It’s time to get back to horses for courses

The Coalition still suffers from the old Tory belief that everyone can be an Alan Sugar. But job reinvention is a pretentious cancer eating at our culture.

When I read two weeks ago that diplomats were to be pressed into service as overseas salesmen for Britain, my heart sank. I’m fully aware that they could argue about how they’ve been doing this job for centuries, but my riposte to that has to be “Well then, you’ve been making a balls of it since about 1906″. Your average mandarin couldn’t sell half-price gefillte fish in Tel Aviv, and nor should he or she be asked to. By all means use intelligence to find out who the decision makers and opinion leaders are. By all means effect an introduction and open some doors. But let’s not be silly here: diplomats carry out foreign policies and make remonstrations to Russians. They don’t sell brushes.

I was raging at a Cabinet Minister the other day about the very same thing in relation to doctors. He was valianty defending Andrew Rawnsley’s wishful bollocks about ‘bringing out the entrepreneur in GPs’ and ‘repositioning them as a service industry’. I do very much want my local doctor repositioned: right back where he was ten years ago – when we first met, and he was still a proper doctor.

My quack has as much idea about service as a caterpillar has about flying. One of the joys of reading Adrian Mole the Prostrate Years recently was laughing out loud at the exact shared experience of making fruitless phone calls, waiting days for an appointment, and being told peremptorily that such and such isn’t my doctor, he’s a member of the Group Practice senior management, and on he’s on a course about competitive service excellence.

Competitive, doctors? My backside. Do you know a practice that competes on price, service and product quality with a rival? No, and neither do I. It’s just more sub-Thatcherite drivel. Dentists compete. Doctors repeat prescriptions and endless advice – and seven times out of ten the bloody prescription’s wrong. The advice will be repeated twice a month for five years – and then dumped in favour of a diametrically opposite piece of advice.

So I’ve been sort of sadistically pleased over the last few days to note that all this job-reinvention fantasy has come back to bite the Coalition in the bum when it comes to the police. To be fair, this Government didn’t reinvent the police – but they didn’t put them firmly back in their box either. Instead, we got a lot of quasi-American pap about elected officials – yet more politics – on top of (not instead of) the five top-heavy tiers of cynical careerists we already have.

Having been spared the shorter leash by this new Government, what did the cops do? They only started lecturing the politicos on how harsh austerity plans were going to cause social unrest, didn’t they? Fair enough: teach police that they no longer have to nick lags, but just give counselling to feral kids breaking into off licences….and this is what you get.

I wouldn’t mind, but this is the standard disguised way of the police heavies saying ‘don’t cut our numbers’. Wherever you go within the TUC, the hypocrisy is mind-blowing: “Oooh no” say the rail unions, “All we care about is passenger safety”. As do the civil servants, the teachers, the BA unions and now the police – “it’s not us we care about, it’s the safety of others”. Cobblers.

The Slog said the same about Theresa May as about Michael Gove: the lady is well-meaning and capable, but she is dealing with the need for a quantum shift in culture here. The police dropped their real role years ago in favour of a cushier one; unsurprisingly, they’ve a hundred reasons why they shouldn’t go back to the bad old days.

Nurses want to have a smarter more doctorish uniform and be called something else that doesn’t involve wiping bottoms. University students want their lecturers to be called senior learners. Surgeons want to start laying down the law about badly behaved people not getting transplants. It can’t go on like this. It started fifteen years ago with thickies not wanting to be plumbers and electricians, and look where that got us: 260,000 unemployed media studiers and no carpenters.

My thesis is simple. If you’re a genius at free kicks, stick to that – and don’t embarrass the nation by making half-witted speeches to Nelson Mandela. If you’re a truck driver, drive the damn thing more safely by all means: but please stop telling me you’re in logistics, because you can’t even spell the word. And if you’re a Chief Constable in Cornwall, look out for the bags marked ‘swag’ – and don’t go on any more courses about cultural diversity management.

EXCLUSIVE: Senior Treasury source alleges ballooning civil service pension cost ‘deliberately hidden’

Figures seen by The Slog suggest that 12% of the UK’s debt liability is down to 600,000 Whitehall Mandarin pensions.
And a source we’ve trusted for years says this was no ‘mistake’.

Today, The Slog begins a campaign to try and unearth why nearly half of everything Britain owes is down to public sector and civil service pension liabilities – and how this came to be presented as a difference of opinion between those calculating the liability….whereas in fact there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to hide the pension amounts being paid to civil servants….especially senior Mandarins.

As it happens, there was an excellent piece by Philip Aldrick on the Torygraph website Friday; along with many other terrifying things, it showed that the UK’s national debt is now £78,000 for every household in the country.

In my previous incarnation as not born yesterday, I believe I was among the first to point out that the public sector/civil service pension liability alone is up there at around £2.3 trillion. The ‘real’ national debt – £4.8 trillion – you may also recall suddenly jumped by a trillion once the Cleggeroons took office. This too appears to have been a result of outright lying by the previous Government.

Outgoing New Labour had the audacity to suggest that this was a deliberate exaggeration by the incoming Coalition, but now the official figures are out - as I reported earlier this year – the scale of Civil Service lies and government obfuscation are there for all to see. These are made all the more reprehensible by the scale of our problem here in the UK.

A Slog piece back in June tried to put that fiscal hole into an understandable perspective, by imagining the UK as a small business where the owner had a huge mortgage and not much income. But it was even more starkly illustrated by the news on Thursday that the UK’s deficit fell last month, yet the debt still increased. Greece’s problem is intractable because the Athens government left deficit cuts too late; had the Brownites fixed a deal with the LibDems, we’d be heading in exactly the same direction right now.

What the British public has not yet been told is that out of the £78,000 owed by every British domicile, fully £36,000 is down to under a fifth of the working population….and an obscene 24% of that, we understand from figures shown to us, involves an estimated 600,000 adults….or just 1% of the UK population.

But how did this pension double-up happen – and why is nobody in a dock anywhere?

In 2003, when asked the question directly, the Treasury lied: ‘Projections of future expenditure on public service pensions are taken into account in the Treasury’s long-term fiscal projections. They are sustainable’ it replied. But in that same year, Matthew Young, a project director at the economics think tank Adam Smith Institute told the Daily Telegraph that “The Government’s recruiting frenzy and the fact public sector wages are rising at twice the rate of private sector pay has made the situation far worse”.

Most of us reporting on politics and government are used to bare-faced lies masquerading as estimates, but in this particular instance we believe there was a concerted conspiracy on the part of the Sir Humphreys to not just lie about sustainability, but also about how much pension money taxpayers would have to stump up on their behalf. The mendacity chiefly involved the level of entitlement – and it is by no means a new development.

On September 22nd 2006, The Times reported that the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) had revealed ‘The £1,025 billion figure that the (IEA) report gives as the liability is equivalent to 80% of gross domestic product, and is more than double the size of the national debt…..it is double the Treasury’s figure of £530billion .’

The fiction continued well into 2009. But in June 2010, another quango, the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) came up – without collusion – at almost exactly the same level of inaccuracy: the CEBR has pointed out that the national debt does not include certain expensive liabilities, such as the cost of civil service and town hall pensions, and projects funded under the Public Finance Initiative (PFI).

The PFI AT £43 billion was Brown’s scam as Chancellor: he simply forced Treasury officials to take it off-balance sheet. Had he been the finance director of a plc, Gordon Brown would’ve gone to prison for carrying out such a blatant disguise of debt liability.

But the balance undeclared once again adds up to an almost exact doubling of the civil service pension liability.

So how could estimates have been consistently 100% different between one source and another? The answer, astonishingly, seems to be that the Treasury under-declared both the size of the fund and the rate of taxpayer contribution that would be required….by the pretty obvious ruse of calling half the amounts something else.

A recently retired former senior Treasury official tells us, “It really was very cleverly worded and yet utterly brazen. The nomenclature used was ‘unfunded pension contributions’. Most people shown it assumed it meant contributions paid by the pensioners themselves. This proved not to be the case. It simply meant that the monies had not been invested. The final sum due would be grabbed out of the current tax accounts – regardless of real market performance. It is as near as you could get to robbing the taxpayer directly.”

Events in recent years support the Slog’s Treasury source fully. In March 2009, Lord Oakeshott, the LibDem peer universally respected for his financial skills, led attempts to set up an enquiry to expose this practice – about which he had been tipped off. It was opposed by the hierarchies of both main Parties. Our source continues:

“They opposed it because they knew perfectly well what was going on: but it wasn’t their money, so they didn’t care. And the last thing thing they needed was an army of Mandarins getting all pre-menstrual about it. On top of the expenses scandal, many (MPs and ministers) felt that for this to come out would blast them out of the water forever.”

The Mandarins’ trade unions, in fact, gave the expected response to the CEBR allegations – and its recommendation to get tough about the recipients’ real entitlement to the full amount. They claimed all kinds of ‘averages’ and ‘equivalents’, but as Liam Halligan wrote in the Daily Telegraph yesterday,

‘Many former state workers command annual pensions exceeding £20,000 – or even £100,000 in the top echelons of the civil service – and are set to draw such pensions for more than 20 years, paid for out of current taxation. That simply cannot be sustained’.

Just so we are absolutely clear about this, The Slog is suggesting two further probabilities in addition to those beginning to appear in the national press. First, that the real size of liability was deliberately kept away from the eyes of public accounts committees for many years. And second, when the practice came to light, at some point down the line politicians of both Parties willingly colluded in the cover-up.

As of now, I don’t think the onus is on us to prove that conclusively: although anyone ready to sue Sloggers’ Roost is happy to try, and watch the evidence come out in Court. I think the onus is on the politicos and Sir Humphreys to offer a credible explanation as to how the clear fact of hidden liability came about. And in the immediate term, the first thing we need is an explanation from Theresa May as to why the police have not as yet been asked to get involved.

OPINION: Time to take the pc out of police constable.

Theresa May’s legacy should be the re-establishment of an apolitical constabulary.

Like most people of a certain age, I have lost most of my sympathy with and for the police. We joke about ‘Good cop, Bad cop’ – but it’s hard to seek out the good guys today.

On the whole, we must forget probity and ethics among the boys in blue today: the police in both middle and senior ranks have been caught fiddling the numbers by every title from Telegraph to Guardian: they ‘fit up’ as many lags as they ever did, they collude with social services to kidnap problem-family kids on the flimsiest of evidence, and the IPCC….well, it’s just an obscene piece of pointless window-dressing.

Decent coppers are few and far between, but they are easy to recognise. They are those who look ashamed when the CPS turns its back on habitual criminals in order to keep costs down and conviction targets up. In my experience, they exist from Sergeant downwards, and are about 10% of the clods recruited these days.

As for the senior ranks, they have buried the plot (if you follow) in return for career enhancement; and for this they deserve the same fate as any other politically correct moron.

The key point is surely this: if you subscribe to political correctness, then you are by definition a political police force. And down that road lies the Gestapo. Not only does such a police force fail to reassure the populace about crime: it terrifies them into submission.

The only answers are (a) to remove the whole force from Party politics; (b) have all police complaints initially vetted by an all-Party committee, and then tried in special open courts; and (c) ditch all the ‘I am a leader in diversity’ drivel, and get back to being a deterrent strictly within the confines of the same laws the rest of us must face.

Equality before the law – for police, bigwigs, Islamics, newspapers, Masons and Nazis – is the ultimate guardian of liberty. Under New Labour, the concept of a politicised police force gained ground. Theresa May’s job now is to squash this idea without mercy.

The Government recovery going forward

The lesser-brained common deludaholic

Having ensured that economic recovery is now a certainty, New Labour remains in a fragile state: we must still regard its leaders (and let’s be clear about this, most of its followers) as recovering deludaholics*.

Accordingly, a crack team of tactical strategists have outlined the new ‘reality policies’ message to be given to all voters as guidance towards their inevitable decision to vote for a World Class Record Fourth Term for the Party that has done so much to transform morally bankrupt Old Britain into financially bankrupt New England & Wales with that disputed bit up the top of thingy that Tony sorted…Ireland, that’s the fella.

1. Strict control of the Nation’s finances
2. No control of the citizens’ finances
3. Ensuring that employees have the right to do anything
4. Making sure employers retain the right to fire anyone
5. Forcing the banks to lend money to small businesses
6. Encouraging the banks to keep quiet about having no money
7. Taking a quarter of Mr Plod’s money off him
8. Giving Mr Plod a hard time for not fighting crime
9. Taking reassurance from the rise in property prices
10.Taking pity on those who can’t pay their property mortgage.

*A Deludaholic is somebody addicted to self-delusion. An illusiholic is someone addicted to deluding others. Lord Mandelson bats for both sides