Britannia Radio

I've laid into the Mail earlier for only telling parrt of the story.  
("Half the story.   Better than none?").  Here's an even better 
responser which I've just found in The Times.

Here's details of the debate - 'spin" from Labour and the Unions - 
common sense from Osborne.

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THE TIMES 8.4.09
We face a tough choice - cut pay or cut jobs
Public spending must be pruned hard. But that need not mean getting 
rid of frontline teachers, nurses and police

Camilla Cavendish

It's the same old refrain. Anyone who suggests that public sector pay 
might have to be restrained is accused of wanting to "cut hard-
working teachers, police and nurses".

That's what Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, said this week, when 
George Osborne suggested that public sector pay should reflect 
economic reality. It's what Unison repeated, fortissimo, when the 
Shadow Chancellor said that three-year public sector pay deals could 
prove "inflexible at a time when the economic conditions are changing 
very quickly". If stating the obvious is so inflammatory, politics 
will remain childish up to the general election. We haven't heard 
much lately about the "hard-working families" who foot the bill. But 
they are not the fools that ministers seem to take them for.

The Treasury acknowledges that public spending must fall. The 
Institute for Fiscal Studies said this week that the hole in the 
public finances is £39 billion bigger than the Chancellor admitted in 
October, and that there are only two ways to fill it: to raise the 
basic rate of income tax by the equivalent of £1,250 a family a year 
or to freeze all government spending for five years. You can't freeze 
spending without affecting pay, because wages make up a third of all 
public expenditure. It is dishonest to pretend otherwise.

It is also wrong to present the public sector, as Unison has done 
shamelessly, as a heroic and underpaid band of "nurses, paramedics, 
occupational therapists, midwives, hospital cleaners and cooks". 
There are two public sectors in Britain today: the "front line" that 
does jobs the public understands, often for low to middling wages, 
and the "back room" that is firmly on the gravy train. The back-room 
boys are using the front line as human shields in a battle for self-
preservation. The top 5,000 civil servants are quietly pushing for a 
3per cent pay deal, even as they discuss how to squeeze the nurses.

I have found it impossible to discover how many public sector workers 
are "frontline". There is not always an absolute distinction between 
managers (some of whom are excellent and essential) and 
"workers" (some of whom are woefully inefficient). But what I infer 
from the figures on offer is that the 680,000 new posts created 
between 1998 and 2005 skewed the balance away from the coal face. By 
2005 fewer than half of NHS staff were clinical, while in 
universities non-academic staff outnumbered academic staff. So maybe 
the axe need not fall so heavily on those that Unison shouts about.

The backroom wields the axe, however. And the chances of it leading 
by example look slim. Take the response to this week's revelation by 
the Tax Payers' Alliance that more than 1,000 council workers are 
paid more than £100,000, an increase of 27 per cent in a year. One 
chief executive, John Foster, left Wakefield Council with a £340,000 
payoff, to be hired only a month later by Islington.

Did the Local Government Association express regret over these 
figures? Not a bit. It claimed that councils have to attract the 
best, because many "have bigger budgets than FTSE-100 companies". Can 
these be the same councils that have lost most of their control over 
education and transport, and palmed off council-house building to 
housing associations? If they really have bigger budgets than 
Unilever or BAE Systems (which I doubt), why? The argument that great 
managers are needed in recession, "because the public will want good 
services without an increase in taxes", will draw a hollow laugh from 
council-tax payers who would have liked someone to have thought of 
that a long time ago.

The back room is already cutting the front line. But it is doing it 
by stealth. Last week schools were told that millions of pounds 
promised for their sixth forms at the beginning of March were no 
longer available. The same Government that trumpeted its raising of 
the school leaving age to 18 is now forcing schools and FE colleges 
to turn away A-level students, with no warning, in the financial year 
that has just begun.

Worse, ministers claim that this is nothing to do with them, but is 
the fault of the Learning and Skills Council. It seems extraordinary 
that basic decisions about expenditure have been hived off to this 
hapless quango. What are ministers for? If politicians refuse to take 
responsibility for spending decisions, they should go home and give 
us a rebate on their salaries.

This Government sustained itself in power by bribing every interest 
group under the sun with taxpayers' money, and claiming the credit. 
But it will do anything to distance itself from "cuts" - even if that 
means using quangos to cover its tracks. Or blaming the Opposition. 
Mr Osborne's honesty about three-year pay deals has done him 
unnecessary harm. He is presented as wanting to "scrap" deals that 
will have less than a year to run by the time a new government takes 
office, and which may have been ripped up by then anyway. Hospital 
trusts, for example, seem poised to renege on the third year of the 
pay deal. But Mr Osborne was right to point out that the deals were 
struck when inflation was expected to rise. Now Britain faces 
deflation and financial crisis.

The scale of that crisis has frozen ministers in the headlights. 
Vince Cable's suggestions of dropping the target of getting 50 per 
cent of school-leavers into university and changing tax credits have 
met with deafening silence. The size of our deficit means that 
ministers must reassure the markets that they have a plan to plug the 
hole. But raising income tax to 45p on the super-rich, as Alistair 
Darling will do on April 22, will raise less than one hundredth of 
the public sector wage bill.

The unions do not want to admit that they face a choice between 
cutting pay and cutting jobs. The Government fears making itself 
unpopular. But cutting by stealth will make it only more unpopular. 
We need leadership, not blame. The same old refrain is sounding very, 
very old indeed.