health drives and motivational sayings or personal mottos on the part of some. Goodness knows what external recipients made of it all.

This is all well meaning stuff. The civil service is painfully nice – being an ‘ally’ and supportive of those we feel are disadvantaged runs right through the DNA of the organisation.

‘Bring your whole self to work’ is a cliché of civil service HR. But it comes across as gaslighting to gender critical colleagues and the dying breed of the socially conservative who know doing anything of the sort would be career limiting, particularly noticing the pronouns in the bio of the people who would oversee the disciplinary process.

Underneath all of this is the tension around who actually runs departments. The Home Office permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft reportedly told officials on a recorded call in 2021 that they should accept government policy ‘on some issues’ but on others it is for them to be ‘stewards and to think about our own role in terms of the leadership of the organisation of the Civil Service, which obviously takes account of ministerial views but doesn’t have to follow them slavishly on every particular issue’.

There is a deep ambiguity about where legal responsibility lies, and in particular a belief that the public sector equality duty in the 2010 Equality Act gives permanent secretaries an autonomous legal responsibility to promote equality in the running of their departments. This is probably why ministers have found it so hard to get departments and agencies to leave the Stonewall scheme, despite frequent instructions.

A project I will be leading for Policy Exchange will make the argument that this is an area where we need to get back to the traditional values of the civil service. Civil servants are there to serve all the public, not to lobby them, and the workplace ought to be open to people of all views and beliefs. Most of all, perhaps, ministers need to look at the whole relationship between themselves and the official machine, track the extent to which they have lost influence over it, and decide what needs to be done to reverse the trend.