But what are they doing?

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For reasons which escape me, cutting the number of civil servants generally seems to be a popular policy. And there is no doubt that the simplistic impact of reducing the number of civil servants would be a reduction in the bill for salaries – even Reform Ltd can do simple sums like multiplying the number of people sacked by the salary they are being paid and calculating a ‘saving’. What they haven’t told us, though, is which civil servants are being sacked, and what they are actually doing at present. If they are doing nothing at all, and if they all find alternative jobs rapidly, then the projected savings are not unreasonable. Those are big ifs, though.

The reality is more complex: some of those 68,000 will join the ranks of the unemployed; that might cost less than paying them a salary, but it’s not a zero cost. Others will take their pension early, bringing forward government expenditure which might not have been expected to kick in for a few more years. Based on past experience, it would not be at all surprising if some ended up providing consultancy services to the civil service, to compensate for the lost expertise which had just been paid to walk out of the door, which would probably cost more than their salaries.

The biggest cost would be in undertaking the activities which they are currently performing. Assuming that at least some of them are actually performing a useful function, that function would still need to be performed. Maybe it would be contracted out to the private sector, enabling Farage’s mates to turn a profit. It would show as a cut in the salaries bill, but with a consequent increase in the bill for external service providers. Maybe the government would no longer provide the relevant services at all, leaving those who use them to pay private contractors directly – that would cut the government’s bills, but the end users would be worse off; instead of sharing the costs of those services across all citizens, they’d fall onto a smaller number of shoulders.

The point is that only on a very narrow view do wholesale arbitrary civil service cuts result in savings, and those savings are restricted to a single budget line. On any holistic view, those savings will be at least partly offset by increased costs elsewhere – how much and by whom they are paid is as unclear as it is indisputable. The approach seems to owe much to Elon Musk’s DOGE in the US, but the more we know about that, the more likely it is that the savings are largely imaginary, and that the exercise may even have increased costs. Cutting the number of civil servants may prove to be a popular policy with many (particularly those seduced by the false notion that only private sector activity creates wealth whilst public sector activity consumes that wealth) up to the point at which it impacts on themselves or their families. And it will. It is utterly dishonest, but then that’s only what most of us would expect from Farageists.