feather wrote:
The Civil Service is the permanent bureaucracy infrastructure which carries out the policies of whichever government may be in power.
Governments change, the Civil Service remains. (Theoretically they work for the Royalty).
This is completely correct. They actually literally work for the Crown.
www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensa...hemonarchy/DG_073447
Civil servants are servants of the Crown
www.civilservant.org.uk/definitions.shtml
Civil Servants are those who are employed by the Crown
It's important to make a distinction between Senior Civil Servants and the workaday variety as well. The workaday variety work in jobcentres, or passport offices, or for HMRC, and so on. Senior Civil Servants work in Westminster and are directly involved with and answerable to government ministers. So if you were watching the BBC news and that twat Nick Robinson is going "blah, blah, blah Civil Servants say", he would be referring to these privileged, almost without exception Oxbridge-educated, career bureaucrats. When Cameron comes out and says "we need to cut public sector jobs because blah, blah, blah" then he's referring to single mothers who work part-time in the jobcentre.
Theoretically you all work for the same organisation, but in practice you need the right school tie to enter the upper echelons. Low ranking Civil Servants typically deal with the fallout from the effect all of the government's ulterior motives on their departments and ultimately the public, whereas Senior Civil Servants tend to make PR statements to newspapers and run inquiries that whitewash the Iraq war.
