How the spirit of Dad's Army's Corporal Jones is coming to SNP government's rescue
Scotland’s civil servants may be facing one of their greatest challenges, but it’s wrong to say that ‘everything is broken’
If the Scottish Government’s most senior civil servant, permanent secretary Joe Griffin, was in the army, he’d probably be a general or a field marshal – at minimum a brigadier, we feel sure. However, it was hard not to think of the (fictional) holder of a more lowly rank as he addressed the looming black hole in the government’s finances.
Griffin warned public sector reform and the need to make £1.5 billion of savings represented “one of the biggest challenges for this generation of the public sector”. And he suggested public sector workers should embrace this new reforming mission, stop “waiting for instruction” and instead “proceed until apprehended”.
Some more flighty civil servants might interpret this as one way of saying that it’s every man, or woman, for themselves or even that “we’re doomed”.
However, Griffin is made of sterner stuff. Asked about the spiralling costs of public inquiries into policy failures and the like, he said: “I don’t subscribe to the view that everything is broken.”
So there, be reassured and, as Corporal Jones told us all in Dad’s Army, “don’t panic!”
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.