Efficiency in the civil service

Abstract

Clarity in government publications is at the end of the rainbow. Obfuscation does not always come from jargon disguising complexity; on occasion, banality can be seen to be barely masking a vacuum.

We leave it to readers to judge which of those two caps fits the white paper on Efficiency in the Civil Service (Cmnd 8293). We give the text in the first column, together with a translation in the second. Our model for this, as it must be for any aspiring translator, is W.J.M. Mackenzie's incomparable rendering of an earlier white paper, Control of Public Expenditure (Cmnd 1432), which he first published in The Guardian of 25 May 1963.

We do, however, have one advantage over Mackenzie. Thanks to our resident Whitehall mole, we have been lucky enough to get a sight of what may well have formed the ‘Yes, Minister’ briefing for Lord Soames when he was considering presenting his white paper to the 1922 Committee. Extracts from this are printed in italics underneath our own translation. They provide a necessary gloss not only on what is contained in the white paper but also ‐ and perhaps more importantly ‐ on what has been left out.