Speaking last week at an event hosted by Queen Mary, University of London’s Mile End Group, Barber said that although the civil service is full of “really talented” people, its culture sometimes reflects the fact that it was created for a time in British history when stability seemed more important than change.
“The same people who wrote Whig history invented the modern civil service,” he said, explaining that Whigs saw British history as “a very, very slow improvement over several hundred years” followed by a period in which everything had been a struggle.
“If that’s your mind-set, you don’t think: ‘Step change and ambitious goals’,” he said. “You think: ‘Going steady, it will be all right eventually, we’ll muddle through’. That is a very British psychology and it is deeply embedded in the civil service.”
Barber, now the chief education adviser at Pearson, told CSW that a commission set up now could report after the election, removing its work from the political cycle and maximising the chances of consensus.