Labour has thrown down an immediate challenge to the new Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, to back Rachel Reeves’s budget plans for big increases in tax, spending and borrowing, as a huge political divide threatened to open up over economic policy and the future of public services.
Good grief, just standard politial posturing. What you hgonna do different, hunh, hunh?
Of course, at this stage the one answer they’re not going to get is the correct one. We’re going to cut the things the state does so that we don’t have to flay the population for quite so much tax.
And this time around it does have to be cut what is done. Not just less money for each thing done. Or, as actually hapepned, vaguely try to hold back the rising costs of what is done. Actually cut the number of things done. Lots and lots of such cuts.
Bloody hell
Is Helm writing this sort of stuff on his padded cell walls in crayon ?
The budget is an open goal a mile wide.
Even Emile Heskey could score.
You’re expecting a tory to be able to?
“Why would any sane person vote against collecting and burying gas under the sea, helping Sri Lankans become carbon neutral, setting up a nationalised energy industry, supporting an unwinnable war against Russia, and paying public sector workers more for doing the same work?”
Won’t happen. Badenoch will be hamstrung by the Tory wets like a gazelle swarmed by hyaenas.
Her response should be along the lines of you lot are making such a mess of the economy that we can’t predict now what will be needed to sort it out.
Anyway, unless the Tories (and Reform if you believe they’re future) find a way to reform the civil service they’ll spend all their energy fighting them and never get their policies implemented. Labour’s making it even harder by shovelling money at the public sector to buy their future loyalty.
I do remember Campbell-Newman. He actually reduced the size of the Queensland state public service. I voted for him, of course.
Labor won the next election. The LNP have never been game to try this one again.
BiND,
“Anyway, unless the Tories (and Reform if you believe they’re future) find a way to reform the civil service they’ll spend all their energy fighting them and never get their policies implemented. Labour’s making it even harder by shovelling money at the public sector to buy their future loyalty.”
This is often something that Conservatives say, but I think it’s really an excuse for their own failures. My experience working with civil servants and people in councils is that there is almost no ideological support for socialism. People are in government for a cushy life. They don’t vote Labour to bring about a revolution but to get bigger pay rises. Same as all those RMT fuckers talking about supporting working people, which really just means they want rail workers to earn more. They’re greed pigs.
The failure of software projects I worked on is mostly about idleness. Some manager who spends his time chasing skirt rather than improving things. Projects where every month, someone comes to the meeting and there is no progress, and no-one yells at them. Or where some civil servants just keep endlessly changing what they want built, adding lots of nice-to-haves where in the private sector, a manager would be “stop working on that and get what we have delivered”.
And if someone is deliberately getting in the way, you move them out of the way. The Conservatives had 14 years in power and for much of that, a majority. If they’d wanted to they could have rewritten the disciplinary rules for the public sector making it easier to fire people. But they didn’t. Most ministers preferred to spend their days travelling to a factory to put a hard hat on for a photo op than doing anything useful.
Beyond that, you start by cutting out the stuff that government doesn’t need to do (e.g. most of DCMS), you simplify the rules on things, and you cut budgets.
I don’t think cutting budgets will work in the public sector. They’ll just stop doing essential services and the BBC will run endless sob stories for them until the government bottles it (about 5 seconds for recent Tories).
Tim is right on this one. Slash and burn!
Martin,
“I don’t think cutting budgets will work in the public sector. They’ll just stop doing essential services and the BBC will run endless sob stories for them until the government bottles it (about 5 seconds for recent Tories).”
If they stop doing what is set as the priority, you fire them and hire in a group of people who will do it. And you don’t bottle it. The problem with the Tories is that they have no code, no ideology at all. You’ve got to figure this shit out long before you get into power. What do you care about, and then, how do you do it. And how do you defend it. And you’ve got to stop being a pussy about “how does this policy affect this deaf dumb and blind kid who wants to buy a ticket to a pinball tournament”. You can’t run the Trowbridge ticket office just for Tommy. Tommy is going to have to fuck off, or someone is going to have to help him. You know, how about you people, who claim to care so much, doing some fucking work, if you think it’s so important.
It’s also important to understand that none of this makes much difference to winning elections and staying in power. Remember Theresa May talking about the Nasty Party? The one that got far bigger majorities than most of the recent losers. OK, there’s now lots of sob documentaries about how the miners were so hard done by, but it is done, and the only people moaning about it are socialists who never vote Conservative, so who cares?
How much harm has it done Farage that All The Right People hate him? Absolutely none.
Cuts should be easy. It’s the will that is missing.
Whole departments could be simply abolished. Energy. Business. UKRI (have they ever got a return on the 8 billion a year they cost?). Environment doesn’t need centralising in Whitehall. DCMS, Actually have that bonfire of the Quangos. Issue all illegal migrants a Nansen style passport prominently stating “No recourse to public funds” and kick them out of the hotels pending deportation. Stop all government funds to “charities”. Reduce the size and budget of the FCO to reflect our actual status as a third world shithole.
“If they stop doing what is set as the priority, you fire them and hire in a group of people who will do it. And you don’t bottle it.”
Yes, I agree. But what did the Tories do for 14 years? They couldn’t find a bottle in a French hypermarket. I’m not sure Reform have it in them either.
Philip
Has it about right.
Problem is – we are the worst kind of third world shithole . We are one with nuclear weapons and are run by maniacs.
@ Western Bloke
It is almost impossible to fire public sector workers: the system set up to protect them from political victimisation has been turned into one that protects them from sacking on grounds of incompetently failing to do their job. In the most egregious cases of deliberate failure it takes a whole series of informal then formal warnings followed by dismissal and an appeals process that lasts for years. Oh, there is also a killer to your proposal – the only people who can initiate the dismissal procedures are higher-ranking public sector workers (until you get up to the ranks of Permanent Secretary when the Minister can sack him or her to massive pubic outcry by the BBC and press.
Hence the need to abolish whole departments and ministries, john77, so there are no jobs left from which they need to be fired.
I mean, the whole Education ministry, for instance, could be replaced by two civil servants sitting opposite each other at a desk: one stuffing vouchers into envelopes, the other addressing the envelopes. But to do that, you need to abolish the whole notion of state schools. But once that’s done, it’s easy. And more than that, every child would get that private education which the left deem such an advantage in life.
Surely your problem is structural. You’ve made government, both the elected & non-elected sides well paid careers. So the individuals concerned are mostly incentivised to protect their pay packets. With the people making the decisions usually being in the latter part of their careers, that’s fairly short term. Past that their pensions are protected, being funded out of taxation. As far as politicians are concerned, they’re driven by the electoral cycle. Again, short term incentives. But change has to be a long term process
So the only way you’re going to get change is to produce some long term incentives.
philip,
You could scrap nearly all of DCMS. I would move spectrum allocation to the home office and then just have a department for the museums and historic buildings (because it owns them).
Martin,
“Yes, I agree. But what did the Tories do for 14 years? They couldn’t find a bottle in a French hypermarket. I’m not sure Reform have it in them either.”
Reform at least don’t mind being disliked by The Guardian. I’m not sure they can do it either, but in the absence of someone better, it’s all we have.
john77,
Yes, but we can change the system with a simple act of parliament.
BIS,
Incremental change can make a difference. By the end of the Blair era, he hadn’t undone the changes of Thatcher and Major. The problem is that Cameron and that lot came in and continued it, or at worst, kept things how Brown had left them. And there’s nothing for Starmer to undo.
And Cam and that lot were never that popular. Coalitions, a small victory. The only big one was Boris and that was against Corbyn, and about being the one party that would honour the referendum. You should get 80.
The growth of Reform is because of people who want proper right wingers. It took the public a while to get to grips with the state of the Conservatives but it’s here now. Reform won a by-election in Wolverhampton this week. Took it from Labour. Conservatives ended up in 4th.
Which is what both Labour and the Tories fear most about Reform UK, that ability to make a working class coalition against middle class / elite interests and steal votes from both sides of the Uniparty.
Nigel was right when he said “The foxes are in the henhouse”.
The next election in 2029 is going to interesting. Just have to hold fast with Labour at the helm until then.
“ Yes, but we can change the system with a simple act of parliament.”
And to get that through you’ve got to clear out the HoL, which now needs to be closed down anyway.
BiND
Closing down Whitehall departments would be done (would that it were done!) through a finance bill. So the HoL couldn’t touch it.
While I’m on a rant, let’s withdraw from foreign entanglements such as the ECHR, WHO, Unicef, Oxfam, UNRWA, etc. Steve will probably say NATO as well, but I’m a bit less sure about that. What benefit have we gained from our seat on the UN Security Council, anyone? Answers on a postage stamp…
philip
Have you thought of advertising the price of your UN Security Council vote on Facebook. I’d think that veto power would be worth something?
+1 philip
Perhaps Britain could sell its permanent Security Council seat to up-and-coming India? You know, like those New York taxi medallions, pre-Uber.