A regular theme remarked upon here and elsewhere has been the big growth in people working – if that is the right verb – in Britain’s public sector. On the most cautious estimates, about half a million new jobs have been added to the public payroll since the present Labour government came to power in 1997. This article in the current issue of the Spectator puts that figure, after revisions, even higher, to more than 800,000. Jeysus.
It goes without saying that the article concludes that much of this increase is designed to build a powerful constuency in favour of voting Labour and embracing Big Government. No kidding.
The article goes on to say that the process is likely to end once big tax rises are necessary to foot the bill, provoking an explosion of anger similar to that at the trade union public sector mayhem in the 1970s. I hope a more pleasant resolution is at hand. If the Tories are half-smart, they will figure out a way to outflank Labour and put some radical, attractive options on the table. Some juicy tax cuts might be a good start.
On that happy note, I am off to enjoy the rest of Friday evening.
Along with the return of real winter, the past week or so has also seen a bit of a return of real Conservatives, with most pundits seeming to feel that Michael Howard has at last managed to land several well-aimed blows on Phony Tony’s smug mug.
But the wide open goal of public service (sic) over-manning hasn’t been a target. In fact it remains spookily, eerily ignored..
Even the poor deluded souls who believe that uncontrolled government spending on school ‘n hospitals can only be A Good Thing aren’t likely to support the legions of Real Nappy advisors, Gay and Lesbian outreach co-ordinators and the rest of the of the zombies being recruited in the pages of the Grauniad each week.
So why aren’t the Tories making hay with this gift? Every time Bliar or one of his henchmen tries to deflect a blow with more lying waffle about Howard wanting to destroy the NHS, all the Conservatives need to do is wave a copy of the Grauniad’s ghastly recruitment section across the despatch box.
If not a killer blow to the junta, it could do a great deal of damage and, happily, also help diminish any prospects for that other Scotch Marxist, Kennedy.
Because the consensus of public opinion is that state funding of public services is a Good Thing ™.
It may result in hospitals which kill, but private hospitals won’t treat you until your credit card is validated. It may result in schools which take 11 years to produce illiterates, but private schools are for the rich and only foster elitism. It may produce armies of inspectors, but this for our own good, otherwise excessive corporate power will feed us poison and contaminate our land. We must conform and be regulated in detail, because individualism only results in the exploitation of the numerous disadvantaged communities by the strong.
Some may need to have it pointed out that there was a degree of irony in the foregoing.
Because a very large number of people really do think like this, and because those same people have for a variety of reasons which presumably made sense at the time been granted the right to vote, there is no electoral advantage in advocating the large scale reduction in the number of state employees and/or substantial reductions in state expenditure. Thus, political parties don’t advocate it. At least, those of them that would like to get votes don’t.
There is no conspiracy to create a vast army of captive Labour voters (those people would vote Labour anyway). Rather, people are just on the average not very clever.
EG
Euan Gray writes:
“Because the consensus of public opinion is that state funding of public services is a Good Thing ™.”
This is not the same as condoning waste. Most people are forced to budget carefully in their lives and recognise waste when they see it.
“Thus, political parties don’t advocate it. At least, those of them that would like to get votes don’t.”
It’s a good thing no one convinced Margaret Thatcher of that. It might have cost her many victories.
True, but this concerns the money they directly control. Many people see “public money” as something the Treasury produces as if by magic, and they fail to comprehend that it is the money they pay in taxes and duties. They simply don’t see a connection. I recall during one party conference season some bloke urging, without any apparent irony, that taxes should be cut but at the same time public spending should be increased.
Perhaps unfortunately, Thatcher never did any more than tinker with minor parts of this issue, nor did she ever publicly advocate the large scale forced reduction of the welfare state (the principle cause of the bloat) as a practical policy. The decline in state expenditure and the state payroll during her period was not that great – in fact, the boom in North Sea oil funded cuts in personal taxation without significantly reducing overall state expenditure. Thatcher herself acknowledged that the reforms of the 1980s would have been politically impossible without oil revenue.
EG
I should perhaps have added to the above that a major reason for Thatcher’s election victories in 1983 and 1987 was the the Labour party was unelectable, not unlike the Tories over the past 10 years. The Thatcher governments were deeply unpopular, and she herself was widely seen at the time as strident and divisive – but it was better than the prospect of a near-Communist Labour government.
EG
Back in the days before Reagan was elected, there was a lot of concern about what would happen when more than 50% of the population received their daily bread either directly or indirectly from the hand of the State. (In addition to all those on a government paycheck or dole, those who are paid by a company or organization with a government contract also have to be counted among this group.)
The fear was that once the balance shifted, it would no longer be possible to find a majority willing to shrink the State. This would be a point of no return.
As things turned out, Reagan was elected and many good things happened, but a shrinkage of the State was not among them. We did have a large economic expansion that offset the blood-sucking of the leeches, so that we have not yet really felt the pain. Nor has the question of the majority’s Statist or non-Statist inclinations ever been put to the test. It is still an open question.
You may be getting closer to an answer in Britain.
This seems to me to be the political and economic analogy of a Black Hole. A nation can get closer and closer the the tipping point and once they cross over there is no going back. Therafter, each succeeding week one can truthfully say “Never before have so many been supported by so few”, until the whole thing is economically crushed out of existence.
This may be the ultimate limit on state power.
So why aren’t the Tories making hay with this gift?
Seems to me, Gcooper, that the better question is why aren’t you making hay with this?
There seems to me to be a large group of right wing people suffering from what I call ideological equivalent of welfare dependency – a belief that the Tories are somehow there to deliver you political demands while you give nothing in return. Grow up.
Second, the Uk has indeed passed the half way mark; most people look at the net figure for government expenditure – around 43%. But the Gross figure i.e. including money the government takes and then rebates is over 50% already.
Giles writes:
“Seems to me, Gcooper, that the better question is why aren’t you making hay with this?
There seems to me to be a large group of right wing people suffering from what I call ideological equivalent of welfare dependency – a belief that the Tories are somehow there to deliver you political demands while you give nothing in return. Grow up.”
Thank you for the entirely gratuitous rudeness. It’s always good to find a use for a word that seems in danger of going out of fashion. Boor, for example.
You haven’t the slightest knowledge what I do politically. It would be more sensible if you confined your remarks to subjects about which you know something.
Euan Gray writes:
“The Thatcher governments were deeply unpopular, and she herself was widely seen at the time as strident and divisive – but it was better than the prospect of a near-Communist Labour government.”
That is certainly the BBC/Guardian line, yes. However, it does not reflect the reality in the many parts of England (I make the distinction for obvious reasons) where she remained extremely popular to the end.
As for the rest, Mrs. Thatcher’s appeal was very directly based on the carefully cultivated image of the grocer’s daughter, the thrifty housewife who would (among other things) manage government spending.
It’s perfectly true that her success in this area was more apparent than real, but you were arguing that no politician would be elected if s/he proposed controlling waste. In her case, that was not true and, personally, I’m quite certain that a platform of controlling government waste would be effective – but only providing it was properly conveyed to people just how big and leaky the pork barrel has become. In that respect, to go back to my original comment on Johnathan Pearce’s post, I am saddened to see how many opportunities have been missed.
Giles-
Actually, it is not so much a matter of whether 50% of the economy is in government expenditures, but whether 50% or more of the voters see a restriction of government spendiing as a threat to their income. I suppose a large number of people may get small incomes from the state which then taxes a few very productive people to obtain the money; or conversely, a lot of productive people may be taxed to provide large incomes for a smaller number of spongers.
Obviously, a politician interested in enlarging his power (or, should I just say ‘a politician’) prefers the first situation. I suspect however that it is a slippery slope. Once you pass the tipping point you have to keep on going. I can see no workable stopping point short of collapse.
What I do not know is the current demographic ratio of taxpayers to taxeaters either in your nation or mine.
Doug Collins writes:
“What I do not know is the current demographic ratio of taxpayers to taxeaters either in your nation or mine.”
Sadly, it’s even more complicated than that. Gordon Brown’s dishing out of other people’s money in the form of ‘family tax credits’ has meant that even tax payers (indeed, even quite high earners) are now being bribed, with both their own and other people’s money, to vote Labour.
G Cooper – As always, good value.
One thing the article in The Speccie addresses is, have we already passed the point of no return? Eight hundred thousand NEW public employees (you can’t call Street Football Coordinators civil servants)
. Whereas Britain used to have pride in having so few people (comparatively) in the public sector, we are now chasing hard on the heels of France. France has 1/3 of the workforce receiving its salaries from the taxpayer. Britain now has 1/4.
Most of those millions of employees will be married or have a “significant other”. Some will have adult (voter) children.
Add to this, the clients of the state. The people on unemployment or disability or Jobseekers’ Allowances or those who spend most of their lives “on the sick”, welfare mothers, job training allowances (that never lead to an actual job). And soon, female recipients of the munificence of receiving their regular salary for nine months of not working.
They all have votes. So a quarter of the working population already receives its paycheque from the government. Thus Labour can count on them to get out there on voting day to protect their positions and their pensions, with their mates, and probably their adult children, doing the same. Add the millions on welfare.
Britain may already have passed the tipping point.
Verity writes:
“Britain may already have passed the tipping point.”
I really do fear you’re right.
And to the ghastly roll-call you list, we have to add those who actually do work in the wealth creating sector, yet still somehow seem to think this sort of lark can go on indefinitely. Even some industrialists (the Victor Meldrew soundalike “Lord” Haskins, former Chairman of Northern Foods, is a prime example) are stupid enough to play the game.
It’s hard to see how there can be sufficient people left in the UK to bring about a change.
Eventually, no doubt, there will be some kind of crisis, following which the whole sorry process will begin again: a few years of belt-tightening, followed by the inevitable return of the legalised pick-pockets.
That’s not really true. The figure of 43% refers to the estimated gross total share of GDP controlled by the state. Taking account of tax credits, rebates, etc., the net figure is about 36 to 37%. Data is available from HM Treasury if you want to look at it in more detail.
But it does reflect reality in the many parts of England where she became and remained extremely unpopular. And still is, for that matter. Thatcher’s unpopularity in much of the People’s Republic of Scotland is a given, of course.
No I wasn’t. I actually said, if you’d care to look up:
That’s not the same thing. I agree with you that people might well vote for controlling waste, but they will NOT vote for reducing the scope of the welfare system. Welfare expenditure continued to increase under Thatcher, of course.
Since welfare (health, education, dole, etc) accounts for well over half of state expenditure in the UK (and therefore close to a quarter of GDP), one might think there is plenty of scope for savings from eliminating waste, but the problem is the sheer size of the system. Any system, public or private, gets more wasteful as it gets larger.
Large private companies often waste spectacular amounts of cash, time and resources, simply because the system is too big and cumbersome to manage effectively. The problem is worse for the state (or for a private monopoly), because there is no commercial pressure to reduce costs, but it is an illusion to think private ownership necessarily results in greater efficiency – it can, but it will not always do so.
You can get reasonably efficient state systems, particularly when they are constrained to a small percentage of national wealth. However, any drive for efficiency in the UK system would inevitably lead to more civil servants and expenditure – after all, someone has to examine the system, and that department needs a budget. Economies would be made, as is the way of these things, by reducing the scope of services provided rather than making them run more efficiently – and there are no votes in this.
EG
GCooper-
Although Giles was rather personal in his remarks and I can see why you would take offense, I can also see a larger point that he may have been trying to make.
Not about you personally – you may very well be a political ball of fire – but about the necessity of getting one’s hands into the dirty business of politics and not just agonizing over the failures of those already down in the muck.
This may, in fact, be the Achille’s Heel of Blogging. There seems to be an idea that merely writing about something and perhaps getting some commentary back is enough to get results in the larger world. After all, it seems to work for Dan Rather and the BBC, right?
Wrong. If you have ever worked in a job dealing with unhappy customers, you know that letting them vent their feelings is one of the most effective ways of shutting them up and making them happy without actually having to do anythng about their complaint. Robert Heinlein, talking about writing, put it another way when he said that when one has an idea, NEVER talk about it before writing. If you do, he said, you will rarely or never write it.
Rather and the BBC are the mouthpieces of a larger establishment with its hands already on the levers of power and on the controls of said mouthpieces. We are neither mouthpieces nor do we have levers of power.
We have to voice our own words and, if we are to pull any levers, we will have to construct them or take them first. Blogging is too easily a venue for venting and too rarely an incitement to lever pulling.
Samizdata and its commenters, over the time I have been reading them, have often severely and justly criticized your Tories and our Republicans. I have, however, never seen anyone coordinate ganging up to pack the vote at local meetings, much less brag about having done it aftterwards. This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s criticism of socialism.
Blogs are not the MSM. If the distributed, connected nature of blogdom is only used for blogging, they will not only fail to live up to their potential, they probably will be about as significant in ten years as usenet is now.
Euan Gray writes:
“Economies would be made, as is the way of these things, by reducing the scope of services provided rather than making them run more efficiently – and there are no votes in this.”
Clearly not the case, were sufficient made of (to quote Verity’s wonderful example) ‘Street Football Co-ordinators’.
The mistake is to let the socialists get on the front foot with accustions that the services proposed for cutting are the ones people want.
When you say: “…people might well vote for controlling waste, but they will NOT vote for reducing the scope of the welfare system.” what you are doing is using precisely the argument deployed by Bliar at today’s conference. It’s a completely fallacious argument. Sacking GLBTG outreach workers isn’t the same as sacking nurses.
People aren’t so stupid that they cannot understand that, provided it is explained clearly.
And that is what the Tories are failing to do.
Doug Collins writes:
“Although Giles was rather personal in his remarks and I can see why you would take offense, I can also see a larger point that he may have been trying to make.”
There is, indeed, a wider point and I’m pretty critical of some of the wilder claims made for blogs, myself.
But to infer from the fact that someone posts on a blog that it is the entirety of what they do is absurd.
Why people might care not to discuss their private lives, affiliations, activities and so on isn’t so hard to understand.
You haven’t the slightest knowledge what I do politically.
Whinge would be a good guess.
I beg to differ. We have a problem in this country with children not taking enough exercise. There are various reasons for this, some state inspired, others not. Whilst one can (easily) make the case that there is no need to employ street football coordinators at the public expense, one can also argue that this is a constructive step towards encouraging our feral brats to exercise more and vandalise less. Given that one reason children seem to exercise less is the paranoid fear of abusers lurking on every street corner, the suggestion that some form of supervision could help with this is, naturally, appealing to hoi polloi – especially when they do not directly pay for it. I don’t subscribe to the argument myself, but it is not hard to see how persuasive it can be among a certain class of people. Furthermore, opposition to it can be very easily labelled as uncaring, thoughtless, not thinking about the children, not recognising that “something must be done,” being in league with the paedophiles, etc. Silly, but most political arguments are and this IS how it would be presented. Similar arguments can be, and would be, made for pretty much any sphere of state activity you care to mention.
True, but who selects the people getting sacked? Civil servants. Who are they not going to sack? Other civil servants. How are they going to secure public support for no redundancies? Sack nurses in preference to civil servants. Add to that the extra civil servants required to determine how many civil servants should be dismissed. Unfortunately, this is pretty much how things work.
Again true, but the civil service is not stupid either and is more than capable of frustrating the designs of its political masters.
EG
Excellent analysis Doug.
Apologies GCooper – not meant personally, doug made the point better.
Giles – Don’t be obtuse. You accuse someone whose level of literacy, precision of language and ability to marshall a coherent argument are light years in advance of your own, of “whinging” – a word I suspect G Cooper would not use, and then you say it wasn’t personal.
Then what was it? A disinterested judgement? Based on what observations exactly? Certainly nothing G Cooper has ever written on Samizdata.
On the other hand, your statement is correct, as you apparently are not familiar with G Cooper’s posts and therefore would not be able to say anything “personal” about him/her. Gratuitously insulting – yes. Personal – no.
it wasn’t personal.
Verity, I said not meant. Read the posts before you get on your high horse.
whose level of literacy, precision of language and ability to marshall a coherent argument are light years in advance of your own
Yes but is he right or is it just the spin that matters?
This time in Scotland, the Conservatives missed yet another open goal. This time on a motion against ID Cards.
The fact the public still think the state “solves everything” comes from the state school system which, lets face it, indoctrinates the young into believing this myth.
This time in Scotland, the Conservatives missed yet another open goal. This time on a motion against ID Cards.
The fact the public still think the state “solves everything” comes from the state school system which, lets face it, indoctrinates the young into believing this myth. Keeping students ignorant and under-educated doesn’t help much either.
the Conservatives missed yet another open goal.
How does that constitute missing an open goal – they voted for the motion, which got passed but .. ??????.
Rubbish.
It comes from the fact that people, given the opportunity, will readily vote themselves largesse from the public purse and that they will gladly abdicate personal responsibility to the state when it appears to them that the state is not charging them for assuming their responsibilities.
EG
It comes from the fact that people, given the opportunity, will readily vote themselves largesse from the public purse[….]
Precisely. The art of modern politics consists in great part of persuading the voter that someone else will be subsidising his lunch. It is greatly aided by the inability of most people to letter, number, remember and reason, but poor education is a self-reinforcing consequence, of dependency, not a conspiracy.
G Cooper:
“Sacking GLBTG outreach workers isn’t the same as sacking nurses.”
Correct. It is far more important to sack the nurses. The NHS consumes orders of magnitude more money than any number of GLBTS’s.