Good afternoon everyone and you’re very welcome to our discussion here this afternoon. The topic essentially concerns the way in which public administrations – and by extension, the public – can be protected from the populist impulse to undermine anything that gets in the way of a government intent on implementing ‘the will of the people’, be it the media, the courts, the regulators or the civil service itself.

Academic and other writing on this topic acknowledge the issue and at the heart of much of the writing is an exploration of what an independent  public administration is, or more specifically, what are the limits of civil service ‘obedience’ to the demands of any government, populist or otherwise.

There is of course no singular will of the people, but neither probably does there exist a civil service that is resolutely neutral and with no internal will or ambition of its own.

The tension between what has been called the ‘permanent government’ and the government of the day exists and has always existed even in the most liberal of democracies. That tension expresses itself in the space between the civil service obligation to implement the legislative agenda of an elected government and the civil service at times ambivalence, or, critically, perceived ambivalence, towards that agenda or parts of it.

We saw that narrative played out in Brexit, we also saw it played out during former British Prime Minister Liz Truss’ attempt to implement budgetary measures that ultimately led to her downfall, a downfall blamed by Truss on the ‘wokenomics’ of the deep state.

The failure to date of Brexit to realise all that was promised by its champions is similarly blamed by some British politicians as well as Brexit ideologues such as Nigel Farage on the so -called faceless bureaucrats actively seeking to undermine it.

The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban routinely targets Brussels bureaucrats, an unaccountable elite as he depicts them who must be faced down, a well-worn trope and not just in Hungary. Having exerted control over many of the checks and balances of power in his own country through media, electoral and other legislation, his ambitions have grown.

Throughout the democratic world, governments choose different balances as between civil servants appointed through merit -based procedures and with security of tenure, and short-term political appointees also there to advise them. It is undoubtedly true that tensions arise at times between the political appointees and the officials.

The question for today is, at what point do those normal and healthy tensions become abnormal and unhealthy, or at what point do officials become so undermined, ignored or outnumbered that a threat is posed to democratic norms and to the rule of law?

Governments can rightly say that if they have been legitimately elected on a specific agenda, then they have the right and the duty to implement that agenda with the support of their civil service.

If those policy choices are ultimately found to be flawed then it is the political system, either parliament or the next election cycle, or sometimes the judicial system, that has the right to take care of that and not ‘interference’ before that point by the civil service.

Again, that is a view broadly accepted in most democracies. Where problems arise is when a Government seeks to change the civil and political rights of its citizens, through changes to its judicial system for example, through discriminatory treatment of minorities, the control of media, restricting civil society organisations – the plethora of ways in which the populist playbook tends to be played out. Problems of course also arise when what the Government is saying simply isn’t true.

In those instances how does the public administration prevent itself from being weaponised, and even in advance of that, how can a public or civil service be developed and maintained in a way that gives it strength when governments or political leaders seek to attach it to its populist machine.