The painkillers seemed to kick in this afternoon, and so I wrote a Twitter thread, largely inspired by the Tory leadership candidates:
Tory leadership candidates are all vying to shrink the state. Their assumption is a private sector job is always better than a state sector job and must deliver more value for society. But that's not true….a short thread.
The vast majority of state sector jobs have high value added for society. There are the classics, like nurses, teachers, police officers (by and large), and rubbish collectors. The less obvious include the essential health and safety officials and tax inspectors.
Johnson and Sunak want 20% fewer public sector staff. My guess is that they think public servants would add more value in the private sector. All the leadership candidates seem to think the same way, Badenoch most of all.
So what could they do in the private sector? They could sell gambling, that is always destructive of well-being. Or fast food, that virtually guarantees ill health. They might instead create advertising, 95% of which has the sole intention of making us unhappy with what we've got.
Alternatively, these new employees could prospect for more fossil fuels which if burnt would likely end the chances of continuing human life on earth. Or they could develop means of oppression to be used by dictators to control their populations.
More mundanely, they could sell tax abuse designed to undermine the revenues of democratically elected governments. Or they could do audits very badly, as seems to be the current pattern.
If they wanted to be more obviously offensive they could discharge shit into rivers and the sea. Or they could run staff agencies to provide the services of vulnerable people to companies unwilling to commit to fair terms of employment.
Maybe they could instead work in a call centre to call you about making a claim for the road traffic accident you never had. Or they might be a contractor employed to burn PPE equipment bought for a fortune from the Tories' dodgy mates and never fit for purpose.
I think you're beginning to get the idea now. I am not saying everything the private sector does is wrong. It isn't. But it is undeniably good at creating shit jobs, on shit terms and conditions doing shit things that not only don't need doing, but are harmful.
And all of this is to make a dodgy buck for businesses - who are easily the biggest tax evaders in the country.
What the Tory leadership hopefuls want is to force people out of high-value creating state sector jobs into yet more shit jobs that actually destroy value in the private sector. This they say will create a more prosperous society.
But it won't. We will have dramatically worse public services. Many people won't be able to work for lack of childcare, social care for relatives, or the relevant training.
Business will lose productivity as people are sicker. And a boom in private security services is no alternative to proper law and order.
But, worse, without the people in government to check that businesses are complying with required standards then there will literally be more shit jobs, and vastly more metaphorically shit ones. And as tax cheating will rise honest business will go to the wall.
This is what the Tory leadership wants but they've got this very wrong. The curse of low productivity in the UK can be easily explained. Although all the things most people want more of in this country can only be supplied by the state that state is refusing to take that task on.
By refusing to take on more teachers, NHS staff, and so on, and to pay them enough, the government is already forcing people out into low-paid, low productivity shit jobs in the private sector.
And so long as the private sector knows the government is going to continue to force more people in its direction it can afford to pay shit pay for those shit jobs, and invest nothing to improve productivity.
That, in a nutshell, is why we're a relatively poor country. We refuse to employ people to do desperately needed value-added work in the state sector to guarantee a supply of labour to those doing shit jobs with zero social value in the private sector.
The answer is, of course, to reverse this. To do this we have to regulate the worst shit jobs out of existence. Everything from cracking down on gambling, tobacco and abusive advertising, to enforcing standards across the board plus making people pay tax will help start that.
It does so by reversing the flow. Demanding the private sector do no harm (which I call fair) would immediately release the people needed to fill the jobs that need to be done in the state sector. Many taking those new jobs in that sector might be returners, previously forced out.
And not only would we end vast ranges of social harm currently created by a private sector that does not care about how it makes profit for a select few in society, we'd also then meet the real need for vastly improved public services that cuts will very obviously never solve.
Sure, we'd end up with a bigger state sector. But that's what most countries richer than us have. And we'd pay more tax. But actually, we'd also be earning more so let's not be surprised about that. And if public services worked who would mind the bill? Only the small-minded.
Is this possible? Yes. But for it to happen we must have politicians who believe that political power exists to make things better. Instead right now we have politicians who positively want to make things worse (Tories) or maintain the status quo (the other three large parties).
The political will and imagination to actually make the world better which drove the post-war era is so absent from the politics of the centre and social democratic left now - and yet that is precisely where it belongs.
The Tories are beyond hope, but surely other political parties should want something like this? And if not, why not? ENDS
PS I realise I forgot to mention some state sector jobs that also need to go. These are those of people running vast numbers of NHS trusts and education trusts. The NHS could be run by relatively few regional integrated health authorities and education should be at county level.
As it is vast numbers of people are being engaged in these trusts on high salaries to undertake tasks that massively duplicate each other, wholly unnecessarily, and with considerable accounting costs resulting.
These people need to be released for more productive use elsewhere – with a net gain to society.
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The repetition of the term “shit jobs” seemed familiar. It didn’t take long before it came to me. I read this not long ago and found it persuasive.
(It also calls for a Universal Basic Income)
Apologies if you’re already aware of it
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber-ebook/dp/B077T7HQM6/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=bullshit+jobs&qid=1658078523&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
I acknowledge the influence
Splendid post.
I don’t now what you’re taking but it must be good stuff!
Paracetamol and ibuprofen alternate four hour intervals
WOW! Strong stuff. But, the question is does this prescription counter our pain of the Tory race to a new leadership ? KUTGW !
Excellent post – please note that in the first line “secret” should be “sector”
Thanks
Corrected
I am going to blame Covid this time
Thank you for an exceptional thread. Do you think if we fed the Tory hopefuls paracetamol they would talk more sense?
🙂
Richard wrote: “PS I realise I forgot to mention some state sector jobs that also need to go. These are those of people running vast numbers of NHS trusts and education trusts. The NHS could be run by relatively few regional integrated health authorities and education should be at county level. As it is vast numbers of people are being engaged in these trusts on high salaries to undertake tasks that massively duplicate each other, wholly unnecessarily, and with considerable accounting costs resulting.”
The Tories’ introduction of “the Internal Market” into the NHS in the 1990s was folly indeed, but a Labour Government in Scotland changed all that with its NHS Reform (Scotland) Act 2004. It did this by inter alia:
introducing provisions in relation to the dissolution of NHS Trusts,
establishing Community Health Partnerships,
placing a duty on Health Boards to co-operate with each other,
extending Ministerial powers to intervene to secure the quality of healthcare services,
placing a duty on Health Boards and Special Health Boards to involve the public in the planning, development and operation
of health services,
placing a duty on the Scottish Ministers and Health Boards to take action to promote health improvement.
Individual Hospital Trusts and internal market ideology were invented and all accounting and other reporting systems were amended/replaced to conform, causing massive upheaval and disruption at great financial cost. Then the whole process was reversed in 2004 with a return to regional Health Boards being reinstated at the top of the pyramid with, in each region, a single Acute Trust and a single Primary Care Trust, each with their own admin functions. The role of the Boards is, in theory at least, largely ensuring their Trusts’ planning aligns with the national aims of NHS Scotland (which in turn have to dovetail with the planning and policies of the Scottish Gov), collation and reporting of regional data from the Trusts.
This model eliminates much of the inefficiency of the Internal Market model and produces improved consistency of data across the regions (which proved invaluable in the Covid pandemic). In the longer term it also simplifies one of the unanticipated results of the Internal Market ideology: handing absolute autonomy to individual hospitals resulted in a zoo of differing software and hardware, with the result that staff moving from one hospital Trust to another (either permanently or to cope with a local crisis) had to relearn how the systems worked. Once installed, correcting this won’t happen overnight, but, for example, NHS Scotland decided on a national A&E system and, as pre-existing A&E systems come up for renewal, they are replaced by the national model. In a major emergency the benefit of all A&E staff in Scotland being trained on the same system is pretty obvious.
“All” that’s needed to eliminate the massive inefficiencies and overspends in NHS England is to get rid of the Tory Gov and its ideology-driven fantasies!
Thanks Ken
What I find bizarre is that Job Centres are obsessed about getting people back into work, rather than the sort of work.
Surely they should be tasked with getting people into better paid work so that they wont still require means tested benefits, and that would mean not acting as a Press Gang for employers wanting poorly paid staff for zero hours contracts.
Excellent post. I worked in the gas industry for many years. At the time of privatisation, the company was the best in the world in terms of R&D, engineering, investment, training, global consultancy etc. Great jobs. Today, the energy industry is fragmented and comparatively impotent and profit driven.
Interestingly, the same applies to electricity and water; the former, destruction of nuclear power expertise. Water’s greatest achievement-pollution.
Look at EdF and GdF in France to see what could have been! Not perfect, but relative success stories.
Indeed
David Byrne says.
Excellent post. I worked in the gas industry for many years. At the time of privatisation, the company was the best in the world in terms of R&D, engineering, investment, training, global consultancy etc. Great jobs. Today, the energy industry is fragmented and comparatively impotent and profit driven.
Interestingly, the same applies to electricity and water; the former, destruction of nuclear power expertise. Water’s greatest achievement-pollution.
Look at EdF and GdF in France to see what could have been! Not perfect, but relative success stories.
Agreed
Thanks Richard for this insightful post. Hope you are feeling a bit better today.
Do you think a job guarantee is the answer here?
The private sector would have to raise their game to compete which as you say would raise productivity.
In theory, yes. But I still I have no idea how one could really work. That is my problem with the ideas.
Scotland has regional health authorities
The state will still end up paying for these services. All that happens is profits are created to be paid to Tory chums and inefficiency e.g G4S and Capita.
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber