The Treasury Spending Challenge has one week to run. Highly popular, its 100,000 suggestions for cutting public spending are whittled down to 44,000 on which the public can now vote. Some ideas will feature in George Osborne's October public spending review.
Virulently nasty and blindingly ignorant offerings make excruciating reading as rabid anti-immigrant proposals vie with equally pungent attacks on welfare. Jokes include "sell Cornwall" or "tax anyone called Steve". The Other TaxPayers' Alliance, the splendid antidote to the Tory-inspired TaxPayers' Alliance, adds simple thoughts such as "Don't cut the public sector" and "Tax the rich more". Mercifully, the challenge is no gauge of genuine public sentiment, since anyone can register to vote over and over – rupert@newscorp.com worked – so this is no proof of the unwisdom of crowds.
But it has not been a pointless exercise. Two-thirds of ideas come from public servants themselves, who may not suggest abolishing their own jobs, but do come forward with good practical savings drawn from experience: water cooler and paper savings, IT procurement, modifications to telephone exchanges, making people pay for frivolous freedom of information requests to deter time wasted on costing the flying of flags. A councillor calls for his allowances to be cut, a police officer for short cuts to charging people with minor offences. What's striking is their sincerity and earnestness. These are not "sod the government" responses from a workforce about to have a million members brutally sacked, but a reminder that large numbers of public servants care about doing their jobs well.
That tallies with my own experience, taking low-paid jobs while researching my book Hard Work. I was struck time and again at how even agency workers – outsourced and not a part of the schools, hospitals, nurseries or nursing homes where they worked – strove to do their best, often against the odds, with the wrong equipment, inept managers or rules that were obstacles to kindness. They were more frustrated by waste or hindrances to good work than by their own rotten terms and conditions. Most took a pride in their jobs that went under-recognised: a strong flavour of that pride emerges in these ideas.
There is no sign that this public ethos will find any recognition from the government. Many will see their good faith rewarded with a kick in the teeth. The bullying rudeness and sheer nastiness of Eric Pickles, the chill callousness of Francis Maude and the evident relish with which most ministers flourish carving knives at public services advertise their contempt. Time and again public employees hear of their demise in the news, trashing their endeavours without even token regret or thanks for years of service, only raw glee and spurious charges of wastefulness. Cameron's government is anything but courteous or noblesse oblige. Michael Gove gave the General Teaching Council staff 30 minutes' notice of its abolition. Watch how many functions of "abolished" quangos are turning out to be essential, simply moved elsewhere.
Professor Julian Le Grand, Tony Blair's adviser who created the quasi-markets of the NHS, talks of the public sector's "knights and knaves", prescribing competition as an antidote to laziness or absenteeism. Indeed, everyone can cite cases of knavish behaviour – the bloody-minded GP receptionist, a sullen council jobsworth or disobliging clock-watchers shutting down switchboards at 4.55pm, regardless. Bad service is unforgivable in public servants, but it is rarely compared fairly with knavish behaviour in the private sector: what public service would dare tell you to stay in all day to get a washing machine repaired without a fixed appointment? Or deliver goods unannounced so they must be queued for at some distant depot?
Right now the coalition is still winning the propaganda war against the public sector. Polls still show people think the cuts are necessary, the deficit is the priority and Labour overspent. But they also show people's growing anxiety that cuts will go too far, hurting their families. Yesterday's Markit/YouGov poll showed 47% of households expected to be worse off next year, deeply afraid for their jobs. On 20 October, when the cuts are laid out on Osborne's chopping block, the coalition may come to regret the tone it has set – enjoying things indecently, no crocodile tears or sheep's clothing. David Cameron let a monster cat out of the bag this month when he told an appalled firefighter that even when the deficit is gone, there will be no increase in public spending. When it dawns that this is eternal austerity, a permanently shrunken state, pea-sized compared with our EU neighbours, the tide may turn. Questions will be asked about the coalition's true motives.
A n OECD paper – Growing Unequal, reported in the FT – warned that fiscal consolidations in Sweden and Finland, much praised by Cameron and Osborne as a model, led to the sharpest increases in inequality among developed countries in the late 1990s, rising by 12%. Britain, cutting deeper and faster, can expect the burden to fall yet harder on the worst-off. This week the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in its analysis of Osborne's June budget, will find the burden falls more heavily on low incomes than first warned.
There is an open goal for a Labour leader offering a convincing alternative economic strategy. That means catching the turn of the tide in public opinion, backing the knights of the public sector eager to do their jobs better, while recognising that all too human knavish tendencies need eternal vigilance too. The next leader needs to repair Blair's failure to embrace the best public ethos.
2010-08-24
Loyal, public service merits more than this cold trashing | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian
via guardian.co.uk
