Civil-service internships won’t close the class divide

With every opinion poll confirming that Labour is haemorrhaging support to Reform UK, it’s perhaps unsurprising that UK government strategists are attempting to court the working class. Their efforts are both desperate and hilarious. Take its most recent overture: a leg-up to the civil-service internship programme. Because clearly, the good folk of Middlesbrough and Blackpool want nothing more than a handful of places on a £430-a-week summer-holiday placement in central London.

This latest wheeze is the brainchild of Pat McFadden, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a man dubbed ‘the most powerful Labour politician most people have never heard of’. His plan is to restrict civil-service internships to students from poorer families in order to make Whitehall more working class. Students who perform well on those internships can then be fast-tracked through the application process should they apply for a job after graduating. From next summer, the programme will only be available to university students from ‘lower socio-economic backgrounds’, as determined by the jobs their parents did when they were 14 years old. Last week, McFadden told the BBC: ‘We need to get more working class young people into the civil service so it harnesses the broadest range of talent and truly reflects the country.’

McFadden is not wrong to pinpoint problems with a lack of diversity in the civil service. Britain’s top bureaucrats increasingly represent only the interests of the political elite within which they are firmly ensconced. Civil servants who ‘cried’ about the 2016 vote for Brexit soon did their best to frustrate it. A 2023 report detailed how attempts to reform the civil service ‘had been met with eye-rolling, disengagement and aversion tactics’. Conservative ministers in particular often found their plans, even if popular with the public, were thwarted by a ‘cloud of resistance’ that included allegations of bullying or malpractice.

The politicised and self-interested civil service we have today is not simply a reflection of members sharing a similar class background, however. As Brexit made clear, the problem is less economic and more political: too many civil servants share the same worldview. The consensus is that Brexit is bad, the EU is good. Patriotism is bad, multiculturalism is good. Women’s rights are bad, trans rights are good. Fuel-hungry industry is bad, Net Zero is good. So entrenched is this consensus, and so confident are civil servants of their own supposed right to wield power, that the need to even consider alternative views seems preposterous to them.

Still, even if we agree the civil service could do with recruiting from a broader range of backgrounds, the problems with McFadden’s plan abound. For a start, defining ‘working class’ is not straightforward. Relying on the occupation of someone’s parents might sound objective, but the government’s categorisations seem to be based on outdated stereotypes. For example, secretaries, personal assistants and call-centre agents are described as ‘middle class’ jobs, even though many are poorly paid and insecure. On the other hand, mechanics, plumbers and electricians are deemed to be ‘working class’ professions, even though self-employed tradesmen can earn serious money. This is a ‘horny-handed sons of toil’ view of the working class that was last spotted a century ago. In any case, why should the daughter of a well-paid train driver (experienced drivers can earn over £70,000 per year) be offered an internship over the son of a call-centre agent (£15,000 to £28,000 per year)?

The truth is, there is simply no large group of talented but poor university students or graduates who are keen to enter the civil service, but held back by want of an internship. According to the BBC, around a quarter of higher-education students are from a lower socio-economic background, yet a far lower proportion of that group make it into the civil service. But these statistics mask the fact that working-class kids are less likely to be attending the high-ranking Russell Group universities, or studying the kind of academic subjects, that open doors to elite professions. Those who do are likely to have bought into the same political consensus that dominates the civil service anyway.

What working-class kids really need is not an easier ride post-graduation. They need better teachers and higher standards in schools. What keeps people from poorer backgrounds out of top jobs is the class snobbery that shows up in the low expectations of schools and teachers, in contempt for populist political sentiment and in the economic abandonment of once-proud industrial communities, now used as dumping grounds for recent migrants.

Instead of confronting these entrenched problems, quotas have become the go-to solution for social inequalities. They’ve been used to boost the number of women acting as MPs and serving on boards of directors. The armed forces, the media, the police and universities have all offered scholarships or placements based on ethnicity. In each case, this is patronising and discriminatory. Whether we’re talking about class, skin colour or sex, the assumption is that some groups cannot get on without special treatment.

Recruiting a handful of youngsters on to a Westminster internship programme will do nothing to improve the lives of people living in Rotherham or Keighley. And if Labour strategists really think this will tempt working-class voters away from Reform, then they are even more deluded than we imagined.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com/