An anonymous civil servant gives his or her view on how Brexit preparations are going under “Operation Yellowhammer”*
Clue:
* Yellowhammer call is usually described as sounding like “a little bit of bread and no cheese”
“… We should by now be in Yellowhammer’s final, perhaps terminal, stage. In my own department, virtually all of the several hundred likely to be Brextracted are still waiting to hear. We know that directors are working behind the scenes to identify these poor buggers. But the worrying fact is that most people don’t yet know when they’re going to be deployed, how long for, or what they’ll be working on when they are. Then there’s the question of whether they’ll actually be qualified to do whatever their new job is, given a) anyone who’s spent even five minutes in a trade negotiating room has already been rounded up like a prized Angus by DExEU and DIT’s HR departments, and b) even now, nobody knows what is going to happen.
As reported by Civil Service World, around ten thousand civil servants are working on Brexit, with tens of millions of additional pounds being spent on consultancy fees. But 5,000 more civil servants will be needed, with the Institute for Government suggesting that even this won’t be nearly enough. You can’t help but wonder what could be achieved if this concentration of treasure and talent was lavished on other pressing national issues – education, housing, health, energy, climate change, the next series of The Bodyguard. We’ll never know, will we? …”
East Devon Watch 