Editorial: ​Civil service head belatedly pulls out of Pride - it's essential that its leaders remain impartial

In previous years the civil service head has been photographed waving an LGBTQ+ flag, known as a ‘progress flag’.

Now imagine that Jayne Brady was flying the Union Flag. Imagine this had taken place in a legitimate context such as Armed Forces Day, Coleraine on Saturday.

There would have been an outcry, an investigation and she might already have been forced into a resignation.

Flying the national flag when being head of the civil service in the province, an integral part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, would be unthinkable. Yet flying a political gay rights flag is not.

The contradictory nature of this – the permissibility of flying a highly political LGBTQ+ flag and the total impermissibility of flying the national flag – might not have occurred to Ms Brady. Or, if it did, she was not troubled by the matter.

We asked about formal civil service participation in the Pride parade in Belfast last year. After all, Pride had highly political goals that had become all the more contentious given the Supreme Court having to rule on contested questions of gender and all-female spaces.

But the civil service continued with public participation in, and implied approval of, the highly partisan stances that Pride took on a major contested area of public policy.

It is shocking that this was not obvious, given the essential need for impartiality in civil service leaders. It was bad enough that the police did not see the contradiction of formal participation in Pride, but they did at least withdraw earlier.

Incidentally, the communication to staff on the withdrawal from Pride was signed by Ms Brady and the permanent secretaries. The latter are under her leadership. She should have signed it alone.