Keir Starmer should take these lessons from history to handle lazy civil servants.

Who do these civil servants think they are? They’re going on strike because they’ve been asked to work in the office three days a week. Is working three days in the office really that hard? It’s hard to tell if this is funny or just sad.

Fran Heathcote, the leader of the PCS union (which represents over 200,000 civil servants), called the request to return to the office “Victorian.” Is she trying to be funny, or is she completely out of touch with reality?

It seems like some civil servants are living in a fantasy world. For example, the Office for National Statistics supported a strike against working two days a week in the office. Others are demanding to work only four days a week but still get paid for five.

But who do they think pays for all this? It’s the private sector workers, who are already overworked, heavily taxed, and under pressure.

There’s a lot of irony here, especially with civil servants in Defra. They only want to work two days a week in the office, but they’re happy to take taxes from farmers—people who work seven days a week, all year round, from sunrise to sunset.

If the civil service were running smoothly, with no delays and all work completed, then maybe working from home would make sense. But that’s not the case. Since the lockdown, when working from home became normal, productivity has gone down.

The only things increasing in the civil service are the number of workers and their pay. There are now over half a million civil servants, and their numbers grew by more than 3.8% last year.

Maybe we should follow President Trump’s approach: get government employees back in the office five days a week and cut jobs that focus only on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).

Unfortunately, the Labour government won’t do this. The changes I made when I was in government—like reducing diversity roles, banning third-party EDI contractors, cutting costs, and focusing on better services for taxpayers—have all been reversed by Labour. They seem more interested in meeting quotas and spending money on their “woke” agendas.

If Labour doesn’t want to follow Trump’s example, maybe they could look to former US President Ronald Reagan. When air traffic controllers went on strike, he fired all of them and started fresh.