The Judge RANTS!
Date: 07/07/10
The War Has Begun
I have said little about the so-called New Politics in recent weeks. Part of the reason is that I would merely be repeating myself. The rest is down to my inability to think coherently and type legibly when my jaw and fists are clenched in rage.
The only thing that surprises me about the savagery of the new régime is that anyone is surprised by it. After all, we are talking about a Tory government here. Tories do what Tories do; and - since the Conservative Party was taken over by the disciples of Hayek and Friedman in the mid-seventies - what they do is to enact policies of unmitigated economic and social brutality against those who are considered to be in no position to fight back: the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and all other marginalised groups. Not only that, but the sheer casualness of their disdain for those groups isn't scarcely even hidden. They simply don't see the need.
In their latest assaults on the values of a civilised society, they have the willing support of the upper echelons of the Liberal Democrats. Again, I was never going to be astonished by the alacrity with which Clegg, Cable, et al turned themselves into Cameron's bitches; I knew that - based on long observation of their conduct in local government - is what LibDems do. The pre-election posturing that they were somehow a left-of-centre party was always ludicrous given the control over the party exercised by the authors of the notorious Orange Book, the central tenets of which could be summed up as Thatcherism redux.
And so we faced Gormless George's 'austerity budget', in which we were presented once again with the socio-economic equivalents of the neutron bomb; policies which harm people but leave institutions such as the banks and The City almost completely unscathed.
Someone has to pay for our economic woes, of course. So why not throw the burden on those who were least responsible for it, and who have the least means to pay? So VAT will go up to 20% and public services will be subject to spending cuts of twenty-five per cent (or is it forty percent this week?). The welfare system will be further degraded to the point where the holes in the safety net will be so big that even Eric Pickles would be able to fall through them.
(And can someone explain to me how it is that, when a Labour Party member suggests it might be a good idea to vote for the candidate of another party in an obscure council by-election they face certain expulsion, but ex-ministers such as John Hutton and Frank Field can accept invitations to join panels on how to 'reform' (i.e. cut) welfare and pensions with no disciplinary action taken? But of course, this is all undertaken in the spirit of "We're all in this together" and gives the political class and its tame hangers-on in the media another chance to mis-use the word 'reform' to mean "cut what we can get away with cutting, and hand over the rest to our donors in The Private Sector").
New school buildings will not be erected, unless they are intended for the quaintly-named free schools; schools set up by businessmen, pushy parents or religious nutters but funded largely with money from the public who will have absolutely no input into how those schools are run.
It seems that this Tory government, with its convenient fig-leaf of LibDem glove puppets, is aiming to be even more extreme that that of Thatcher at her high-sewage-mark in the mid- to late-eighties. The knives are being sharpened, and the guns of propaganda are being re-bored, cleaned and loaded ready to fire at the intended targets from a variety of angles, all apparently different, but all sharing the same passionate intensity.
At this point, I should declare an interest. I am a worker in the public sector (if you didn't know already), and I'm beginning to wonder how long it will be before it will only be safe to make such an announcement whilst I am shown in profile and back-lit.
For we are - and have been for some little time, even well before the election - facing a barrage of statements, calumny and spin all designed to cast the whole of the public sector in a bad light. For although the barrow-boys of The City may have - as the Americans so cutely put it - 'taken a bath', and the bankers may have been more interested in speculating with non-existent assets, and the so-called 'regulators' may have seen little or nothing wrong with this large-scale dereliction of what any civilised society would consider ethical standards; nonetheless, all the failures of the economic system which has ruled this land since 1979 are to be laid at the door of workers in the public sector. They (we) and they (we) only are to be scapegoated, to have ourselves made redundant by the tens of thousands, to have our pay held even further back, to have our pensions and our redundancy packages slashed to ribbons. We, who administer systems which keep the country running, who keep your roads clear, who tend you when you are ill, who clear up your rubbish; we are the ones who must pay the price.
The ground for such a campaign is already fertile and, as with fertile ground in general, has got that way by a steady application of shit, flung widely and frequently. For those who still don't believe the truth of what Goebbels said about 'the big lie', try looking at the newspaper websites whenever the subject of public sector workers comes up. From the readers of the Daily Heil, the Torygraph, yea even unto the devotees of the Interdependent and the Grauniad, come torrents of green bile which might be a useful weapon against BP's latest little difficulty in the Gulf Of Mexico.
All public sector workers need to "get real!" and to "Wake up and smell the coffee!", and other similar phrases betokening the blithering idiocy which has overtaken public discourse in recent times; phrases used by people who think that they sound clever because they once heard an American on television use them.
So all we hear is how we are merely 'pen-pushers' (erm, we have reached the computer age now, y'know? All provided and administered via the dynamic, thrusting, lean, mean private sector; which means they cost about ten times as much and work about one twentieth as well) who sit on our arses drinking tea all day, piss off home at three o'clock, and have as our sole raison d'être the discombobulation and frustration of the good old Brutish Pubic. We are constantly told that our pay is far better than for equivalent work in The Private Sector (to which we are required to genuflect thrice daily for its munificence), that our pensions are 'gold-plated' and thereby unaffordable, and that our redundancy scheme is similarly far too good for the likes of us, being suitable only for cushioning the blow to those few senior executives in The Private Sector ("Hosanna! Hosanna!" (*) who get the push, not forgetting those of their number who have in recent times been dropped on us like the famous 'Elsan Raids' on the Germans in World War Two (†) - and with much the same effect.
The corporate media, true to their unerring ability to know on which side their preferments are greased, have parroted the same line, whether it comes from politicians, leaders of 'the business community' or from the desocialised trolls of the newspaper websites.
On to such fruitful territory stamp the politicians - all of like mind (i.e. concrete: thoroughly mixed and permanently set). The last government attempted unilaterally to worsen our redundancy provisions but - in an all-too-rare victory - this was blocked by the courts. The new régime, however, has made it perfectly clear that it intends to pass legislation amending the 1972 statute under which our entitlement falls in order to slash payments to just about everyone by very substantial amounts. Similarly, a 'report' published today recommends the emasculating of our pensions, as well as making us pay more to get much less of them.
But who is calling for such public-spirited sacrifice here? Well, an organisation calling itself the Public Sector Pensions Commission (PSPC). Sounds very official, doesn't it? The truth, however, is that the PSPC is a body set up by such independent spirits as....the Institute of Directors (IoD), the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Policy Exchange and other such usual suspects. None of the people involved in the production of today's 'report' came from the public sector, no-one who actually works in the public sector was consulted. This did not stop the BBC (amongst others) from calling the 'report' and the malignant body which excreted it "independent", of course; although the news story which I read on the Broadcorping Castration's website this morning in which they were so described seems to have disappeared by eventide.
All of the people involved have 'form' on the subject, and they have produced a document which merely states what they've always thought. And so you have Philip Booth of the IEA uttering thusly:
"Public sector workers are being promised gold plated pensions whilst workers in the private sector...struggle to make sufficient provision for themselves."
Malcolm Small of the IoD came out with this last year:
"Public sector pension schemes are not sustainable."
Similar bollocks litters the report, in which the whole litany of the loony libertarians is seen in extenso. Let's just look at the two claims above for a start, shall we?
I would hardly call my prospective pension 'gold-plated', unless you habitually use the term to describe the almost see-through foil they wrap up the Easter eggs in at your local pound store. My latest forecast is on its way to me any week now, but I doubt if it will contain any pleasant uplift from the last one, which suggests that the most I can expect is a pension somewhat less than what the State Pension is now. Not a lot for thirty-one years' efforts, I think, even if you throw in the lump sum.
And, if workers in the private sector are having difficulties getting a decent pension, could that possibly be something to do with the fact that many of them work for a bunch of freeloading shits? You know, the ones who took full advantage of their pension funds' performance to take a 'contributions holiday' (which they weren't keen to extend to their employees for some unfathomable reason) and then, when the market tanked, started closing their employees' pension schemes or watering them down to uselessness; and were allowed to do so because Government was 'business friendly', the 'regulators' were rank cowards and the employees weren't in trade unions because they had swallowed the libertarian crap about the undesirability of collective protection for workers?
Even if the above were not true, and the failure of The Private Sector ("We Are Not Worthy! We Are Not Worthy!") to provide a prospect of a secure old age for its workers is all down to the fecklessness of said workers; even, as I say, if the previous paragraph were false, why should it follow that those of us who have managed to protect ourselves from the weaknesses of private provision deliberately be impoverished in our retirement, unless as a spectacular act of revenge cheered on by those who are motiviated by their own sense of grievance and a nagging feeling that they've been had and have to have someone to lash out at?
As for the public sector pension schemes not being 'sustainable' or 'affordable', well what the hell is 'sustainable' about, say, a new generation of nuclear-tipped penis extensions to enable the scions of Eton, Harrow and Oxbridge to "punch above their weight" around the world (in reality, a position of glorified coat-holder for the world's current playground bully)? What is 'affordable' about massive bail-outs to banks which - true to their recent pattern of behaviour - then use the public's money to ensure that they can keep themselves in the style to which they have become all too accustomed?
But no; we must pay for their bungles, their corruption, their arrogance. We, along with the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, must take it in the crotch.
The Phony War is coming to an end. Shortly the real battles must be fought. And, for the sake of the ability to continue to live in something which is worth calling 'a civilised society', it is crucial that we are not defeated.
For further reading, I guide you to this statement from my union, PCS. OK, you might think that it is biased from the other side to the self-styled 'PSPC', but I know from personal experience and knowledge that it is far closer to how things actually are than the eager slavering of the owning class.
(*) Welsh for "Socks! Socks!".
(†) Whereby the Polish contingent of the RAF used to drop not only bombs but full chemical toilets on the Reich, until the Nazis complained to the Red Cross about an illegal use of 'chemical weapons').
