Labour’s Maoist Internship Scheme Elevates Loyalty Over Competence

Chairman Mao had a fixation on people’s family backgrounds. Under his regime, Chinese citizens were divided into two starkly-defined groups. The politically reliable “Five Red Categories” — including poor and lower-middle-class peasants, industrial workers, revolutionary cadres, soldiers, and martyrs’ relatives — were trusted and welcomed into government jobs. Those descending from landlords, wealthy peasants, criminals, counter-revolutionaries, or “rightists” (the Five Black Categories) were persecuted and faced systematic exclusion from public life.

Pat McFadden, Labour’s point man on civil service reform, hasn’t proposed open struggle sessions or communist purges just yet. But there’s a Maoist echo in his declaration that Whitehall’s new summer internship scheme will be reserved for those whose parents toiled in working-class jobs when the applicant was 14. Under Labour’s plan, selectors will bin your application if your parents dared to be hotel managers, architects or teachers, let alone chief executives or financiers.

To be sure, Labour’s intent is not as sinister as Mao’s. Yet the Chinese dictator would recognise the policy’s categorisation of the UK public. Under Labour’s rules, young people whose parents performed manual, technical or routine occupations — plumbers, gardeners, train drivers, shop assistants, caretakers or even the unemployed — will benefit from what Americans call “affirmative action”. If your old man was instead an engineer? Tough luck, you’re out of the running.

Our security services, in fact, have even narrower criteria for their undergraduate internship scheme. For the past three years, MI5, MI6, and GCHQ have offered internships exclusively to students who tick two identity boxes simultaneously. Applicants must be both from an ethnic minority and a demonstrably lower socio-economic status, proxied by parental occupation or free school meal eligibility. Middle-class Black or Asian applicants, never mind their white counterparts, need not apply.

Today’s civil service is pretty gender balanced, and even diversity-obsessed Labour recognises the political poison of extending MI5’s ethnic quotas across Whitehall. So ministers have focused here on the one group it’s acceptable to patronise: the working class. In doing so, they compound a grim anti-aspirational message that runs through many of their policies. Sir Keir Starmer himself, the son of a toolmaker father and NHS nurse mother, might just have scraped internship eligibility, provided selectors agreed his dad was a manual worker. His own children, however, will be excluded from applying, owing to his success.

McFadden defends this blatant discrimination on social mobility grounds. “We need to get more working-class young people into the civil service so it harnesses the broadest range of talent and truly reflects the country,” he says. Only 12 per cent of fast-stream civil servants originate from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Labour thinks restricting internship eligibility to this group will produce a gateway to help correct the imbalance.

Yet McFadden then goes further, boldly asserting that pursuing class-based diversity will improve the quality of government itself: “Government makes better decisions when it represents and understands the people we serve.” That smells like wishful thinking.

First, this line of argument fails a basic logical test. For every internship or job, there must, at least theoretically, be a “best” candidate. Narrowing the candidate pool by excluding anyone whose parents had a non-manual job necessarily reduces the odds of finding that ideal person.

Second, even if these internships are intended as symbolic entry points to encourage working-class applicants, Labour’s approach remains flawed. Such restrictive policies will inevitably alienate other talented young people whose parents had middle-class or professional jobs, broadcasting the message that under this government, the civil service isn’t interested in people like you.

More importantly, the civil service’s core tasks — formulating policy, regulating industries, managing public finances, procurement and delivering frontline services — require competence, expertise and skill. Believing that bureaucratic quality in those tasks can only be maximised by mirroring the population’s precise socio-economic, racial and gender make-up is naive. Inevitably, such an approach prioritises tokenism and representation over ability.

Mao’s obsessive class purity tests proved catastrophic in part because they elevated zealotry over expertise, and loyalty over competence. His Great Leap Forward resulted in devastating famine and economic ruin. The historian Frank Dikötter has documented how ideological conformity displaced skill and capability, crippling governance. Labour’s modest internship scheme will not have such stark consequences. Yet, on the margin, prioritising group identities over individual talent will modestly erode effectiveness.

Given the scale of Britain’s public administration woes, this socio-economic diversity push is a bizarre priority. Dominic Cummings, with characteristic bluntness, has branded Whitehall a rotten bureaucracy more concerned with self-preservation than performance. His diagnosis is increasingly echoed by Labour insiders. Experts at the Institute for Government and the National Audit Office, meanwhile, routinely highlight how staff churn, weak accountability, perverse incentives, low pay and gaping skills shortages among legions of civil service generalists undermine UK governance. Nowhere in any of these authoritative accounts is there a suggestion that the real problem is too few civil servants whose parents laboured manually.

Academics increasingly realise identity politics is based on dodgy economics too. Alex Edmans, a finance professor at London Business School, has detailed how enforced gender and ethnic diversity mandates frequently fail to deliver on their promised benefits. Rather than boosting corporate performance, mandated quotas often damage financial outcomes, creating resentment and division rather than cohesion and excellence. Socio-economic diversity targets promise the exact same disappointing outcomes. Yet Labour clings to this fixation with “representation”, paddling doggedly against the rising tide of evidence.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has thankfully dismissed Labour’s internship policy, saying she would “scrap all this rubbish and hire the best people”. Bold words! Yet her message is somewhat undermined by the reality that MI5’s quota internships began under the Conservative government.

And that’s the grim truth: Labour’s new internship policy merely prolongs the cycle of identity posturing we’ve endured for decades. At precisely the moment Britain needs competence, meritocratic government and a relentless focus on core priorities, the government remains fixated on ticking demographic boxes.