I would like to find the right words to describe Liz Truss' plan to level down civil service pay outside London, so reducing the income of all areas but the south-east of England, but frankly I can't.
Leaving aside for a moment the contempt that Truss clearly has for all those who work for the government she claims to want to lead, and leaving aside too the phenomenal organisational difficulty inherent in her proposals, you have to wonder why she is doing this.
The answer is easy to find. At present she faces a unified civil service on issues relating to pay and conditions. And she knows she is losing. So what she wants to do is create the classic fascist scenario where she faces groups off against each other. Her aim is to have the groups within the civil service fighting each other for the best pay deal whilst overall undermining them all. Fascism always depends on the creation of the enemy within. This is what she is trying to create here.
Will it work? I very much doubt it. Bizarrely, Thatcher picked on miners because ultimately she knew we could do without them. But no sane person thinks we can do without the civil service. Not that is, unless we are seeking to destroy the state.
Truss may well be seeking to destroy the state. But we have a civil service made up of people who, by and large, are competent and who can appraise reality all too well. Truss can try this one, but I think she would lose it.
However, the warning has been given. We are in for an exceptionally rough time if Truss gets the Tory leadership. Political and economic insanity on a scale we have not previously seen will be normal.
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Absolutely unbelievable. To first hear about this via your blog, that this woman wants to cut my pay and holiday entitlement, after 18 years service, is incredible. What a kick in the teeth. Seething is an understatement.
Levelling up has clearly gone out of the window. Its back to the workhouse for us northern plebs. Your last sentence just about sums it up. Deluded, demented and downright cruel is the order of the day, but that appears to be the way to pander to the daily heil electorate.
She’ll get her “whitehall waste” savings though, when those who can choose to leave (by hook or by crook) do leave, then they simply won’t replace them.
How thoroughly depressing
Forced to drop it already MG! Even tory MP’s and mayors could see it for the crap it is. Proves yet again how utterly hopeless our unwritten consitution is. Even a PM is forced to resign, we should have a GE, bot this ridiculous farce where 0.2% of the electorate decide who the next PM is.
And that 0.2% is a bunch of old farts whose brains have been rotted by years of reading the deranged and dishonest right wing press.
For added insult, the 0.2% electing the new PM may not even live in the UK or be eligible to vote in a General election. In fact, for all we know they could be friends of Putin.
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/07/26/conservatives-posture-about-foreign-enemies-while-ignoring-own-membership-rules/?mc_cid=9268cf8ba8
Having worked for 40 years in the Civil Service I can only say this has been tried before and failed, the Tories seem to live in a fantasy world detached from the reality of what actually works – they never learn from history. What if someone moves to a different area of the country and their pay goes down – or up- it is a recipe for chaos. And in any case pay already varies from one department to another for the same grade of staff as each department now sets its own pay rates.
Add to that the Hays report from 2012 on market facing pay which demonstrated that the civil service were underpaid. Nothing was done as a result and the report quietly shelved. Funny that!
How the Taxpayers Alliance got to their figures is beyond me too.
I’d leave it to Victor Meldrew
I Don’t Believe It!
But what on earth is Truss & Sunak’s dream – a failed state?
Mission accomplished
I’m losing two members of staff this summer to better paid wages in the public sector as my employer has kept its wage levels down. It’s going to hit us hard. People are leaving my org left right and centre – and I’m looking too.
But what gets me is that wherever you go house prices have been going nuts – that’s the clincher – if these ‘local’ wage councils are taking housing costs into account then there may not be the savings to be made. I expect a callous response – nothing less.
And what is driving up house prices where I am is incomers from the South East looking for better value for money from their wages and using high house prices of their properties there to launch them into cheaper areas to live, without it seems realising that they are actually contributing to the inflation in the area they have just moved to!!
Once again, the Tories are going to treat a dynamic situation as static and cause all sorts of woe for the people involved.
The only glint of sunlight is that Truss – so rigid in her dogma – will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It will be a high price to pay for the country but maybe a necessary one. Maybe a worsening situation – running out of road – is the only thing that will get the Tories out.
she won’t last five minutes.
Between malice and Incompetence, I choose the latter.
Which is why I prefer if Liz Truss gets in. Sunak will do a George Osbourne and attempt to balance budgets….we know what happened last time when George tried it.
Truss, Sunak, Trunak, Suss – doesn’t matter who gets the job. They’ll be as bad as each other – two cheeks of the same ****. Same horse, different jockey. And they could be even worse than the current incumbent – which is truly saying something.
Craig
Another gem from ‘loo loo Liz in la la land’ Truss, who is competing with Johnson to be the worst PM ever before she’s even in post. Obviously this is yet another load of right wing drivel designed to appeal to the bigoted, vindictive old farts and boors who now constitute the tory party membership, from a woman who has shown she will say anything, and drop any principles she ever had, to gain power.
In doing so, she is of course destroying the very thing, Britain, she purpouts to believe in. Even some tory MP’s (!!!!) have criticized this as making a mockery of ‘levelling up’. So apart from SE England, the rest of England can get stuffed!
And how about tackling the Scottish independence question by saying Nicola Sturgeon should just be ignored?
Genuis! That’ll get the Scots on board won’t it? There’s nothing the Scottish electorate like more than English politicians saying they’ll just ignore everything the Scots say. Another shot in the arm for the Independence movement.
Then there’s her law breaking bill to break the NIP she wants to pass…..opposed by the vast majoity in NI, and only supported by the extreme unionists. A united Ireland is isnching nearer.
The fact she’s advised by the lunatic Minford tells you all you need to know about the quality of her team. Who forecast that Brexit would result in lower food prices, when the exact opposite has proved to be the case. Richard, as an acedemic yourself, can you explain how this man was ever employed by any respectable institution of learning in any post other than cleaner? I’m being serious, BTW.
Many of us have asked that question, no one more than Danny Blanchflower, very publicly
Will Liz Truss’ pay policy also apply to Members of Parliament.
She has already abandoned it….
Brilliant! Parametric policymaking.
Policy options are linked to a ‘Situational Awareness’ platform. The only active tab is ‘Target Audience Opinion > media+polls+etc ‘ – everything else is greyed out. Input feeds are selected and the approval/disapproval parameter is set on a timeline as deemed appropriate. Sentiment keywords are pre-prepared, the policy is announced, the feed goes active and when the ‘sentiment score’ in the target audience reaches the parameter, the system flags, and Ms Truss or her media team receive a text alert #policyswitch. This is repeated until the score remains below the parameter.
The brilliance of the scheme is that each party can claim that they are not responsible for the outcome; politicians are merely facilitating the desires of the majority….
You think I’m joking, don’t you? 🙂
I do not wish to give parametric modelling a bad name. It is incredibly useful in all sorts of ways, especially when applied responsibly to complex risk scenarios , and not abused as above. It allows rapid response to small scale experimental actions, for example specific and unforeseen consequences of flood mitigation measures, and is hugely useful when combined with AI to identify and track how small scale actions combine to produce large scale effects. To be effective in public policy it would require cooperative, issue focused, accountable policymakers; a joined up civil service; transparent technical processes; publicly owned data infrastructure; centre stage public education and buy-in; and a robust regime of public rights, protections, and social compensations. In our dreams!
We might be needing something like this soon.
When I was in the Civil Service – admittedly over half a century ago, there was something called the London weighting….
Extra for them as worked in London.
Truss’s proposals were inspired by the Taxpayers Alliance (link below) according to the FT
https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/local_public_sector_pay_rates_could_save_taxpayers_9_billion
If this is the level of “thinking” of the prospective new prime minister we should all be very worried
I cannot do better than to refer to Ross McKibbens diary piece in the London review of Books of 23 November 1989. I am sorry to have got the month wrong when I referred to previously.
“Although Mrs Thatcher and Mr Lawson are closely associated in the public mind, their aspirations are very different. Mrs Thatcher, for her part, is not really interested in the economy at all. She has little idea how it works, no notion of its complicated and delicate relationships, and only the most elementary conception of how it might work better. Sceptical would-be supporters of the government used plaintively to enquire why the prime minister allowed herself to be sidetracked by marginal matters. Why someone so anxious to promote the free-market should be so obsessed with secrecy, censorship or the poll-tax. That is not the right question. The question is why should someone so obsessed with secrecy and censorship have any interest in the free market? In fact, in so far as her Thatcherism has a clear focus, It is the establishment of a reactionary moral and political order in which the free-market performs a disciplinary and not an allocationary function. The free market, as political economists know, is a harsh disciplinarian, the more effective because itss tenets Are expressed in apparently impartial terms. But free-market ideologies. are purely instrumental to Thatcherism: she uses them when they promote her political order and she abandons them when they obstruct it. Indeed, in several important ways Thatcherism is Antithetical to the free market. Her principal preoccupations are the restoration of authority and hierarchy, and it is this she means when she speaks of the “defeat of socialism”….. The overriding object of her government, to which the freemarket has always been subordinate, has been political mobilisation, and she has pursued it with determination.“ Truss is simply imitating Thatcher. She made this mistake because she does not understand or care about the free market. Both The supporters of Sunak and the opponents of the Tories ought to recognise this as the supreme example so far of her unfitness for leadership.
Well spotted