I noted these adjacent headlines on The Guardian homepage this morning:
The message could not be clearer. The NHS and state education cannot recruit or retain key new staff.
The trouble is, what this means is that the neoliberal ploy of destroying the state by starving it of resources is working, just as ministers want.
Once they tried to starve governments of money by launching assaults from tax havens.
Now they deny the government the people it needs to recruit by making working for the state profoundly unattractive, or unaffordable.
The price of this is going to be enormous.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
I agree with the main points. Sometimes it is useful to compare & contrast with other countries:
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2023/08/29/record-number-of-flemings-swap-private-sector-for-teaching-but/
Not all is peachy – as in the Uk there is a shortage of dentists (gov cock-up). Plus other come-day-go-day irritants.
However, what is profoundly lacking (in Belgium and core EU member states) is the ideological attachment to small-state/no-state/every man for himself state.
English vile-tory politicos have foisted this no-state ideology on the rest of the “union” which does not (& never has) bought into it.
The end game is break-up, followed by civil unrest in England, following the total failure of vile-liebore to even start to sort out the most egregious problems (see blog above plus blog ad nauseum).
On early morning radio they were saying that most medical graduates will want to be out of the NHS within 2 years.
And now we are hit by revelations about female surgeons being treated appallingly by male colleagues?
And now we have a ‘Marthas’ Rule coming in.
But no one seems to relate any of this to what has been happening in the financing of public services. Is there a link? I suspect that it has something to do with it.
Even in the private sector – all the talk about Wilko is about Wilko itself – not about how interest rates might be hurting it or disposable income going down. I’ve seen huge changes in retailing and public services as a result of one thing – AUSTERITY.
Why is the commentariat so blind about this?
What happened to the girl called Martha whose name is now being used to promtoe this rule was appalling.
But, no one seems to note that the real issue in the NHS right now is getting a first opinion, and not a second one.
Of course we can have second opinions as of right – but having tinmely first ones might be even more important.
From trading economics this morning: compares with market forecasts of a slightly smaller 8.2% rise. The biggest gain was recorded in the public sector (12.2%), while wages in the private sector rose 7.6%
But the public sector was distorted by one off payments that have been toaken totally out of context.
Private sector pay is generally higher for similar skills than in the public sector, the trade off supposedly being job security, better pensions etc. Additionally lower income households have been disproportionately affected by fuel cost and food inflation, which are higher than the aggregate level quoted. I saw an article recently that calculated what they called ‘personal inflation’ that recalculated the inflation experienced by the household based on the proportion of income spent on various categories including fuel, food etc. For the poorest households this re weighted inflation rate was upwards of 20%. Even a 12% increase for these households is still an 8% cut in real terms. Unfortunately I can’t remember where I saw the article.
Perhaps you’d better tell my disgruntled HMRC colleagues who were commenting on the oh-so generous 4.5% pay offer (so still a real terms pay cut) the government has grudgingly, and only after significant strike action, awarded to them after years of real terms decline in pay leaving many of them scratching a living, and the lower paid ones often claiming UC to top up their salaries.
One-off lump sums which are non-consoliable for pension purposes and still subject to deductions for tax and NI do not make up for years of real terms pay cuts in the public sector.
Totally agree
Excuse me Mr Goode.
I have seen 27 really good people leave my public sector organisation in the last two years and each one – each one! – is earning more money in the private sector – not an inflation busting amount, but still much higher than the public sector where their wages had reduced by 25% since 2010.
Public sector pay has a lot of ground to make up because of stupid austerity policies and the gains will look larger than that the private sector just to get closer but not equal, but those gains aren’t even making up parity with the private sector.
And I should know because I’m still bloody here.
So, be careful about how you evaluate those figures please! Public sector pay has reached new lows under the Tory party, believe you me. And any bounce back will look better than it is.
That’s why austerity policy does not tend to work in the long run.
This is a serious question – why do you stay?
Voters need to come to terms with the fact that the political system in the UK has very much been tailored to put sociopaths in power and the invention of money has been a major means of facilitating this. Ipso facto gaining control over money is central to getting rid of the sociopaths and returning to a more natural prosocial society. In a nutshell monetary reverse dominance is required and urgently with global warming building in the background!
The neoliberal agenda has refined itself cleverly since it first used Chile as the rollout laboratory under Pinochet.
Sadly it seems increasingly unstoppable.
And what will Labour do when they inherit all of this, I wonder?
Starmer has talked about ending tax breaks for private schools. Will this end up on the bonfire like so many broken pledges?
Streeting talks of increasing sector involvement in the NHS whilst picking fights with the BMA.
My guess is we are back to the New Labour days of targets and punishing front-line staff for not meeting them.
Why do I stay?
Not an unheard of question in my life.
I still might not!
For me it’s about finishing what I’ve started and knowing that it will (and already has) made some sort of difference. I get so involved in the projects I don’t always have enough energy left to start looking for another job.
And also I have younger people working for me – I want to make sure they known what they are doing before I move on if at all.
Getting things done is about taking your energy and releasing it where it has the most effect. I wish I had many more years, but I don’t so I might as well get as much done as I can where I am in the time I have left – and that will be achievement in itself and something to feel proud about in my dotage given that we are always swimming upstream.
And also – if you believe in something better, then practice it as best you can.
Thanks
I like the answers
Well said PSR. When Ive worked with public sector and third sector (NGOs and charities) folk that has always been my sense of why most of them stay there. Not all but most.
Meanwhile we have had a series of Conservative governments who actively despise public servants – people who choose to serve the public interest. Serving your own interests – self-serving – is all they understand. Money is the only ‘value’ they recognise.
Or more likely, the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Ariel Dorfman, from Democracy Now.
“Milton Friedman and his Chicago boys, had used Chile as a laboratory. And that laboratory, what was done in Chile, which is to create a free market fundamentalism, and that example is the one that then is now, in fact, prevalent in the world and is part of the crisis of the world today. So Chile creates this situation where both the repression, and the situation of repression was also accompanied by an economic model, which is a model where profit is all that matters, the bottom line is all that matters, solidarity does not matter. And it took over the world. It took over Thatcher’s England first, and then it took over Ronald Reagan’s trickle- down economics, where the idea is to reduce the state to its minimum, except for defence, of course, and surveillance, and not use those resources for the development of the welfare and the happiness of the people.”
Milton Friedman landed in Hong Kong and saw a way to pursue global capitalism at the expense of democracy. Cheap, transient labour with no rights for workers, producing whatever people wanted quickly and at little cost. That particular malignancy spread to other countries, but nowhere was it more embraced than in the UK of the late 1970s.
And now here we are.
Forty Years On.
2023 and we have less money; fewer rights; fewer freedoms; widespread poverty; greater inequality; ballooning numbers of food banks; a trashed reputation; wrecked public services; and THE WORST THING OF ALL – absolutely no route out of any of that.
It is genuinely shocking.
It is utterly outrageous.
It is a national scandal that Starmer’s party offers no hope of salvage.
“My Labour Government will…”
The use of that personal pronoun should terrify anyone with a shred of fight left in them.
I don’t know what the answer is. I do know, however, that if we don’t find an answer in the next few months, our lives in this country will honestly not be worth living.
Friedman’s toxic legacy boils down to this:
Democracy might need capitalism….but
Capitalism does not need democracy.
I understand the Chicago Boys buggered pensions up as well. Why have the people of this world stood by and watched and encouraged the USA to reek havoc on other countries who have not done them any harm at all. I have spent all my adult life wondering this.
[…] The Tories are destroying the state by making working for it profoundly unattractive or unaffordable…Richard Murphy […]