Whitehall Officials Plot to Disrupt Government if Farage Wins Election
Whitehall officials are reportedly planning a sustained campaign of strikes if Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party wins the next election. This move comes as the largest trade union for civil servants, the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), prepares to vote on a motion calling for an ‘industrial defence strategy’ to sabotage a potential Farage administration. The union has warned that workers may go on strike with minimal notice if the new government takes power.
Farage has pledged to address what he calls the ‘institutional Left-wing bias’ within the ‘Blob’ – a term he uses to describe the Civil Service, local authorities, and schools. However, the motion being debated at the PCS annual conference suggests that a Reform UK government would face a significant challenge from within the public sector.
The motion highlights the ‘significant rise in polling and political influence of Reform UK’ and warns that a Reform government would pose an ‘existential threat’ to the job security, pay, and professional integrity of all PCS members. It claims that such a government would wage a ‘culture war aimed at demoralising public servants’.
The motion also states that a ‘laser-focused industrial strategy’ is needed to defend the Civil Service as a ‘vital, neutral institution’. If approved, the union’s ruling NEC will develop the resistance strategy by the end of the year. The plan includes launching a targeted recruitment drive in departments most at risk of cuts, ensuring the union has the mandate for sustained industrial action.
Farage’s recent success in local elections has led to increased tensions with other groups. Earlier this year, he clashed with a ‘Marxist’ teachers’ leader whose union has vowed to mobilise members to prevent him from becoming Prime Minister. At the National Education Union (NEU) annual conference, delegates called for the trade union movement to ‘throw its full weight behind stopping a Reform UK government’. They also urged teachers to ‘collate and disseminate anti-racist teaching materials’ and to ‘encourage school and community-based anti-deportation campaigns’.
Farage has promised to eliminate ‘politicised classrooms’ if he becomes Prime Minister, targeting Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s hard-Left general secretary. He accused Kebede of being an ‘open Marxist’ and claimed that the NEU should focus on teaching rather than trying to ‘indoctrinate children’.
Kebede responded by calling Farage a ‘disaster for Britain’, stating that a Reform government would ‘cut our schools to the bone along with the NHS’.
Civil Servants Receive High Pensions Despite Reforms
New figures reveal that some civil servants are receiving taxpayer-funded pensions of more than £150,000 a year, despite reforms aimed at curbing gold-plated public sector payouts. The Civil Service Pension Scheme, one of the largest of its kind, will cost taxpayers £7 billion this year, up from £6.8 billion last year.
Among those drawing from the scheme, 23 individuals are receiving more than £150,000 annually, with a further 263 collecting more than £100,000. These pensions are guaranteed for life and linked to inflation. Former Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson described the numbers as ‘extraordinary’, highlighting that the scheme was ‘paying out far more than you would ever imagine is reasonable’.
Johnson argued that the pension scheme had ‘got out of control’ historically and pointed to a growing imbalance between pay and pensions, especially as the private sector no longer offers similar benefits.
Despite the 2022 reforms, which aimed to limit payouts by basing pensions on average rather than final salary, the number of pensions exceeding £50,000 has more than doubled since then, from 3,025 to 7,234. Pensions over £100,000 have also risen from 71 to 263.
In November, the TaxPayers’ Alliance found that 22 senior civil servants had accumulated pension pots worth more than £1 million, enough to generate retirement income of more than £70,000 a year.
