You will recall that we solved the financial crisis months ago. The problem was too many people in the public sector doing non-jobs and more or less everyone in the public sector being paid too much. Especially when you include their pensions: if the private sector can't afford decent pensions, how come it has to shell out to pay for the gold-plated public sector ones? If you want to know where this ends, check out Greece.
The governor of the Bank of England, clearly a Marshside blog follower, put it even more succinctly the other day. The problem, he said, was governments spending too much. The "governments" to which he was referring are those of the western democracies. If we ask why it is that so many governments like spending money they don't have, the clue could be in the word "democracy". With an election always round the corner, there's nothing like splashing out some cash to buy a few votes. Don't have the money? Never mind, we'll borrow some more and worry about it after the election, or not at all if the other lot get in.
It's a bit different in China, where they continue to pile up the loot and lend it back to the rest of us. Could the fact that China is not a democracy have anything to do with this? Would you rather live under the Chinese system of government, with their piles of cash or under ours, with our piles of debt? Hmmm....this is one for the campers at St Paul's to think about. And Michael Moore, the US documentary film maker who gave an asinine performance on Newsnight the other day with a totally incoherent justification for the equally incoherent protests going on at St Paul's, Wall Street and elsewhere. He thinks that capitalism has failed. Or is it democracy that's failed? I blame the baseball cap - why do otherwise sensible Americans feel such a strong need to wear one?
Anyway, I'm rambling. The point of all this is....you would think that the "cuts" which everyone is moaning about must be right to the bone. But in today's local paper, I see that one bit of the NHS around here employs not only an "assistant director of citizen engagement" but also a "citizen engagement manager"!! (They had the front to both appear in an unpixelated photo - that's very brave.) You will have spotted that if there's an "assistant" director, there must be someone who's plain "director" of this curious line of business known as citizen engagement (or probably "strategic director", my previous post refers). There might even be more than one "manager" and even people so lowly that they are not directors or managers at all. Plus they're bound to have a secretary or two and they all occupy office space, with computers, laptops, mobile phones, etc. Probably bloody iPads as well these days.
The public sector just doesn't get it. While they are shelling out huge sums on these people, they are probably cancelling operations and extending waiting lists. This is a sin. They should take a red pen in one hand, a list of all administrative jobs in the other and apply one to t'other.
Either the cuts are only skin deep or they're in the wrong places. Or both. Our government, like many others, is still spending far too much. Sorting this out is painful but not sorting it out is more painful. I wonder if the people at St Paul's would have been there when Jethro Tull's invention of the seed drill put thousands of agricultural workers out of a job (never mind the catastrophic effect of the combine harvester). Apparently, according to Michael Moore, they want the end of capitalism. So it's the Chinese way for them then. Good luck with that.
The medicine of change often has an unpleasant side effect but it's necessary, just like many other medicines. Just ask the people at your local NHS's Citizen Engagement division.
