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RandomRanger  Just build nuclear plants!  9mo ago (text post)   2281 thread views

Review of Yes Minister – televising the British deep state (in 1980)

Firstly, I wholeheartedly recommend that you watch the show. Both Yes Minister and the sequel, Yes Prime Minister are amongst the greatest sophisticated satires of all time. The wordplay is excellent. The acting is superlative. It is a very funny show. You can also get the books, they’re nearly as good as a faithful representation of everything that happened in the show and have their own little additions. The very first episode is a little more dull and the pixels are few - those are the only problems with quality. This is one of the BBC’s greatest achievements. I imagine many if not most here have seen Yes Minister but younger people probably haven’t.

Secondly, I think it’s interesting politically.

The premise is that of a fundamentally good-natured, albeit egotistical, indecisive and self-deceiving politician (Jim Hacker), leading the fictitious Department of Administrative Affairs facing constant suppression from the Civil Service (represented by Sir Humphrey Appleby). The bureaucrats nearly always win, assisted by Bernard, Hacker’s Private Secretary who must tread a fine line between serving the interests of the Civil Service and Hacker.

The Civil Service create a system where they get all the power to decide and total freedom from responsibility. They draft all the papers, select all the information that flows through to ministers, listen in on all the telephone calls, excel at creating media crises they can use to extract quid-pro-pro deals. Their goal is to housetrain their ministers, coax them into seeing the Department’s interests as their own interests and act as disposable political shields for any errors. When the Civil Service errs, they want Ministers to pay the price.

They’re characterized as unashamedly corrupt, firmly anti-democratic, anti-meritocratic, self-interested bunglers who appease every interest group at public expense in the name of ‘harmony’ and ‘stability’. Lovable, sympathetic bunglers but bunglers nonetheless. Government spending is, in their minds, symbolic. There is no need for a hospital to actually heal the sick, it is just a nexus where bureaucratic activities can take place. Military spending is to delude the British public into thinking Britain is defended. Education is a method used to keep unemployment statistics down and appease teacher’s unions…

This is all pretty relevant to today’s world IMO.

There’s one rather illuminating episode where Sir Humphrey has to go lay down the law on a local council run by a mad middle-class socialist white woman who threatens to refuse funding to the local police force until they’re 50% black (this episode aired on 7 January 1988). They are initially in total opposition – but there is no true ideological disagreement. Her desires are to ban ‘sexist calendars’ since it’s ‘colonialism against women’, encourage adoption of children by lesbian single mothers since ‘children should not be brought up in an atmosphere of irrational prejudice in favour of heterosexuality’, allow only free-range eggs in her borough for animal rights…

In fact, she’s prepared to allow the breakdown of law and order generally, yet draws the line at allowing true democracy (which is the other plot thread of the episode). Later in the episode she cooperates with Sir Humphrey to squelch a proposal that would make local council elections more democratic, a tactic that would weaken her power. This involved street representatives, voting communities of 200 households and selection of candidates by the whole electorate.

‘Of course they would want our policies if they could understand all the implications. But ordinary voters are simple people… The people don’t always understand what’s good for them.’ Neither she nor Humphrey believe in democracy, they seek to hollow out elections so they can implement their own chosen policies rather than let people decide things for themselves. The episode ends with them in heartfelt agreement, each decrying the other as a great loss for the militant revolution/civil service.

It’s rather prescient for them to characterize the radical left and the bureaucrats as two heads of the same anti-democratic coin, potential allies. I think it shows how little the political climate has changed in over 30 years. I was also reading P. J. O’Rourke’s writing from the late 80’s and 90’s, he identifies eerily contemporary aspects of what we’d now call wokeness, liberalism and so on.

Yes Minister is also a story of asabiyyah, where the superior coordination abilities of the Civil Service let them run rings around the politicians. They’re all of the same Oxbridge class, they can freely cooperate while poor Jim Hacker has no such ability to work with his Cabinet colleagues. Half of the Cabinet are ‘house-trained’ by the Civil Service, assimilated into their worldview. All of them are competing with Hacker for power. Hacker complains in the books that the Private Secretaries and Civil Servants generally have a great grapevine but the Minister’s network is hopeless.

Perhaps the most obsolete part of the show is that the Civil Service they portray is uniformly intelligent white male Oxford graduates who hobnob at the Opera and sneer at those who aren’t fluid in Latin or Greek. There’s one episode where Hacker tries to bring in more women, only to be successfully sabotaged by Sir Humphrey. The show gives the impression that efficient, effective women are much happier working in industry where they get things done as opposed to pushing paper around.

In terms of the writer’s political views, the show seems rather unusual. While seeking more women and less Oxford classicists in the bureaucracy, the writers also seem fairly keen on conscription and the build-up of Britain’s conventional forces, vaguely Euroskeptic. Meanwhile they seem to favour school choice, joke about the excesses of political correctness. The abiding theme is a distrust in the competence of politicians and the alignment of the bureaucracy with British interests.

The show highlights the national decline that took place in the Age of Bureaucracy. The show constantly references British decline. The pound is always plunging, there are issues with inflation and high unemployment. The state-owned national industries are failing, the economy is deteriorating from disastrous to catastrophic. The army is a joke. And yet, the Civil Servants constantly remind Bernard (who has vague leanings towards democracy) that he’s naïve:

“This is the system that made Britain what she is today!”

From their vantage point, Bureaucratic government is great. They get high salaries, inflation-proof pensions, knighthoods and honours, cushy Quango sinecures for when they retire and face no responsibility for their own errors. But for everyone else it’s disastrous – after all Britain is in gross decline throughout the period. That’s the joke they’re making.

In comparison to modern political comedies like The Thick of It or Veep, it’s much less crude. Standards for vulgarity are much lower today than they were. Yes Minister also feels more political, in that it presents actual perpetrators and conspirators behind government dysfunction. While a modern show might show government to be dysfunctional, careening from crisis to crisis, they don’t home in on a reason why things go so badly other than ‘these leaders are really terrible, stupid, malign people’. The plot threads in an episode are all cleaned up nicely by the end, there’s so sense of ‘how can these people possibly stay in government if there are all these endless disasters.’

Some clips of the best parts are here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QurCB1lCHp0&list=PLRAJSUF2MG_wI0MmTPPZOzcuEI85OKXfT

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I can't find full episodes of the show that aren't subbed in chinese. The BBC is really vicious about copyright enforcement of shows they never plan to make available.

those are the best ones though. half the entertainment from this show is in reading chinese youtube comments on western democratic dysfunction

It's on The Pirate Bay. Remember to seed afterwards, they only have ~10 seeds atm.

Damn that is sad. I will download and seed a bit from my new fiber internet connection torrent-safe country (TM)

This show is absolutely one of the greatest things the BBC ever created. But it's 40 years old, and I often wonder where the next generation's Yes, Minister is. I don't watch a lot of TV (I've seen some of The West Wing, none of Veep or House of Cards), but as far as I know no modern show is worthy of claiming its mantle. Why? Is this the sort of show that can only come from a no-longer-existent world of low BBC budgets, niche high-brow appeal, and writers' willingness to skewer everyone's sacred cow rather than push a one-sided agenda?

Thick of It, Veep and Succession are all spiritual successors.

I'd say Succession is clearly left-coded in its themes but will skewer left-wing causes too (though it fails at the "low budget" hurdle). Thick of It just came across as so nihilist that it's hard to decide what was a sacred cow in the first place.

You should watch The thick of it, it's better than Veep, although like randomranger says it pales next to Yes, Minister. And Utopia (the Australian series, not the covid predicting British series) is almost the same level in its first three seasons, I haven't watched the latest yet. If you live in Australia you can also get your hands on The Games, about the Sydney Olympics, which is the closest anyone has gotten to Yes, Minister in my opinion, on abc iview.

I grew up in Salt Lake City, and our PBS station added 'The Games' to its late night block of British Comedies for about a year prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics. It's one of the highlights of my childhood, seeing that show.

It was also completely incomprehensible to viewers of "Are You Being Served?" and "Keeping Up Appearances," and was quickly moved to Saturday nights after reruns of Baker-era Who--and the other highlight of my childhood is when a liberal Mormon pledge drive volunteer called that block "documentaries" whilst on air.

I also endorse Utopia. It's so true to life it hurts.

Edit: Hollowmen is an earlier show produced by the same people which also has its moments.

I second your recommendation! It is indeed very relevant, and I think the most insightful work about government that I know.

However, I think you overestimate the extent to which the show is an indictment of Sir Humphrey and the civil service - Sir Humphrey is often correct about the issue du jour and does a good job of reigning in Hacker's naivety and sentimentalism. He points out, perfectly correctly, that if he was expected to believe in and zealously work to further the goals of every politician he's worked under, he would have to have a lobotomy every five years and spend all his time unpicking his own work.

He's right about the factory in The Greasy Pole - the factory is indeed genuinely safe and everyone knows it but Hacker has to pretend otherwise and destroy a source of good jobs for the sake of holding onto a marginal constituency. He is at least plausible on things like the futility of selling weapons but demanding they never end up being used for bad purposes ("Minister, if you sell weapons, they will inevitably end up in the hands of people who want to buy them."). In general, his role, jaded and greedy as he is, is to present the cynical view on things in contrast to the minister. He's not meant to be a punching bag. He has a much more detailed knowledge of foreign affairs than Hacker and he's usually pretty plausible when he discusses them, albeit over-cynical.

From their vantage point, Bureaucratic government is great. They get high salaries, inflation-proof pensions, knighthoods and honours, cushy Quango sinecures for when they retire and face no responsibility for their own errors. But for everyone else it’s disastrous – after all Britain is in gross decline throughout the period. That’s the joke they’re making.

Again, I think you overstate the point. The Civil Service is not a post-war invention and I don't think that the show is blaming bureaucratic government for Britain's decline particularly. Humphrey is partially correct when he says that the Civil Service and tight control from Westminster is what made (past tense) Britain great. The show is blaming bureaucratic government for being screwed up rather than for existing, in the main.

One of the thing that's shown very consistently is that when Hacker and Sir Humphrey actually get their incentives in line and work together they can usually solve their problems pretty well.

I have to add that I'm pretty suspicious of local government. The idea 'sounds' lovely, but all the ones I know of are run by nutters. They don't have enough power for people to really care, and it's very rare to get significant shifts in voting patterns, so you end up with maniacs who appeal to the local selection committee. As Yes Minister says itself, local government is often "a vast, subsidised ego-trip".

Perhaps they just need more power, but that doesn't seem to have worked out in Scotland.

There just doesn't seem to be enough motivation to get competent people involved. Where I live each party has 1-3 mediocre people in each council and then a few people who have clear defects as bench warmer who vote as they are told. There are far more competent people around but they rarely seem to prioritize running for local political positions. They are too busy with other things in their life.

Possibly creating local strong men would make the job of local politican more attractive.

PM Jim Hacker: Don't tell me about the press — I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?

Bernard Woolley: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.

That one is pretty funny but I still think the best joke of the entire show is this one:

Peter Harding: Soames has been waiting for a bishopric for years.

Sir Humphrey: Long time, no see.

I might add to your recommendation to watch the series that it is quite short and doesn't repeat itself. Famously the creators didn't want to repeat the story beats and become predictable so they ended the first series Yes Minister after 21 episodes and resumed only with the sequel for 16 episodes as they could add new material with Jim Hacker becoming prime minister.

I think there is a very interesting analysis to be done linking Yes Minister, Moral Mazes (extended analysis thread), and The Gervais Principle as a kind of three-fold way of bureaucratic dysfunction.

Moral Mazes is about the middle-management hierarchy of large non-financial companies in the pre-shareholder-value era, but is generally considered to be a universally applicable account of the internal politics of unaccountable bureaucracies. Yes Minister is about how such bureaucracies resist reform-from-above. And The Gervais Principle is about how they conceal the full horror of the situation from the line workers who actually hold the thing together and therefore prevent revolution-from-below.

Toss in The Peter Principle for people getting promoted out of positions of high competency into positions they struggle at, to show how incompetent people got that high in an organization to start with.

I first read it when I was struggling to find my first real job. It make me very aware of how much I needed to level up my skills to ensure it wouldn't happen to me.

Yes Minister is my favourite documentary.

The bureaucrats nearly always win

FWIW, I don't think this necessarily gives a completely accurate impression of the show; especially as the series go on, Hacker gets his way quite a lot; just off the top of my head, he gets one over Humphrey on defending St George's island, the national database, moving soldiers to the North, Humphrey testifying about the bugging in one of the last episodes, the phone tapping petition (in the death list episode), over that bureaucracy/waste/select committee thing, the Buranda speech/oil loan, and moreover in many episodes they are working to the same ends. The Channel Tunnel, the threatened abolition of the department etc.

So, at some points in the series, it almost approaches an even contest. And iirc, Humphrey and other senior civil servants do now and again admit that if a minister, or maybe just the Prime Minister, is really dead set on something they often can't stop it. Plus, Hacker seems to be a less competent minister than the average

Great show.

In terms of the writer’s political views, the show seems rather unusual. While seeking more women and less Oxford classicists in the bureaucracy, the writers also seem fairly keen on conscription and the build-up of Britain’s conventional forces, vaguely Euroskeptic. Meanwhile they seem to favour school choice, joke about the excesses of political correctness. The abiding theme is a distrust in the competence of politicians and the alignment of the bureaucracy with British interests.

That the show’s politics are a bit eclectic and ultimately converge on some vague anti-establishmentarianism shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given that it was co-written by a right-winger and a left-winger.

The show's politics are quite typical of British establishment satire (for example, Private Eye magazine). Both creators were upper-middle class and went to good private (public) schools and then Cambridge. One even studied Classics. They're making fun of their peers, it's not outside humor which is, in part, why it's so funny.

A big reason why Veep is less funny than The Thick of It (it's still funny of course) is because both shows were written by the same people, who had personal experience of the kind of people who run Britain but less personal experience with the kind who run America. As a result, eep often seems like a show about how the US government would work if it was run by Brits.

A big reason why Veep is less funny than The Thick of It (it's still funny of course) is because both shows were written by the same people, who had personal experience of the kind of people who run Britain but less personal experience with the kind who run America. As a result, eep often seems like a show about how the US government would work if it was run by Brits.

I wonder if you feel the same way about Succession? Also Brit writers & directors who worked on Thick of It, working with American politics but I didn't notice the uncanny valley.

But my not-Americanness biases me.

They deliberately made the patriarch in Succession British and his wife British, so when the Roy children say British things (which I do notice all the time as an American) it makes sense. Succession’s forays into American politics are kind of a spoof, Mencken isn’t the kind of candidate that could ever win an American election (see how much DeSantis is failing) etc. I love the show, but it was clearly meant to be British or at least Australian-British-American as the Murdochs are before HBO requested a US setting.

Ironically, everybody I’ve met who worked in politics has said Veep is far away the most accurate portrayal of American government.

This matches my experience as well, from the few interactions I've had with actual people in actual politics. However, whenever I hear it, it also tends to have an add-on, that despite that, Veep is still highly inaccurate in multiple ways, with the most stark one being that the characters in Veep are far more competent at their jobs with better put-together lives than their real counterparts in Washington.

Unfortunately likely true haha.

The fact that neither Hacker (who is chasing headlines) nor Sir Humphrey (who is trying to protect the interests of the senior Civil Service) are actually trying to deliver on an agenda is critical to the way the show works. Giving Hacker recognisable political views would turn Yes Minister into The Thick of It - in the sense that the show would become about why Hacker is chasing headlines rather than doing what he went into politics to do.

Interestingly, there appears to be a real-world parallel - a lot of people (including Dominic Cummings) who have commented on the real-world applicability of Yes Minister have said that a minister who is actually trying to do something can normally find more junior civil servants who want to help them and work around Sir Humphrey, whereas a minister who is chasing headlines will not motivate civil servants to do anything other than chase promotion.

Hacker has some recognisable policies - he creates the first Data Protection act. He's vaguely populist: cut arts spending, funnel to popular things like football; he's in favour of a stronger military. Mostly, of course, he's in favour of Hacker and will go where the wind blows.

The politicians in The Thick of It don't have policies. I can't think of any strongly partisan policy in the entire show, a lot of the political point is that New Labour were ideologically bankrupt and didn't really stand for anything. The Thick of It's movie (In The Loop) about the Iraq War is about this too. If anything, permanent staff in the Civil Service like Terri come across better than the politicians and SpAds.

The Thick of It isn't really particularly good general political satire. It's specifically satire of New Labour (and to some extent the haphazard opposition to it in the early Cameron years) and its main character is obviously a satire of Alastair Campbell, hence all the jokes about the Scottish Mafia and so on. Iannucci isn't making a political point, whereas Yes Minister does, even though it isn't in itself particularly progressive/conservative in its viewpoint.

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