It took a while but the truth is no longer ‘out there’, it has landed smack dab onto the pages of the Guardian. Yes, the Guardian.
This long-overdue confirmation of the real centre-left agenda comes courtesy of David Walker who is gleeful about the viral growth of tax-consumers:
Tony – reform is my middle name – Blair isn’t obviously the public sector’s friend. Nor, for all his protestations of affection, is Gordon Brown, the man who insisted on putting the safety of London’s tube travellers in the hands of profit-maximising companies.
Yet under them the public sector prospers. Since 1999 it has just kept growing as a source of jobs; the UK’s approximation to full employment owes a lot to council, NHS and government recruitment. Paranoid rightwingers, for whom the Guardian’s thick advertising sections are a weekly torment, don’t know the half of it. Under Labour, “indirect” employment has also boomed. Yesterday John Prescott published an evaluation of his new deal for communities, a set of participative projects in run-down areas. Between the lines it noted that a sort of reserve army of tenants and activists has been recruited, subsisting of government grants.
Imagine how ‘paranoid’ those ‘rightwingers’ would get if they suspected the truth about how many people are suckling at the state teat? Why, it would be enough to drive them round the twist.
Now here come new figures for direct government employment. Whitehall is booming. During the past year, the Inland Revenue took on 8,500 extra people, at a time when total civil service numbers increased by nearly 4%. Even the tiny Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 450 strong in April last year, added 30 people to its roster.
Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!!! Roll on the glorious day when everyone works for the state!
In theory, that ought to mean up to 6 million households -perhaps 15 million people – with a direct interest in buoyant public expenditure, and hence in having a government likely to keep it that way. Labour’s formula for permanent re-election, you might think. But turkeys will vote for Christmas.
And to think it is capitalists like me who are generally regarded as ‘self-serving’.
Not once does Mr.Walker even attempt to invoke the mendacious tropes about ‘social justice’ and ‘caring’ and while his candour cannot be regarded as admirable it is, nonetheless, refreshing. His is as bold an admission as I can imagine that the motivation behind voting Labour is to increase one’s chances of joining or staying on the government payroll. Of course, libertarians have been saying this for years and I suppose I must extend some muted thanks to Mr.Walker for publicly admitting that we were right.
But being right is one thing and prevailing is something else. In order to prevail this message must filter down to the remaining 45 million or so other British people who struggle to support themselves and carry the burden of this parasite class on their backs.
Now is the time for all good Brits to SHRUG and move to America
Yes, it is time for the sensible Brits to start moving to the US. I notice that Gordo is looking hungrily at 40 percent capital gains taxes on the sale of principal residences, the main financial asset of most working people as well as pensioners. Disgraceful and truly frightening.
I also notice that the Daily Mirror has an appeal about poverty in “Hidden Britain”. I realize that this is the Mirror and its word to be taken a bit hesitantly, but the figures on per-poverty quoted in the article, if true, are similar to American figures on poverty.
So with all the social welfare spending, Britain does no better than evil Kapitalist USA in addressing poverty.
It is not necessary, or even desirible that “everyone” work for the state. Only that so many are in state employ that public employee’s unions remain a dominant political force.
Additional to these grey ranks of government serfs are the swelling numbers of even relatively middle class people who are now in receipt of some kind of ‘benefit’ or other. Going further, one only has to look at the way in which the government’s support for council tax was shifted to favour its northern, chip-on-the-shoulder, socialist strongholds.
Bliar has vowed to wipe out the Conservative party (though it seems to have done a pretty reasonable job on its own) and, pretty clearly, gerrymandering on an unprecedented scale is one of his weapons of mass destruction.
Well, at least if you implode with the rest of the EUnuchs it may serve to steer us off the road our fellow travelers are taking us down. Probably not.
Listen up, boys and girls! I have just had a brilliant idea. Inspired by the ‘India booming’ thread below, we take every job in the overmanned public sector that doesn’t require a physical presence and … export them to India! Thus the cost of maintaining a parasitic, bloated, overmanned public sector can be reduced by 90% at a stroke!
And we take all the “jobs” – if that is not too strong a term – of all the tens of thousands of apparachiks in Brussels and Strasbourg, including the entire army of simultaneous translators, and export them too! Another 90% saving!
And for all the toy jobs advertised in The Guardian, we make them into virtual jobs – which they are anyway – and – you got it!
Thus we do a giant favour to the British taxpayer whose burden would be lessened beyond his dreams, and provide employment for hundreds of thousands of motivated, highly educated people in India and contribute to the Indian economy!
And the bonus ball – all those hundreds of thousands made jobless would cut their hands off before they’d vote Labour again …
Verity,
Competition in the “Public” Sector HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHA
Help me start Talent-Redistribution.com to help those that can, do, anything somewhere other than the UK and EUSSR.
Rob – Who said anything about competition in the public sector? I’m suggesting we export all public sector jobs.
Susan writes:
“So with all the social welfare spending, Britain does no better than evil Kapitalist USA in addressing poverty.”
Indeed not, the welfare sepending creates the very poverty that it is alleged it relieves.
Okay, time for me to throw a stink bomb into this orgy of self-congratulation.
Just a reminder of who I am: a Civil Servant who believes that it is the duty of Civil Servants not to interfere in the affairs of the public unless it is absolutely necessary. I voice this on a regular basis at work; I stated as much – in rather blunt terms – at my last promotion board. I got the job.
Verity, you want to export all public sector jobs. While it would be nice to think that everyone thus made unemployed would instantly find a job at a wage which would allow them to keep a roof over their families’ heads, clothes on their back, and food on the table, do you really think that would happen? As has been pointed elsewhere, there may be no comparable private jobs left as the free market may have moved them overseas. (Who’s to stop them? The Government? That would be Statist and Wrong. The “Enlightened Self-Interest” which used to drive at least part of big business seems to be sadly lacking nowadays).
Rob – competition in the public sector? Yes: my department (IT) won its last two tenders against private companies. If it doesn’t deliver then the jobs go elsewhere.
One final point before I return you to your regular schedule. Back in the early days of the Thatcher administration when support services were put out to private tender, we used to joke about the “Olga Pulloffski Cleaning Company” winning the MoD cleaning contract. How much of the MoD, or other institutions even you consider vital to this country’s well-being, would you allow to be outsourced to places like, say, the PRC or (shudder) France?
I’ve just been reading a post by godless capitalist at Gene Expression about the transparency of government spending. His proposal was for each tax payer to be told how much of his money went to which programme. It put me in mind of the much more robust notion of hypothetication. This would bias towards choice and, thereby, efficiency.
Of course, we are too stupid to be able to comprehend the agonising expenditure choices our rulers make on our behalf. Offhand, though, I am not aware of any extensive evidence of wise spending in Whitehall. Any suggestions, any one?
Adrian Ramsey, With respect, there are exceptions such as yourself. But the public sector is bloated. We do not need a quarter of employed people in this country working for government departments. It’s obscene. We’ve reached tipping point. In France, one-third of the workforce are fonctionaires and the country is at a standstill.
You say: “While it would be nice to think that everyone thus made unemployed would instantly find a job at a wage which would allow them to keep a roof over their families’ heads, clothes on their back, and food on the table, do you really think that would happen?”
I am not interested in their fate. Any more than the government is interested in the fate of people who cannot afford to live comfortably, or educate their children privately, despite earning a good salary, because such a massive amount of their money is siphoned off in taxes. The people whose jobs were exported would have to go on unemployment and benefit, like other unemployed, less privileged, people, which would be hugely cheaper for the taxpayer than paying their salaries, NHS contributions and pensions. Also, the thousands of acres of office space they occupy could be rented out.
I accept that there are still old-style, conscientious and public spirited genuine civil servants, of course, and it is nice to hear of a department being well-run. But most of those public sector jobs, many of them “enforcers” to collect and administer all the new taxes, are completely unnecessary and the ship of state would sail on perfectly comfortably without them. The state is far too big and far too intrusive.
Adrian Ramsey:
While it would be nice to think that everyone thus made unemployed would instantly find a job at a wage which would allow them to keep a roof over their families’ heads, clothes on their back, and food on the table, do you really think that would happen?
Yes. What do you think those Indians will do with their new export earnings, or the taxpayers will do with their new tax cuts?
Last week, Samuel Brittan gave an interesting speech to the St Andrews Liberty Club, which is now webbed here.
Here’s the relevant quote:
The second key idea is somewhat more difficult to put across. It is the circular flow of income. This is something that most macro-economists regard as too obvious to stress. If they were to listen to their favourite taxi driver, they would see how far being taken for granted it really is.
The basic thought is that there is a continuous flow of spending between customers who desire to buy products, the incomes received from supplying their wants and still further purchases. The ignorance of this flow is probably the most important single force of perverse economic policies today. For instance it is assumed that if Britain loses arms orders in pursuit of an ethical foreign policy that the workers in the arms industries will simply waste away in idleness. It is not asked whether there will be other purchasers at home or abroad to make up the difference. To take another example: many alarmist writers wonder what will happen when China and India are able to produce cheaply vast quantities of products which are now made in the West. But few people go on to ask what the Chinese and Indians will do with their export earnings. Presumably they are selling these cheap goods to make a living and not to line their bank vaults with sterling, dollar or euro notes. Even if they are so misconceived as to do so, the circular flow could still take place; but this is something to be explained after a few stiff drinks or with a cold towel round our heads.
I am: a Civil Servant who believes that it is the duty of Civil Servants not to interfere in the affairs of the public unless it is absolutely necessary.
Every single public servant, not to mention every program passed by the legislature, doubtless justifies their interference in the affairs of the public as absolutely necessary. Whether the public holds such interference in their affairs in the same high regard is doubtful.
I know a number of civil “servants.” For the most part, they are pleasant, ordinary people. Collectively, they are an anvil around the neck of society. Their individual virtues do not reduce their collective vices.
R.C. Dean is absolutely right. Nurturing individual virtues is usually a fruitless and oftentimes counterproductive task, especially when the virtue in question is ‘good intentions’. Most people operate from motives of ‘good intentions’ there are few deliberately misanthropic people and few genuine philanthropists also. This is not a cause for worry as the “Enlightened self interest” of the market, mocked by Adrian Ramsey, works just fine. In order to understand this one does not need to be an economist of the acumen of Sam Britten to see that human wants and desires are practically limitless yet there are people in the world standing idle or underemployed. If entreprenurs are not bound down by taxes and regulation imposed by our well intentioned yet woefully ignorant civil servants and legislators then every job ‘lost’ to someone more productive should be a cause for joy as the person who lost their job is then free to apply their talents to serving some new human want or desire. Whenever and whereever this lesson is learned then wealth and prosperity are enjoyed to the extent that it is learned and acted upon. Virtue doesn’t come into it.
Servant, huh? Fetch me a beer.
“If entreprenurs are not bound down by taxes and regulation imposed by our well intentioned yet woefully ignorant civil servants and legislators then every job ‘lost’ to someone more productive should be a cause for joy as the person who lost their job is then free to apply their talents to serving some new human want or desire. Whenever and whereever this lesson is learned then wealth and prosperity are enjoyed to the extent that it is learned and acted upon.”
Yippee! Abandoned by the old boss because he has found someone more desperate to exploit, you too can become so desperate that you will be exploited by someone else. Hooray, ‘ wealth and prosperity are enjoyed ‘ (by the entreprenurs).
zack,
Old fashioned ‘class-warfare’ rhetoric, and old fashioned thinking, that is a large part of the problem today.
Where is it written that when you take a job, it has a guarantee for life?. If you have a job, and are offered something that pays more, do you say ‘No thank you, I have a job already’, of course you dont, you move on and, hopefully improve yourself. Why should your ex-employer not have the same freedom of choice?.
The only people who stick in a job for thirty or forty years, usually end up as time serving, clock watching dullards, – yes – just like civil servants!.
Modifying that old saying – ‘Those that can – do, and those that can’t, become civil servants’.
Zack,
Thank you for treating us to a fine display of your woeful ignorance. Despite this I expect that you have some slight talent that someone somewhere is willing to pay for.
Earnest,
Teachers are a sub-set of Civil-“Servants”. (Aren’t servant’s supposed to do what they are told by the people that pay them?)
BTW Has anyone seem Diana Moon Glampers (Tolly Poynbee) latest peice on “If you coerce enough money into your favourite state spending trough market forces will kill off the free-market alternative” in today’s grauniad?
Verity writes:
The people whose jobs were exported would have to go on unemployment and benefit, like other unemployed, less privileged, people, which would be hugely cheaper for the taxpayer than paying their salaries, NHS contributions and pensions.
More people unemployed = less taxpayers, at least in the short term.
Also, the thousands of acres of office space they occupy could be rented out.
The Government-owned office I worked in during the 80s was sold off – we pay market value for office space.
Andy – the key word was people instantly finding a new job – okay, to expand/clarify/fudge, not have one handed to them on a place as a God/State-given right, but being able to successfully find one within a reasonably quick time (one month? three?). See my comments to Verity above.
Paul – I do not mock “Enlightened self-interest”. Henry Ford made sure his workers could buy one of his cars by paying them a decent wage. That was “Enlightened self-interest”. Wal-Mart ensure staff loyalty by paying such low wages that their staff can only afford to shop there. I call that unenlightened.
Weasel – Certainly, but do you mean beer or
beer?
Meanwhile, according to the (London) Evening Standard PT is doing her bit for public sector troughing:
I don’t really have so much problem with her taking the work (even barking commentators should be able to sell to whoever will buy them) as Ken using my money to pay her. As far as I’m aware–please correct me!–the Mayor of London has no actual responsibility for childcare so the whole “strategy” is an even vaster waste of other people’s money.
What are the chances of a declaration that this is ultra vires and Livingstone having to pick up the tab himself? Small, I fear.
Adrian,
You are right in that you were not exactly mocking ‘enlightened self-interest’ rather you have a very different conception of it to me. For me the market is ‘enlightened self-interest’ no extra virtue on the part of employers is either necessary or indeed possible. Whatever the PR claims of various firms all firms pay their workers the value of the marginal product of their labour. Any firm which habitually deviated from this either by error or misplaced good intentions would soon find itself out of business. You are quite wrong in attacking Verity’s arguments as well when you say that job losses in the public sector will mean less tax is paid since people working in the public sector make no net contribution to tax at all, their wages are paid out of the taxes levied only on jobs in the private sector. To see how absurd this idea is that public sector workers pay tax consider how when the chancellor raised national insurance to raise more money he succeded also in massively raising the payroll bill for all the public sector industries and institutions.
…in short, the way of the future is “be as much of an a**hole towards everyone else as you can”… or more politely “take everyone else for as much as you can get”
… & we call this progress? This is the bright future we’ve decided to build?
Adrian Ramsey writes: “More people unemployed = less taxpayers, at least in the short term.”
Which would be entirely true but for the fact that state employees and state contractors are not taxpayers, except nominally–other people’s taxes go to make up their nett pay. So by reducing the state payroll you will have a larger government surplus or smaller deficit, if nothing else changes.
In real economics, of course, everything does change all the time. So genuinely private businesses who happened to supply goods and services to ex-state-employees would suffer too. It definitely isn’t that everyone would be instantly better off except the redundant civil servants and quangocrats. Total private spending power would increase, on the other hand, with less tax pressure. It is very hard to guess the detailed effects, but government can certainly be shrunk without instant disaster for the public finances.
Actually getting to do it is the problem. Keith Joseph’s ratchet is running fast the wrong way as the original article points out.
A_t,
Your last conribution is very opaque and way below the usual quality of your comments. I’m assuming you were following up on my point, if so your sentiments are misplaced. All I advocate is that the free market is the only know method of solving the calculational problem of allocating work to those talents that can engage in it most productively. The free market means in practice comfort, prosperity and abundance for all economically as well as maximising the sphere of personal autonomy within which we can enjoy our liberty and prosperity. Attempt to find other solutions to this key social problem have always been failures, practically and conceptually. No cruelty in behaviour is either implied nor condoned, in fact quite the opposite.
Andy – the key word was people instantly finding a new job – okay, to expand/clarify/fudge, not have one handed to them on a place as a God/State-given right, but being able to successfully find one within a reasonably quick time (one month? three?). See my comments to Verity above.
I’m not sure why it’s so important that they should find a job instantly; three months looking for work is hardly going to impoverish someone who has been living on a civil service salary.
And as you also specified “job at a wage which would allow them to keep a roof over their families’ heads, clothes on their back, and food on the table”,
I would say they could probably find such a job within a week or two. If they take longer, I would expect it to be because they are holding out for a wage which would also pay for the luxuries of modern life which they have got used to.
But if you’re worried about the effects of a sudden dislocation of lots of people, the civil servants needn’t all be sacked at once. You could sack 5% this year, 5% next year, …
As to your comments to Verity:
More people unemployed = less taxpayers, at least in the short term.
But we’re talking about sacking civil servants, not people working in the private sector.
Civil servants are net tax recipients, not net tax payers. Sacking civil servants would release funds for tax cuts or for hiring cheap foreign labour, even in the short term.
The Government-owned office I worked in during the 80s was sold off – we pay market value for office space.
Then the money saved by not renting office space at the market rate can be spent on tax cuts, or cheap foreign labour too.
Ooops. Sorry about runaway italics.
A_t:
Speaking for myself, I definitely am not in the business of building a future. I’m really very much against the Big Plan. Whatever it is, I’m against it.
Though there are a few things I might like for myself, I’m not about to impose them on others, and expect others to do me the same favour of detachment. What worries me is not the grand form of a future I can’t predict or control, but the shape of the institutions under whose power I have to live. At present their Big Plans prevent us individually, or in voluntary collectives, from choosing for ourselves how we lead our lives.
Let’s decide NOT to build a bright future.
My vision of a bright future consists of little more than everyone doing pretty much what they want, so long as they do not engage in fraud or the initiation of force. I freely admit that this bright future will require a night watchman state, but little more.
That way, everyone (except the authoritarians, of course) can pick the bright future they want, rather than having it picked for them by their “betters.”
Adrian,
I’m surprised that you managed to get the obligatory sneer re Wal-Mart into your reply to Paul, and you a ‘hands-off’ British Civil Servant, how very naughty..
As a Brit you probably accept at face value the rubbish written in the British media about Wal-Mart being the big global exploitive company, paying minimum wage here, at the POS, and there, at the Point Of Manufacture.
In truth they are not bad employers, they could not have built the company to the size it is, and in such a realtively short time, if they had been as bad as the lefty trade unions say they are.
I do not know what their terms of employment are, but I do know that the staff are invariably pleasant and helpful, and in spite of a little nudging, never have a bad thing to say about the Company, unlike other competing, and pricier chains where the staff seem to suffer from delusions of grandeur, and where rudery and company bashing seem to be the norm.
They are noted for giving, otherwise unemployable folk a job, when these same people would be reduced to living on a social security cheque.
Wal-Mart values them appreciably higher than any State handout or pension does, and at the same time their pride and self-esteem is bolstered and they are not made to feel inferior and second-rate, as often happens when dealing with civil servants.
Another plus in Wal-Mart’s favour, is that they are consistent and ‘always there’ for their commuity, they are reliable in a way that the State or Government agency are not.
If the Company is wrong in paying ‘minimum wage’, (it being supposedly, not enough to live on), then isn’t the Government even worse when paying pensions (the result of a lifetime of contributions) that amount to less than half of a minimum wage job. How about a good sneer at the Government for being even more exploitive.
To my mind Wal-Mart has as much ‘enlightened self-interest’ as Henry Ford or any other socially aware company.
One last point – Wal-Mart may sell goods cheaply, that does not imply that they sell cheap goods. If the staff can only afford to shop there, then at least they are getting better value for money, than if they were to shop elsewhere. Pardon me, but I think your snobbery is showing.
ernest,
I hold my hands up and admit I have never been inside a Wal-Mart, having never visited the U.S. I will however freely admit to having shopped at Lidl, Farmfoods, and Mini-Mart.
My second-hand observations were based in part on comments from U.S. correspondents, not all of them left-wing (or even the equivalent of New Labour) by U.K. standard. Then again, I never worked for Henry Ford, and that seems to have gone by the bye…
Well I’m not a habitual Wal-Mart basher, and have defended them before, but having lived with a Wal-Mart employee before, they are not quite as nice as Ernest makes them out to be.
They have indeed locked workers into stores during night time inventory, and peddled the employee stock purchase plan with the line “see how great our stock is, it’s way up, you should buy some” in a very high pressure way. The poor slobs of course not realizing the fundamental problem with that buy recommendation.
And their excessive use of part-time workers, purely to avoid paying any benefits, when many (most?) of their part-timers would be more than happy to work full time even without them, is indeed shameful.
But there are indeed a few things in this house that couldn’t have been afforded elsewhere, although this is counterbalanced by the things bought there that unreasonably broke upon first use (what good is a “made in America” campfire coffee pot if it breaks the first time you go to make coffee? And you’re already deep in the woods?)
Adrian,
Sorry to have ‘knee-jerked’ in my defense of WM, I just hate to see unfair or uninformed critisism – of anything or anyone. And WM comes in for a lot of it, especially from the ‘anti-global’ lot.
Point taken that you are not a snob, :-), so many Brits come to the US and tend to look down their collective noses at the Aladdins Cave that is WM, and somewhere or other they manage to say, ‘Of course, I shop at Target’, (one of the competition that I mentioned, and invariably pronouced as Tarjay), as though they wouldn’t be seen dead in WM…. of course the more enlightened, and generally working class with large families, can’t wait to get into the casual wear, electronics and sporting goods that WM retails so well.
Point is, no-one, individual or corporate body, can please all the people all the time, and I find it ironic that a company that really does put a lot back into the community, (largely unsung), should be criticised so heavily by the, generally lefty, anti-global crowd who profess to have the working class interest at heart.
Yes, I agree, not all anti-globs are lefty, surprised me too when I found anti opinion coming from the right, but in general the most vehement critisism comes from the trade union movement. I suppose it is because they cannot work their protection scam on WM.
Comments in the British media by the likes of Greg Palast, really should be taken with large pinches of salt.
David,
We all have to speak as we find. Point taken about part-timers, but then (in this area, at least Fl), a lot of the part-timers are unable to work full-time, due to health, age or other domestic problems. My point was that employment is provided for these folk, when non else is available, and that even the minimum wage offered is substantially better than living on ‘welfare’.
Pensioners who have fallen on hard times, and need to have a little extra cash, don’t want or need a full-time job, they may even lose what pension they have if they work full-time. Any finger pointing should be at the real culprits – the Government, and their generally stupid rules governing welfare and pensions.
If WM is great for Wall St. why is it wrong for the employees to buy it?. Benefitting from their own labours can’t be that wrong….besides it may even instil a propriatary attitude towards work, rather than the confrontational attitude seen in so many mundane jobs. Whatever, you see more smiles in WM than in the others…. and I’m sure they have the same rights-to-sell as the rest of us.
Shows how different points-of-view are generated by different experiences.
Greg Palast makes a better case than, for example, Michael Moore. Although I agree he needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
I don’t need too much convincing to accept that Wal_mart isn’t a nice place to work, with the possibly exception of Waitrose/John Lewis, I can’t think of a retail company that is.
Dave,
Horses for courses!, you and I might not like to deal with the public for eight hours a day, but some folk do.
The problem with recruiting staff for a retail operation is to get people who have enough brains to do the job, without feeling that the job is beneath them. If you are ambitious, then ‘front-line’ retailing is not for you, (nor me). But if you like people and have the gift of the gab then you may have found your niche in life!.
Are you being served?. 🙂