The Scottish parliament’s decision to ban its staff wearing campaigning lanyards may seem like a small step. But could it set a precedent for rolling back a trend for tolerating staff activism that has spread throughout the civil service in recent years?

In an email to staff, the move was justified ‘to minimise the risk of perceived bias and avoid any perception that wearing such items may be influencing our own decision-making.’ But the problem of staff activism goes further than this.

The real change came since George Floyd and the rise of trans ideology

I have recently left the civil service as a director after a 30-year career in four departments. Traditionally, civil servants understood their role as carrying out ministers’ policies quietly and efficiently, whether they agreed with them or not. If they were required to reverse policies they had put years into implementing, so be it: ministers have a political mandate and we do not.

This was an unglamorous life, which the former cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell presumably felt needed a bit of modernisation when he told civil servants we needed to have ‘passion’ for our roles, passionately implementing and passionately reversing.

Whatever the personal leanings of senior staff, the commitment to impartiality on party political grounds is strong and the top leaders pride themselves on their ability to get on with ministers from all parties. Outright partisan behaviour is genuinely frowned upon. But senior leaders have not caught up with the fact that the dividing lines are now more cultural than political, and span issues on which the civil service has plainly taken sides.

It is hard to track where this divergence began. It was obvious at Brexit. I attended a ‘high leadership potential’ scheme for director level colleagues across the service, where over 40 excellent senior colleagues regretted the outcome of the vote to my one dissent – highly improbable odds if the civil service actually represented the wider country.