Monday 10 January 2011

A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS

There has been, for a decade or more,  a massive, sustained upskilling, a re-education of public sector workers. Rightly, care workers have finally been trained in safe lifting-and-handling techniques, in the administration of drugs, in the recognition and prevention of child and elder abuse;  all those working with vulnerable people have been subjected to enhanced disclosure procedures (of previous criminal convictions.) Criminal justice, probation and social services workers have seen their qualification entry levels raised dramatically, often funding degree courses themselves;  librarians have become IT adepts and outreach workers; nurses have trained as specialist practitioners,  the professionalising of previously often ill-regarded occupations has done nothing but good for society and for the workers themselves, many, at relatively junior levels,  finding themselves living a life, now,  of continuous learning and study, much of it in their own time. Job descriptions and productivity have expanded exponentially, without the very necessary bonuses, perqs and fiddles, demanded elsewhere. The gabshite imbecile, Cameron, now suggests that as these workers and others are foolishly discarded to fund  the bankers'  same very necessary bonuses he should be applauded for breakfasting with the CEOs of Tesco and Sainsburys, who have "promised" - in return for the abolition of planning controls -  to "create ten, twenty or thirty thousand new jobs, sometime." 

skymadeupnewsandfilth, the Oxbridge cocksuckers at the Beeb, in fact all the reptiles in MediaMinster, including, tentatively, the ghastly, gibbering, unspeakable Ed Moribund, all hail this as the measure by which half a million skilled public sector workers will be gainfully redeployed.  Teachers, lecturers,  social workers, probation officers, cops, screws, care home workers, librarians and nurses  all marched down to Tesco, to learn the methodology of shelf stacking,  their incompetent greedybastard chief executives left largely in place, rewarded for their very sensible axe-wielding.

Cameron's latest PR wheeze is an assault not just on all of us, but on Reason itself.  Who will, in Ruin's future,  teach the awkward, care for the elderly and the vulnerable,  monitor and befriend the delinquent,  the different ? Yes, that's right,  Every Little Helps.

Throw the fucker out on his arse.


A previous PR strategy.
What an ugly, mean-looking shit.
Is that the valet, behind, without a helmet?

23 comments:

jgm2 said...

Ah. This is where we part company Mr Ishmael. A large number of the one million jobs created by the Maximum Imbecile with borrowed money so that they would be forever grateful and vote Labour had nothing to do with front-line care. A million box-tickers, bed-wetters and bastards inserted into the system as a reward for their 'education, education and education' back in 2001/2002.

Diversity. Health and safety. Interminable layers of management, under-managers, sub-managers all given 40K a year and a nice heated office to supervise half a dozen minimum-wage dinner-ladies or Nigerian nursing auxiliaries.

First in my family to get a degree doncha know and look at me now - endless away-days and off-sites and town-halls and all kinds of management shite. Until something goes wrong when they're all suddenly writing reports exonerating each other. What was it - 400 or so killed in Staffordshire hospital with hundreds of cunts wandering about monitoring every fucking thing and no cunt responsible.

You're right about one aspect though. It'll be the dinner-ladies and heavy-lifting auxiliaries that gets the P45's. No cunt in HR or 'compliance' or 'diversity' or 'H&S' will have a hair on their head harmed. Management you see.

jgm2 said...

...continued. And it was creating one million jobs with printed money whilst not building one million additional homes which created the massive housing bubble which begat the rest of Brown's miracle borrowing economy. One million newly minted public servants suddenly scrambling for their executive Barratt Box. All off borrowing 3x, 4x 5x, 10x their salary and forcing every other cunt to borrow a similar multiple to match them.

Without creating one million jobs from borrowed money there would have been no (additional) demand for housing. Without artificially constraining building there would have been no housing boom. Without a housing boom there would have been no bust. No banks going down the pan. No massive recession. No bail-outs required. No class war fomented by the evil, wicked and malicious bastards Brown.

If the wicked and malicious cunt had put taxes up to pay for this one million then the rest of us (and his one million newly-minted voters) wouldn't have had any spare cash to push up the price of houses so much either. No boom. No bust.

But the wicked and malicious bastard opted for the worst possible combination. Just borrow indefinitely from the future and leave a clusterfuck for some other cunt to clear up.

mongoose said...

All of this is true, mr jgm2. Some of us lost a few pennies the last time all this bullshit happened near twenty years ago. Tory twats that time, as I recall.

The box-tickers have started to be slaughtered - inevitably the most junior - but in my little corner of the world, fewer and fewer things are getting done. For every one wastrel, I guess maybe three or four "service deliverers" are leaving too. The cabinboys are being eaten, the circus is in town.

call me ishmael said...

That's the baby and the bathwater, mr jgm2. Not all PS jobs were created by Prime Minister Snot. And millions of people need managers, no avoiding it. Millions of PS workers are skilled and conscientious, exactly as I describe them, that the self-protective culture of MediaMinster afflicts senior management is not in dispute here, nor is the wicked indifference of many doctors - absent, you may notice, from my lists.

You always ignore or wish away the fact of an ageing society, the fact of more and more illnesses becoming treatable, the fact of the intractability of delinquence and posit a mythical family response, a family responsibility, in fact, which, given the free rein of market economics, is impossible to apply, in most working homes both parents work, to feed capialism's insatiable demand for growth; they work harder and longer than their parents and are rewarded only with Mr Chinks worthless tat, bought with borrowed money. The villified lone parent will soon be forced into Tesco work or some such, paying to park his or her own children with other lone parents, unskilled, ill-qualified, in a Tesco-franchised creche. And your wished-away problem will come back and bite you in the arse. We need more skilled public sector workers, not fewer

The reports you mention, of which I have read a few, are actually generally written by eminent - they're all eminent, aren't they, bastards - QCs, not practitioners covering their own arses and deliver findings which the govament of the day requires and which have been agreed in advance. You don't need me to tell you that.

And I don't know any sub-managers on 40k a year supervising nursing auxiliaries; one senior manager I know - on 40k - was on unpaid standby duty all over Christmas and called frequently to child-at-risk situations which, with their horror, would freeze the marrow in the bones. A lifetime of training and advanced study and a highly developed set of skills and instincts and an equally refined sense of social responsibility, deployed in the public interest.
What were you doing at Christmas?

Ask any frontline practitioner or manager - and many do both - in NHS or Education or Social Work by what multiple their caseloads have expanded, ask them how much of their own admin, secretarial work and report writing they now also do, how much of their free time is given over to now necessary study.

There is much in the public sector which requires remedy but such is life, constant improvement is what we do best; your conflating ordinary people with political scum is shortsighted and speaks to the mob, egged-on enough, as it is, by the Daily Mail and the Filth-O-Graph, to Ruin's work.

george said...

jgm2 said..

" Without a housing boom there would have been no bust. No banks going down the pan. No massive recession. No bail-outs required. "

Our banks bought the MBS ( mortgaged backed securities) from the US. These were worthless bits of paper wrapped up as 'AAA' investments. When Lehmans failed our banks couldn't sustain the losses in the US and had to be bailed out. The housing boom in the UK was small fry in comparison and didn't cause the collapse of RBS and Halifax Bank of Scotland.
Our loans to Eire and other EU countries and the purchase of ABnAmro by RBS were further poor decisions that required taxpayers to bail out the banks.
It would have been cheaper to allow the banks to fail and suspend mortgage payments until a new bank was established. This will have to happen eventually anyway as the ongoing debts are unsustainable.

Agatha said...

Mr. Ishmael,
You are an indefatigable supporter of the public sector worker in his or her many guises, and it is heart-warming to read such support. As a social worker myself, I also had to work over the Christmas holiday - which entailed staying abstinent (even on New Year's Eve!) and many, many public sector colleagues across Britain would also have been working whilst the rest of the nation partied, some of them cleaning up the mess caused by the partying. Nurses, junior doctors, police, mobile toilet attendants, road gritters, social care workers, child protection workers, hostel staff, including Women's Refuge workers, helping women and children find respite from drunken and abusive partners and fathers. All of them keeping society going - when Tesco's, Sainsbury's and the rest of them were closed.
And, Mr. JGM2, £40k is unattainable for the majority of public sector workers and front-line managers. Only senior managers are paid that sort of money, and there are fewer and fewer of those, as the budget cuts bite down. Granted, Directors and Chief Executives are paid far too much, but it is hardly eye-watering in comparison with posts of similar levels of responsibility in the financial sector.

yardarm said...

It always makes me laugh when some arsewit politician starts burbling about the private sector, something they know no more about than astrophysics.

Whether its Margaret ' wife of millionaire Dennis ' Thatcher, Tony ' I used to work Derry Irvine`s photocopier ' Blair, David ' Carlton is worth watching, no really ' Cameron, loonybins Brown or the trustfund pansies Osborne, Clegg and Miliband fuck me, you just have to laugh.

None of the deluded overpromoted twerps I`ve mentioned above is fit to clean the shit from the tread of a shelfstackers or a care workers boots.

jgm2 said...

@George.

Not so George. That line was just a Labour story planted at the BBC on the morning of the bail-outs.

Peston has finally admitted the real, more mundane cause of the UK's banking troubles.

Here...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2011/01/will_fsa_take_action_against_h.html


There were two huge British banking casualties of the great crash of 2008: Royal Bank of Scotland, rescued by taxpayers, and HBOS, rescued by Lloyds' shareholders and taxpayers.
...

...

The calamitous takeover of the rump of ABN in 2007, which did for RBS, .....

...

Now, much of what went wrong at HBOS was old-fashioned lethal exuberance about lending to property developers. It's not dissimilar to the madness that infected and harmed all of Ireland's major banks.


Those who believe Brown's self-serving lies about 'It started in America and has fuck all to do with me' have been had.

It was a borrowing and squandering clusterfuck that Brown instigated and then turned a blind eye to.

mongoose said...

The problem is that a privately-run activity can be run, operated and done, and make a decent profit, and still be cheaper than the same activity done by the public sector. It is the nature of the beast. One does not waste money if it is one's own and one tries not to hire buggers to waste it for you. Easy. Stated but not solved. The problem is far from simple to solve - easy though it is to state.

The skill therefore is to identify those things that the state should do and leave the rest to the private sector. Arguments over health and education then occur. One tends not to argue about defence and police. But what about cleaning hospital floors? Cheaper might not be cleaner, and people will die for that extra bit of profit made. What about collecting refuse? What about TV? I would rather see public sector activity concentrate on those things where value is not measured in money. It is a simple rule-of-thumb which I commend to you all. All this talk of markets in the NHS, for instance, is just bollocks. I am not competent to measure the effectiveness of health professionals all the time. Yes, they handled the lad's eczema v poorly until the excellent Dr X sorted us out. OTOH they were great but how cost-effective were they in doing my mum's cataracts? How would I know? If you can measure it in money - private sector; if you measure it in happiness or health - public sector.

PT Barnum said...

And today's wizard wheeze from the Pretend Government is to restrict tribunals for unfair dismissal to those who have been in post for 2 or more years. Now that's not going to produce a barrage of sackings and rehirings after 1 year, 364 days is it?

I always marvel at those who lambast the state and all its caring arms, as if they could never get old, never have a serious accident, never find their private health insurance does not cover long term disability care. I've seen more than my share of the public sector in many of its forms and I've seen both the very ugly and incompetent and cruel and also the skilled and compassionate. That it fails sometimes is no reason to discard it. It's a reason to improve it.

mongoose said...

And it is worse than that, Mr PtB. Out here in the bandit country of the private sector, nobody cares a hoot about industrial tribunals. It is usually cheaper to just lose them than to pay the lawyers to defend them. I know businesses which just let them go by the wayside. Most people anyway end up not going to a Tribunal. Victory by inertia and silence. Fuck principle, fuck honour.

On the other point, one should not look for or expect kindness or compassion from the private sector. Capitalism doesn't measure that stuff. It is enough that they do not rip you off. The major exception perhaps is education where I think teachers of all shapes and sizes, for the most part, are united in doing what they do for the good of the kids. OTOH they care about your kids but not your money.

call me ishmael said...

"......as if they could never get old, never have a serious accident, never find their private health insurance does not cover long term disability care."

There's a lot of them about, mr ptb, many of them over at the Filth-O-Graph, I wonder if it might ever dawn on them. That they are the true Enemy Within.

Cops, army etc, crime and punishment, public and individual health, education, social care, transport, including ATC and Coastguard, and energy, mr m; they can have the rest, the profiteers.

There are no Snotty apologists here, mr jgm2, and he could spend his miserable, nailbitten life in contrition without ever making amends but he was not responsible for whatever ails Greece and Portugal and Ireland and the USA, although his "light regulatory touch" and Mandelstein's "intense relaxedness about people getting to be filthy rich" may have contributed to a TransAtlantic blindness among consumers and a rottenness among usurers; with other finance ministers, he was, in short, enthralled by the apparent end to boom and bust, stupid ss such a proposition is.

That generally harmless low-paid workers should accept the nationalisation of global banker debt, whilst the bankers continue to privatise the profits reminds me of my young friend stanislav's exposition of the Day America Went Communist.

You know, in the words of the Deputy Head Boy, Cleggy, it's just not fair. Rather like he and his shit-eating public school cronies but that's a lamb for another slaughter.

george said...

jgm2 said..

" Those who believe Brown's self-serving lies about 'It started in America and has fuck all to do with me' have been had."

McSnotty should have clarified. It may have started in America but our debt was 100% the fault of our own UK banksters. No one marched them over to the US and forced them to buy the worthless derivatives and packaged up toxic mortgage debt. RBS etc did it all on their own. House prices in the Uk , for some strange reason, have managed to drop by very little relative to the 60% drop in the US.
No, our crash was self inflicted. Buying worthless mortgages, buying ABnAmro, buying Eire debt, buying Dubai World debt, buying EU PIGS debt etc....

richard said...

People doing stuff, that's all there is. The PS workers could do the same work without the State, and there is nothing the State gets it's hands on which isn't made worse and more expensive than the services of either private enterprise or the voluntary sector. BUPA costs less than NI, for instance. You are right about Cameron's stupid plan, but Mongoose has hit the nail on the head.

PT Barnum said...

Richard wrote 'BUPA costs less than NI'. And for obvious reasons. When an operation at a BUPA hospital goes awry, or the patient is hustled out of the door too soon and complications ensue, it is the NHS which steps into the breach. You do not seek for intensive care services with BUPA, cos they don't got them. If they had to provide 24 hour staff coverage and facilities for all eventualities, I imagine their costs/fees would far exceed NI.

Mr mongoose is entirely correct. The private sector only understands balance sheets and shareholders' dividends. Which is perfectly fair when what you are buying can be returned for a refund or replacement because it was not fit for purpose. Try doing that with a dead person who was left to bleed out overnight in a BUPA hospital because there was minimal staff coverage for patients who were having 'low risk' minor surgery (and yes, that's personal experience). The NHS is a long way from perfect, and the same thing could happen in an NHS hospital, but it wouldn't be because of shareholder payouts.

mongoose said...

There we are, Mr PtB, you see how sophisticated the argument has already become? If you want remedial, low risk medical care, BUPA might be fine, and you can pay for the convenience of having it done next Wednesday. If you have a heart attack this morning, get to the NHS asap.

Errors at work are a fact of life. Alas, when medical people make errors, people can die. I, for one, wonder how medical people live with that.

PT Barnum said...

But, Mr mongoose, I find myself unable to see past the fact that private health providers do so for profit (as opposed to medics doing it for a salary). There are no public accessible figures for death and infection rates in private hospitals, so one cannot even make an informed decision via a Which? report.

george said...

jgm2..

Robert Peston ? You're seriously believing anything he says ? Shame on you !
I'll look up the figures again for where RBS and HBOS invested and get back to you.

mongoose said...

I agree Mr PtB. I cannot see past it either. You have it in one. One cannot make an informed decision.

Let us name the private health suppliers: BUPA..... Err, that's the only one I know. So if I were in the market for private health care I would go to, errr, BUPA. (This is btw a triumph of marketing and consolidation.) The actual level of care, the excellence, the value for money is invisible. So I would argue that one is as well to toddle off to the spankingly clever chaps at the JR in Oxford. And we do. The BUPA "sell", as we say in the trade, is that all medicine is presented as equally good and excellent. (Is it? I don't know.) One pays supposedly for preferential access not the content.

When one of mine was born, there was some unpleasantness and when I looked up there were 17 of them in the room - in the middle of the night too. I bet BUPA can't do that.

call me ishmael said...

And then there is the question of ethos, of an ethical framework in which people work - firefighters do run into burning buildings, do sustain injuries rescuing others, do die under burning timbers; emergency rescue personnel, on land, sea and in the air do perish on the job, without a bonus between them, nurses do face harrowing situations daily and as ms agatha remarks, all across the public sector society, workers make sacrifices that others might be safe, be cared for. These things happen because of an ethos, a set of values which have been hitherto exempted from govament reappraisal by the likes of little Michael Gove, the gobby nitwit, and Chancellor Spunkface, the vindictive oik and if there is a private sector apologist here, who can make the case that the smirking blubbermountain, Carolyn Quentin, extolling the virtues of Marks and Spencers processed food is fit to polish the shoes of an underground train driver, or that M&S is somehow loyal to any ethos beyond the salaries of its repulsive executives and the dividends - unearned incomes - of its shareholders, then, please, feel free.

The blurring of the differences between private and public sector - as though both are just jobs - in which Cameron and his stooges are engaged is the work of the fucking Devil, that so many with nothing are willing to support the few, like Cameron, who have so much, is the blackest of black farces, we are a land, anew, of ragged trousered philanthopists, the poor falling at the feet of the rich, in worship.

Bad enough that decent people are poorly paid, that so many braying, gobby idiots now rejoice at their further devaluation is a reckless, embittered stupidity.

mongoose said...

The price of everything, Mr I, and the value of nothing - save money. It has been like this since Maggie the Milksnatcher stalked the burning land. Alfred Herbert? Do we need the mightiest, most excellent machine tool company that the world has ever seen? Nah, fuck it. (There used to be an ethos too even in the private sector. That one might take pride in doing something well. Poeple were proud to work for Herberts.) Nah, fuck it. Flog it off, gut it and close it down. Fuck 'em.

It still exists. The man who fixes our cars is as good and as honest as anyone I have ever met. And I know a chippying family likewise. You can still find it - if you lean you head out far enough - but you'll not find it many places this winter. It is the Repeal of Civilisation.

yardarm said...

Cameron: leaving aside the trust fund and the wife`s family fortune, who subs his meal ticket ? And Osborne and Clegg`s ? Right; us. So that makes them, er, public sector does it not ? Until like Blair and the other vermin they use that as a springboard to a pocket lining big career in what the dolts imagine to be the private sector: corporate, advising, lobbying, non executive, speechmaking, writing whorehousing.

That ain`t the private sector. I can`t speak for the public sector, only ever having worked in the private sector for a quarter of a century, fuck help me and I`d like to make the point that the private sector, just `cos its private is NOT automatically the most efficient provider of anything.

Greed, uselessness, backstabbing, arselicking, waste and corruption is frequently prized. Honesty, competence and efficiency driven out. You may ask how do these places survive ? They don`t.I`ve worked for a company that went from a national market leader to a memory in a decade not because of Brown or the banks or foreign competition but because of the sloth, greed and sheer ineptitude of its management.

The politicians, not knowing anything about it, babble about the private sector coming to the rescue. It isn`t, it can`t, it won`t. They will be disappointed, although their Blairite, globe trotting corporate schmoozing lives will cushion them from the worst of it. For the rest of us, misery awaits.

Anonymous said...

I've worked on Herbert Lathes.