Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Hunt's gaffe
Thursday, 24 June 2010
Vote for Christmas!
The coalition government is to write to public sector workers asking for ways to save public money. Here's a suggestion to get us started: Why not write a handful of letters to their elected representatives in the trade unions, instead of six million letters to each individual member?
The government is borrowing a tactic from public sector managers. Consulting directly with staff can be justified as a means to really engage with workers - it just so happens to exclude the trade unions, who are nominated by public sector staff to represent them in discussions.
Why do some people find the concept of collective bargaining so difficult to understand? In law, and in parliamentary democracy, we have no difficulty in understanding the idea that people can nominate another to speak on their behalf. When it comes to industrial relations, however, public sector managers – and now the government – reserve the right to speak to whoever is convenient.
And consulting staff directly will be very convenient indeed for the coalition government. It will allow them to pick and choose anecdotal examples to justify their strategy of cuts, using different views scattered across the workforce to validate a massive programme of cuts and redundancies. It is very similar to the strategy they are already using in welfare, where they are using the complaints of working families about unfairness in the benefit system to justify cutting their entitlements.
They will try to avoid consulting the unions about cuts because they know they will get a response they don’t want to hear: Why don’t you address the deficit with a greater emphasis on taxation, and why are you gambling with the economy and our members’ lives by cutting so quickly and deeply?
I suspect this is what the majority of public sector workers will really think. So if it is genuinely interested in consultation, the government can save itself a lot of time - and money.
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
New politics
Nick Clegg's welfare safety net
The Tories say that spending on public services for people who don't depend on them is unsustainable, and that we need to change our expectations of what the State is supposed to do.
Now the Conservatives and Lib Dems are shackled together in coalition, how will this Tory philosophy square with the Liberal Democrats' stated commitment to public services for all? Here are a few extracts from the preamble to the Lib Dem Federal Constitution:
"We promote human rights and open government, a sustainable economy which serves genuine need, public services of the highest quality."
"We support the widest possible distribution of wealth and promote the rights of all citizens to social provision."
"We seek to make public services responsive to the people they serve, to encourage variety and innovation within them and to make them available on equal terms to all."
It is difficult to see how grassroots Lib Dems will swallow public service cuts in the longer term, and party activists should question whether they entered politics to assist the Tories in permanently reducing the size and function of the welfare state.
Some party grandees are rumoured to be very unhappy with today's announcements, including former leader Charles Kennedy. Kennedy remains very popular with party members, and his unease will be echoed by the Lib Dem grassroots.
They are not in denial about the need for cuts. Nor are they frightened of making difficult decisions. What concerns them is the suspicion that they are aiding and abetting a Tory assault on the long-term prospects for social democracy in the