…so let’s all have a massive refund.
Yes – I had another of my blinding revelations –
huge cosmic insights and general headache-inducing flashes of brilliance (or
maybe it was something I ate?)
I was mulling over the rash of un-elected
‘government’ organisations, drain blocking number of public inquiries and the
wholesale outsourcing of government services and it hit me like a big, wet,
rotten fish.
We no longer need politicians. Government itself is
outsourced. From contractors doing cheap jobs on road maintenance to companies
found to be abusing vulnerable and elderly people in care homes – outsourcing
is a known disaster but continues to grow exponentially. The only possible
benefit to the public is a massive tax rebate – funded by eliminating clearly irrelevant
‘government’.
In the face of the horror of Grenfell tower – for
example - there was the initial deluge of information about what had not been
done – which local politicians had never in fact visited a high-rise – the crazy
catalogue of safety issues that had been blatantly ignored for years and so on.
Instead of an honest indictment of the whole bloody shower of local and
national politicians who allowed or helped create the environment for this to
happen, including ex-chancellor George Osborne – see my letter to the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/17/local-community-should-set-up-their-own-grenfell-fire-inquiry we got another inquiry at huge public
expense. An inquiry – to find out what
happened which has become the standard euphemism for kick the ball down the road to a time politicians hope public anger and
shock will have subsided. Because – for some reason – even though its
bloody obvious – it’s better not to reach conclusions and set about putting
things right – it is, politicians decided, much better to get a posh establishment
figure – who (see blog 240) may not be the most appropriate person for the job
– to spend months and millions of public money (that could have been spent on
public services) so that he can tell the public a fraction of what we already
knew. And do inquiries into disasters result in serious reformative action? Iraq inquiry anyone?
Companies such as G4S and SERCO are awarded huge and long-term
government contracts despite acknowledged crap service, dangerous practice and
poor value. They are the problem.
In June 2012 UNISON published a report showing that
bringing services back into local government control could improve quality and
lower cost. It is hard not to conclude that the only remaining reasons for
outsourcing is to slough off responsibility and have a third party to blame
when things go wrong while also channelling tidal waves of public money into
private hands.
Way back when I was a city councillor in Newcastle –
councillors did not get paid. An allowance of sorts could be applied for – though
for people like me – with children – when there was little or no childcare
provision – even claiming for the odd allowance left me out of pocket. Unlike
many, I would not just turn up to the first 5 mins of a meeting so that I could
collect multiple allowances as was common. I did get sent to Coventry by the
then leader Jeremy Beecham for publically complaining about the abuse of the allowance
system and the ludicrous expenditure of some senior or favoured councillors.
However – now councillors do get paid; in part – I suspect – the stop that kind
of abuse. Aint it odd that for people in power – when they do wrong they get
more. It works the other way round for everyone else. But now –huge swathes of
public goods and services are out to tender with private firms. Many not based
in the UK – so much for the Brexiteers re-claiming our borders...
In 2013-14 (47th report) the
Public Accounts Committee stated –
More
and more public services are being contracted out to private and voluntary
providers. Government spends £187 billion (estimated at
242 billion by January 2017) on goods and
services with third parties each year, around half of which is estimated to be
on contracting out services. Government retains responsibility for ensuring
value for money and we, on behalf of the taxpayer, need to be able to follow
the taxpayers’ pound, wherever it is spent.
This conjures up an image of some grey civil servant
wandering the corridors of power aimlessly whistling and shouting ‘here poundy
poundy – where are you?’ Is this what government is in 21st century Britain?
Do we simply let public money leak into
private hands with diminishing returns, less accountability and less value for
the taxpayer while employing people to tell us which sewer our money has been
flushed down? Meanwhile we are paying politicians and civil servants to GOVERN,
to MANAGE. When did it happen that we were paying them simply to pass the buck
and tell us where it went?
Obviously we’d keep a couple of spare politicians
for the obligatory photo opportunity. Last week – for example – dead woman
walking Theresa May and creepy polished git Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt turned
up unannounced (to staff at any rate – I wonder why) at the trust where my
middle daughter is an overworked doctor in an understaffed hospital. They were
there for a self-congratulatory photo shoot in an NHS building – proving that
there is no level of incompetence, shame, irony, no self-questioning, no
humility, no depths to which some politicians will not sink for self-aggrandisement.
Hunt can get his, I’m-alright-Jack self, photographed in an increasingly
privatised public service institution that probably hates his guts more than I
hate dog shit on my shoe. So ok – we’ll keep a couple of politicians in an old cardboard box in a musty cupboard somewhere for occasions like that. But otherwise – as I’ve said – why keep them?
Maybe our young people could use their refunds to
pay off their life-crushing student debts?