Tuesday 11 May 2010
Meet the New Boss!
So, David Cameron becomes our new PM, albeit with the support of Nick Clegg and the LibDems (not all of whom are happy about the deal). How long this Coalition will last is a matter of some conjecture, as such arrangements are very often prone to severe strain. Examples include the Popular Front governments in France and Spain before the war, and the Lib-Lab pact in this country more recently. As George Orwell noted in "Homage to Catalonia", the Popular Front in Spain was "an alliance of enemies". This Tory-LibDem Coalition might not be that deeply internally divided, but there are many in both parties who loathe what the other party stands for. So - what do we think? Will this new alliance be a success, or can we look forward to another General Election before too long?
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Tory-LibLab? Surely not. That would be positively amazing!
ReplyDeleteI felt quite optimistic and reassured by the tone of Cameron's speech outside No 10 last night. Let's hope it's all for the good. One problem they now have to address is the fact that the PCS won its case that the govt couldn't unilaterally cut redundancy payments to civil servants, so plans to downsize cannot be done on the cheap.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that, Ewa! I've put it right. Ah, but has Mr Clegg made a mistake? And have Labour done themselves a favour by not building a coalition with the LibDems? After all, didn't Mervyn King say that the party which got in would be out of power for a generation afterwards? After all, Labour will not be seen as the party that carried out the inevitable public spending cuts. Time will tell.
ReplyDeleteFlyp: so you see it as a problem that the Government was stopped from unlawfully tearing up binding agreements with its own staff? The problem I have is that the Government was prepared to break the law in such a high-handed and arrogant manner. PCS knows that changes are necessary and was prepared to negotiate, as their General Secretary said after the court case. Typically, the Government wasn't.
ReplyDeleteI don’t see how throwing people out of work makes good economic sense in the middle of a recession. Paying for people to do nothing is horrendously expensive, especially when they have families and homes to support. However, some people don't care about either the law or the unemployment rate as long as unions are bashed and public sector jobs cut. Getting a pay-off from a civil service job is not a lottery win - not unless you're a mandarin at the top of the shop - so if there aren’t other jobs to go to, the pay-offs will not last very long.
Some examples of the effects of job cuts:
The failure of Jobcentre Plus to answer 3 or 4 million phone calls a few years back was entirely due to staff shortages. Since then staff have been cut again and again, until rising unemployment forced jobcentres to do some modest recruitment in the last year or two to ensure the system didn't collapse entirely.
Two years ago, DWP was declaring staff surplus and paying them to go in accordance with ministerial instructions AT THE SAME TIME that it was taking on staff to cover extra workloads caused by the recession. I think any applause of the Government's illegal actions should be tempered by that fact. Funny how the press didn't highlight that stupidity, but they probably just saw public sector jobs going and were pleased enough by that not to examine what was really going on. Our proud tradition of investigative journalism really is that debased.
The loss of 2 discs containing personal details of 25 million child benefit claimants 3 or 4 years ago was a direct result of staff reductions. I know exactly what happened there, and so did the press, which decided not to publish it, because civil service bashing made a much better story than the truth.
The cutting of tax fraud inspectors, who generally recovered about 5 times their wages. Why would anyone cut those jobs? But they did and the Government raised the threshold when tax evasion is investigated, and less tax is paid as a result.
PCS was absolutely right in the actions it took, and I was happy to interviewed by local radio as a member of the public who supported them. My reason for supporting them is that public sector job cuts will mean worse public services, because there aren't that many more "efficiencies" to be squeezed out the system after more than one tenth of a million public sector job cuts over the last 6 years.
That won’t stop Cameron and his born-again Tory sidekick Clegg from initiating another round of public sector cuts. Once the LibDems get used to the heady fragrance of Government, I’ll think they’ll happily go along with most of the Tories’ agenda, just to keep the ministerial status, cars and salaries. So I think this unholy alliance may last some time.