00:00Well at the moment you have civil servants who don't meaningfully answer to the government,
00:04who feel that ministers will change, their career prospects are best served by doing what the
00:09permanent secretary, i.e. the senior civil servant in their department wants, rather than what their
00:14minister wants. So across the political spectrum, Labour, Conservatives all complain that they can't
00:20get the Whitehall machine to do what they want. And it's a totally dysfunctional system when the
00:26state is not under the control of elected ministers. So we are going to reform the civil
00:31service code to ensure that civil servants answer meaningfully to their ministers. Also that we can
00:36bring in more political appointees to support ministers. At the moment, you know, they come
00:40a new minister, a new prime minister comes in, they can only bring a handful of quite often quite junior
00:45special advisors. And the government itself, which is the civil servants, basically say we'll take it
00:51from here, minister. We need to change that. When we get into government, if we win, we will go in
00:55with a plan and the civil servants will take their orders from us.
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