The Economist (20210522) by calibre

Author:calibre
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, pdf
Tags: news, The Economist
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2021-05-20T19:54:48.107000+00:00

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This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/05/22/why-the-best-farmland-in-britain-has-become-cheap

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The civil service

Britain’s civil service remains upper-middle class

Not so much has changed since the 1960s, a new report says

May 20th 2021 |

THE KEY, thought John Fulton, was to do away with the dominance of Oxbridge-educated generalists and promote officials with technical skills. It was 1968, and Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister, worried that Whitehall was too institutionally conservative. He had commissioned the Fulton report with the aim of forging Britain into a science-fuelled meritocracy. One enraged traditionalist declared his preference to be ruled by men who had read Plato and Shakespeare rather than by nuclear scientists.

Boris Johnson also wants to turn Britain into a science superpower, and to make its government sound more like his new northern voters. The upper ranks of civil service have changed little, according to a report published on May 20th by the Social Mobility Commission ( SMC), an advisory body. In 1967 some two-thirds of the senior civil service—the officials at the very top—came from what the authors call a “high socioeconomic background”, meaning their parents worked in fields like accountancy and engineering. Today the figure is 72%. The share whose parents did working-class jobs has changed only from 19% to 18%.

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