"Gary Saunders, a company director, was using a hands-free phone when he burst out laughing at a joke told by his brother-in-law, who he was talking to. It became a bit ridiculous when he wanted to know the colour of my hair as I have alopecia and there isn't a hair on my head. When I pointed this out he asked: 'What colour was your hair when you had some?' Labels: police POSTED BY WAT TYLER AT 9:57 AM COMMENTS (10) | TRACKBACK (0) And here's another interesting thing: since the People's Party has been in power, pay increases in the public sector have kept up with, or exceeded, those in the private sector right up the pay scale - even at the top. Why is that interesting? Because defenders of the public realm have long complained that fat cats curled up at the top of the private sector tree have been rinsing their pay increases. Whereas honest hard-working top moggies in the public sector have lived on a meagre diet of household scraps. The truth is that pay for the top decile of the public sector has increased by virtually the same percentage as that for the top decile in the private sector (57.9% vs 58.5%). And both have done much better than their underlings: Can that be right? How can the spirit of public service accommodate such naked fat cattery? Pol has an explanation: "Council chief executives, heads of quangos and of foundation hospitals,have been infected by the high-pay virus of our times. When pay went mad it was hard to insulate the public sector, housing associations or large charities from the insanity. Headhunters deliberately inflated pay, persuading these outfits to poach top players from a tiny pool of people already in such jobs." You might want to remember that as you pay your taxes to pay for the forthcoming public sector pay increases. *Footnote: It is highly gratifying that the TPA has now achieved the prominence to be demonised by the Prog Con as a far-right danger to the public realm. As far as Tyler is concerned, it remains the centrist voice of reason in turbulent times. PS Defending the public realm? Let's just remind ourselves where Pol got the idea: "This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England." How dare she subvert our heritage. Labels: public sector payTHURSDAY, MARCH 05, 2009
This Is No Laughing Matter
We pledge to give you a special badge
Amid all this gloom and fear it's good to know the police are keeping us safe from harm:
For a policeman to spend half-an-hour questioning someone suspected of laughing, you'd have to guess this is an area where the cops have already cracked all the real crime.
A few moments later he noticed a traffic officer flashing his lights at him and gesticulating at him to stop his Renault.
When Mr Saunders got out of his car, the policeman told him: "Laughing while driving a car can be an offence."
Mr Saunders said "the officer accused me of throwing my head back in a dangerous way, which I denied since it is definitely not something I do.
"It went from ludicrous to unbelievable. In the end he reluctantly admitted that he had nothing he could accuse me of, but still required me to take my documents to the station."
Ah, no. This is Liverpool, which in case you don't know, has some eye-watering crime rates: violence against the person is 40% higher than the national average, car theft is 70% higher, robbery is 140% higher, and burglary also 140% higher. We somehow doubt that cracking laughter crime is a priority for the typical Liverpudlian.
Which brings us to the Policing Pledge.
This may well have passed you by, but it is the Home Office's latest attempt to persuade us that, whatever our own experiences, the police are genuinely accountable to us.
The pledge begins with a mission to boldly go:THE POLICE SERVICE IN ENGLAND AND WALES WILL SUPPORT LAW ABIDING CITIZENS AND PURSUE CRIMINALS RELENTLESSLY TO KEEP YOU AND YOUR NEIGHBOURHOODS SAFE FROM HARM.
It then runs through ten specific service pledges, such as:5. Aim to answer 999 calls within 10 seconds, deploying to emergencies immediately giving an estimated time of arrival, getting to you safely, and as quickly as possible. In urban areas, we will aim to get to you within 15 minutes and in rural areas within 20 minutes.
Sounds good, huh?
Well, they'd sound good if you were looking for a job in the box ticking industry, that's for sure. But in terms of making the police accountable to us taxpaying punters, they ain't no substitute for the elected sheriffs Jacqs wimped out on.
In fact, they put Tyler in mind of a box ticking exercise he once came across in aHappy Eater roadside caff. The waitress served us our pre-Heston Blumenthalstuff, and then returned a few minutes later to make sure everything was to our satisfaction. We'd never come across that before in a caff, and we were impressed. Until, that is, we spotted her ticking the little box on her order pad labelled "Satis 4 mins". Later on the way home, one of the junior Tylers threw up.
Let's keep everything crossed that Cam will honour his pledge of elected sheriffs.
PS While Googling Merseyside crime stats, I was amazed to discover that Merseyside's crime problem was actually solved as long ago as 1988. I can't understand why the police still haven't caught up with the power of Yogic Flying:
"Time series analysis was used to test the hypothesis that Merseyside crime rate was reduced by a group practicing Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs. Previous research suggests that a phase transition to increased orderliness as evidenced by reduced crime rate should occur when the group size approaches the square root of 1% of the total population. Analysis of Merseyside monthly crime data and coherence group size from 1978 to 1991 shows that a phase transition occurred during March 1988 with a 13.4% drop in crime when the group size first exceeded the square root of 1% or the Maharishi Effect threshold =o.oooo6)"
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 04, 2009
Pay Apartheid
Defending the public realm
David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, puts it in a nutshell:"Across the country I am hearing more and more businesses left with no choice but to freeze and cut pay. It is unacceptable that the public sector should not share any of this pain. There is already an apartheid between the public and private sectors on pensions. We cannot have apartheid on pay too."
The Times adds :"Under three-year public-sector pay deals agreed last year, NHS workers will enjoy pay rises of 2%-3% this year and next. Similar deals were awarded to teachers and the police, while local government workers are seeking a 6% pay rise."
This isn't just a provocation to all those anxious private sector workers teetering on the edge - there's also the question of affordability.
With the public sector pay bill currently running at about £160bn pa, every 3% pay increase is another £5bn pa. Two year's worth of 3% pa increases compounds to £10bn pa. By the end of the second year the cumulative cost is £15bn - money our parlous public finances simply cannot afford.
The outcome of course will not be more money for the public sector, because thereisn't any more money. The outcome will be service cuts. Just this morning, following an Acas ruling in favour of a higher pay deal for council workers, thechairman of the Local Government Association said: “We are not prepared to pass this on to council taxpayers so it will be jobs that have to go.”
And then there's the thorny issue of fat cat pay in the public sector.
It wasn't so long ago that the determinedly centrist* TaxPayers' Alliance was being lambasted by the Prog Con for publicising high pay in the public sector. But now everyone agrees there's a problem. Last week, Labour's local government minister John Healey pledged to change the rules, arguing:"We've seen in some councils' salaries spiralling, we've seen some big pay-offs for failure, and that can't go on."
Even Prog Con stalwarts at Society Guardian are getting the message: "Some town hall salary packages... appear obscenely high. But then so do less-publicised salaries in other realms of the public sector, neatly documented by the rightwing* lobby group, TaxPayers' Alliance."
Ah, but for every Prog Con that repenteth, another remaineth mired in denial.Here's Pol:"When the private sector catches cold, the heat is turned up on everything public. "Don't bank on a pay rise (unless you work in the public sector)" said yesterday's Daily Mail, with the Murdoch/Rothermere/Barclay brothers press all in tune with the CBI and the TaxPayers' Alliance. Labour is rattled, and ministers run with the hounds instead of standing their ground to defend the public realm."
I always love the way Pol weaves her opponents into a capitalist conspiracy working to undermine "the public realm" - it really tells us what goes on inside her head. Evil press barons, fat cigar-chomping bosses, shadowy organisations of right-wing zealots, and the Master of Foxhounds: it's all straight out of Sir Roderick Spode and the 30s class war, as recounted by PG Woodhouse. Only Woodhouse meant it as humour.
Anyway, her point is that the public sector deserves its coming pay rises because it needs to catch up:"In boom times the public sector tends to fall behind, but in recessions it catches up, in a counter-cyclical pattern... Gordon Brown screwed down the public sector to below-inflation pay for three consecutive years - which can hardly be called feather-bedding."
A screwing from Gordon Brown on a feather-bed? An horrific image that may be inside Pol's head, but which I certainly don't want inside mine. Let's blot it out with some facts.
The facts are that over the last three years (to December 2008), average earnings in the private sector increased by 3.7% pa. Whereas in the public sector they increased by 3.5% - a 0.2% pa difference. That doesn't sound like much of a screwing, especially when you consider that private sector pay may now be falling.
In reality, as we've blogged many times, the official stats show that overall public sector pay compares well with the private sector. Here are some headlines (all figures relate to full-time gross pay, including bonuses, in 2008):
Wouldn't you just know it - the egregious money-grubbing antics of our public realm defenders turns out to the fault of private sector headhunters.
Thursday, 5 March 2009
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