ABSTRACT
Senior civil servants in Britain are part of our political elite. Their status was developed over the decades following the Northcote-Trevelyan Report, and they came to play an increasingly important part in the government of the country. Indeed, they were the handmaidens of ministers. They were guided in their activities by an ideal of public service inspired by the great idealist philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hill Green. That ideal was essentially that there is such a thing as the public interest or common good, that the purpose of government is to ensure the preservation of that common good, and that those fortunate enough to have been endowed with certain intellectual capacities should set aside their own and their group interests for that purpose. Some regard this as being anti-democratic, even with totalitarian undertones, and question whether senior officials should arrogate to themselves the right to determine what the public interest is or even to think in such terms. Such critics are, of course, correct that in a democracy it is elected officials, not civil servants, who are responsible for such matters, for it is they, and only they, who are accountable to the electorate for the decisions of government. The views of political philosophers cannot be accepted absolutely as the basis for practical action in government. Questions may indeed be raised about the necessity in a democracy for appointed officials to pursue the settled will of the electorate as expressed through the ballot box. Civil servants’ ideas of the public interest have to be reconciled with the intentions of elected politicians. In other words, the necessity for accountability is also central to the notion of an ethic of public service. However, the necessity for accountability in a formal, democratic sense, does not negate the requirement for moral accountability and for public officials to act in ways which accord with such requirements. Examples from history indicate that sometimes public officials ought to exercise independent moral judgement; and the inculcation of such an independent spirit, a spirit inspired by the ideal of public service outlined in Chapter 1, was, in the past, central to socialisation
of senior civil servants in Britain. In the words of Graham Wallas, there can be ‘no feeling of disloyalty to the democratic idea in admitting that it is not safe to allow the efficiency of officials to depend on the personal character of individual representatives’ and that one of the checks on the possible failings of such representatives is ‘the existence of a permanent civil service [in which civil servants] have the right and duty of making their voice heard, without the necessity of making their will prevail’ (Wallas, 1908, 1920 edn, pp. 257 and 262).
