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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Notes -
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.
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.
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