Whitehall officials are plotting to paralyse the Government with a sustained campaign of strikes if Nigel Farage wins the next election.
The largest trade union for civil servants will this week vote on a motion calling for an ‘industrial defence strategy’ to sabotage a Farage administration, with workers ready to strike with minimal notice.
Mr Farage has vowed to tackle ‘institutional Left-wing bias’ among the ‘Blob’ of the Civil Service, local authorities and schools if he forms the next government.
But the motion being debated at the annual conference of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which has 170,000 members, suggests that he would be embroiled in an all-out war with Whitehall if he becomes Prime Minister.
Noting the ‘significant rise in polling and political influence of Reform UK, and the very likely eventuality of a Reform government following the next General Election’, the motion states that ‘a Reform UK government would represent an existential threat to the job security, pay, and professional integrity of every PCS member’.
Reform would wage a ‘culture war aimed at demoralising public servants’, it adds.
It declares: ‘The specific threat of a Reform government requires a laser-focused industrial strategy… we must be prepared to defend the Civil Service as a vital, neutral institution through direct industrial and legal action.’
If the motion is approved, the union’s ruling NEC would draw up the resistance strategy by the end of the year.
Civil servants could frustrate Reform UK leader Nigel Farage should he win the next general election
The strategy will include ‘launching a targeted recruitment drive in departments most at risk of slashing, ensuring we have the mandate for sustained industrial action’.
Mr Farage, who made sweeping gains in this month’s local elections, traded blows earlier this year with a ‘Marxist’ teachers’ leader whose trade union has vowed to mobilise members to stop him becoming Prime Minister.
Delegates at the annual conference of the National Education Union (NEU) called for the trade union movement to ‘throw its full weight behind stopping a Reform UK government’, and called for teachers to ‘collate and disseminate anti-racist teaching materials’ and to ‘encourage school and community-based anti-deportation campaigns’.
Mr Farage vowed to sweep away ‘politicised classrooms’ if he became Prime Minister and took aim at Daniel Kebede, the union’s hard-Left general secretary, saying: ‘The NEU should focus on the day job of teaching instead of trying to indoctrinate children.
‘Daniel Kebede is an open Marxist and shouldn’t be anywhere near our education system.
‘Change is coming for the NEU – a Reform government will introduce a patriotic curriculum, no longer will teaching unions be able to politicise the classroom and talk down our country.’
Mr Kebede responded: ‘Nigel Farage will be a disaster for Britain. He would cut our schools to the bone along with the NHS.’
The civil servants with £150,000 pension pots
By Elizabeth Ivens
Civil servants are drawing taxpayer-funded pensions of more than £150,000 a year despite reforms designed to curb gold-plated public sector payouts, new figures show.
The payments come through the Civil Service Pension Scheme – one of the largest of its kind – which will cost taxpayers £7 billion this year, up from £6.8 billion last year.
Among those drawing from the scheme, 23 are receiving more than £150,000 a year, with a further 263 collecting more than £100,000. It is a guaranteed, inflation-linked pension for life.
Former Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson condemned the numbers as ‘extraordinary’, adding the scheme was ‘paying out far more than you would ever imagine is reasonable’.
‘This is evidence of a pension scheme that, at least historically, has got out of control,’ he told The Telegraph.
‘I think the real issue is we’ve got a totally wrong balance between pay and pensions, and it’s increasingly wrong as the private sector no longer has anything along these lines.’
The 2022 reforms aimed to limit payouts by basing pensions on average rather than final salary – yet pensions exceeding £50,000 have more than doubled since then, from 3,025 to 7,234, while those exceeding £100,000 rose from 71 to 263.
Last 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.
