GRAHAM GRANT: Binge watching Netflix and gorging on public money...the laptop civil servants of a grossly bloated state

Daily Mail​

19-05-2025

You have to feel for the massed ranks of civil servants stretching out in their back gardens in the baking hot weather.
It could get boring as the long hours stretch ahead, and there's a lot of work to do including deleting all those memos about coming back to the office.
Don't worry, though, they have plenty to keep them busy, including their government-issued laptops which provide an unlimited supply of entertainment.
As the Scottish Mail on Sunday revealed, our tireless public servants have been watching Netflix and even accessing porn websites on their taxpayer-funded devices.
So many of them streamed their favourite Netflix shows in the past six months that officials say the number of attempts to log onto the streaming channel is too high to calculate.
The data was the result of a request under freedom of information laws, so the results might well have been collated by home-working civil servants in between binge-watching The Thick of It - or logging onto Pornhub.
It's all at your expense, and yet we shouldn't be shocked as this is the administration which fought tooth and nail to keep Michael Matheson in his job.
He was the hapless Health Secretary who racked up a data-roaming bill of nearly £11,000 on his parliamentary iPad and tried to claim the costs back from the public purse.
It's also the government which is pushing ahead with a four-day week for public sector workers – how selfless of them to take the plunge before everyone else.
Tone deafness has become a speciality: back in 2020, in the midst of economic turmoil, civil servants cashed in on inflation-busting pay hikes of up to 12 per cent.
Kate Forbes, then Finance Secretary, signed off on the deal shortly after taking over from Derek Mackay - who quit over his extensive online interaction with a teenage boy - just as the pandemic began to run riot.
The sprawling state in all of its varied manifestations under the SNP has a talent for looking after itself, even as public services sink further into chaos and dysfunction.
In their home offices, or lounging on deckchairs during the sunny spell, they have more on their minds than fixing these seemingly intractable problems – which in many cases they helped to create, or exacerbate – including catching up on the latest episode of The White Lotus.
Well, there has to be some distraction from the important business of drawing up plans for the next tax raid, or costly handout.
The bloated civil service in Scotland has grown by more than 70 per cent since 2016 - the workforce stood at more than 9,000 in 2024 and costs more than £600million a year.
A new edict has been issued, ordering civil servants to spend an average of 40 per cent of their time in the office – not an unreasonable demand, by any yardstick.
Yet many of those on the payroll are said to be furious at the move with some complaining about the extra commuting costs - while one report stated that some saw it as 'an attack on their human rights'.
The rights of taxpayers are an afterthought - but then they always were for the vast behemoth of the state machine whose primary aims are expansion and self-preservation.
Some public sector workers only need to attend their office one day a week while council staff have been allowed to work from far-flung locations including Japan, India and Australia.
The legion of entitled home-workers taking us for a ride are supposed to be entirely impartial, though their political masters have pushed them into drafting absurd 'papers' on independence.
Where were they when the SNP was forging ahead with botched transgender reforms, or Named Person, or the bottle Deposit Return Scheme?
They were either giving sage advice which was ignored, or bad advice which was accepted (or else they were too busy on Netflix).
Then there are those for whom the boundaries became dangerously blurred, including senior civil servant Ken Thomson who urged colleagues to destroy Covid-era WhatsApp messages
Mr Thomson, who retired in 2023, had been appointed to further the cause of independence - and in 2022 he was accused of bragging that breaking up the UK was his job.
Back in 2020, he told colleagues in a WhatsApp group called Covid Outbreak: 'Just to remind you (seriously) this is discoverable under FOI [freedom of information]. Know where the 'clear chat' button is.'
Mr Thomson added: 'Plausible deniability are my middle names. Now clear it again!'
He also wrote in 2021: 'I feel moved at this point to remind you that this channel is FOI recoverable' – and helpfully included a zipped mouth emoji in his message.
Now FOI has lifted the curtain on the working practices of the organisation he helped to run – doubtless Mr Thomson would be furious about it if he were still in post and not enjoying a pension pot worth £1.5million.
Reward for failure is nothing new – in April, it emerged that the First Minister had quietly lifted a long-standing salary freeze for ministers.
All ten members of his Cabinet and 13 junior ministers have accepted the rise, which will entitle them to £19,126 extra per year.
At the last minute, John Swinney decided not to take the pay increase – but the damage was done.
While you're struggling to make ends meet and keep a roof over your head, the people presiding over the country's rapid decline are cashing in on a massive salary boost.
At every level, this government has failed in spectacular style - but its bosses couldn't care less whether you think they deserve a huge pay rise.
That mindset also helps to explain the arrogance of their flunkeys logging onto betting accounts and streaming services, assuming they'd never be caught out.
Yet how can we expect those living high on the hog at our considerable expense to mastermind the rebirth of a shattered economy?
For those on the breadline, as their companies collapse or they lose their jobs, it's just another illustration of the venal hypocrisy hard-wired into the upper tiers of a rotten, failing state.
For years, the SNP has bleated about 'austerity' at every turn, imposed on Scotland by uncaring regimes in London, and now we can see why their loathing of it was quite so visceral.
Austerity is a foreign concept to the army of well-remunerated apparatchiks - many of them implicated in this Government's abysmal failures, or busily employed in attempting to airbrush them out of existence.
Businesses are crying out for some sign that the government cares about their survival - and the rest of us are sick of paying sky-high taxes for deteriorating public services.
An entitlement culture has taken root so deeply that it can never be fully excised - and shamefully there's no political appetite to curb its relentless growth.