Oh, how clever, Mr.Brown! How clever!
One of the features of Gordon Brown's stewardship of the economy, both as Chancellor of the Exchequer and as First Lord of the Treasury (Prime Minister), has been a quite peculiar approach to the public sector. On the one hand, public expenditure has gone up by some fantastic proportion, and so has the taxation to cover it. On the other, the actual number of employees in ministries and public authorities, with few exceptions, have been cut, and their wages kept at the lowest possible level. The bizarre discrepancy between these two statements is explained when one reflects on the simply monstrous amount of public money being thrown at private contractor in what are called PFIs, Private Finance Initiatives, and PPPs, Private-Public Partnerships. The general idea is simple. To run, say, a PFI school, some private company puts in a million or two pounds in the financing of a school. The State puts in, say, forty million, and calls it a private initiative. The contractor taks over the school, runs it for a profit, and skims the profits. There also are thousands of consultancy contracts in every public authority in the land, as if the public services had to be taught to do their work by consultants from outside.
All this amounts is the most colossal job of picking the public pocket in history. The English upper classes have always been rapacious: they were formed, after all, in that sinister orgy of theft and murder in the reign of Henry VIII, and reformed in an even more thoroughly corrupt and rapcacious form in the course of that abominable act of treason that they, but nobody else, have good reason to call the Glorious Revolution. The transfer of public goods into private pockets is their frequent if not constant habit - just look up "enclosures" in any English history if you do not believe me. But even by English standard, the assault on the public pocket in the last 25 years has been particularly vicious, sustained, and bipartisan.
However, the party always comes to an end. There was an end of church goods to steal (or else where were the younger sons of those very thieving lords to get their sinecures as Anglican vicars?); there was an end of land to enclose. And now the end of the looting of the public purse has come, in the shape of the worst recession in a quarter of a century. The great privatization and consultancy racket was ran on he profits of a long period of supposed prosperity - which itself was largely artificial, the result of the monetization of an enormous amount of assets. To keep the British public spending, a number of clever devices were invented. For instance, collectively owned "Building societies" - financial institutions for the purchase and building of houses - were privatized, and the members issued with money supposedly equal to their part in the society. But the cleverest was also the simplest: the price of housing was allowed to drift insanely upwards. The vast majority of British families own or have a mortgage on their own homes, and many people own a second home intended to be rented as an investment. Incredibly, to keep house prices rising, the government deliberately destroyed thousands of perfectly sound but unwelcomely cheap houses in the north of England.
You may not believe me, but I have been saying this since before John Major fell: that growth based purely on the public purchasing, with a constant negative balance of imports and exports, house price inflation rising well beyond the rise in wages, and borrowing on bricks-and-mortar capital to pay fr it, were false prosperity. I was saying it in the nineties and in the "oughties", and I have the copies of letters to friends to prove it. Tory and Labour policies in this have resembled each other like evil twins. House prices just kept getting nudged up. And everyone was getting more and more in debt, and being told that they were getting richer.
Now, as we say in Italy, the Castigamatti, the Punisher, has arrived. And like the last time this happened, a Labour Prime Minister is caught like a rat in a hole. In order to finance his continued looting of the public purse, he has kept public wages at the minimum possible level. Each year, he informed the people who cured the nation's sick, watched the nation's streets, pursued the nation's criminals, fought the nation's wars, paid the nation's bills, taught the nation's children, guarded the nation's coasts, and carried out in a million ways the nation's business, that this was not the time to go on a spending spree, that restraint was the order of the day, that sacrifices must be made. Meanwhile contractors, shareholders, and their placemen in politics and top bureaucracy, grew richer and richer. And as the habit of kicking the public sector in the groin grew more and more rooted, it grew more insolent. Last year, the government cheated the police, bold-facedly and openly, and did so over a pitifully small amount of pay - one that would not probably have paid for one of the bigger thieving PFI contracts. The police, for the first time in decades, manifested their anger in a huge nationwide rally that the government boldly ignored. It is illegal for the police to strike, and the ministers know it, so they calculate on being able to rob them at will.
However, as this year began, people went out to make their first weekly purchase of the new year. And they found an ugly surprise. The prices of basic foods had gone up - and by up, I mean anything between a twenty-five and a hundred per cent. The weekly shopping bill had been blown out of all recognition. And then, horrendously, like the unstoppable terror in some horror movies, the prices of gas and petrol started going up.
Normal householders who have been encouraged for decades to debt-spend in order to purchase not just the luxuries but the necessities, and whose income was as often as not anticipated for months ahead, could not possibly cope with such a blow. Add the fact that the crazily rigged inflation figures informed the public that inflation was only about 3%, and that pay rises, even if over inflation, would in any case be infinitely too small to cope with the monstrous rise in real inflation - the kind you have to pay for at the shops, week after week, or in your bills. And then house prices started going down - and down, and down. And even worse than the fall in house prices was the unimaginable collapse in the number of mortgages granted; the banks who six months ago were lending to anyone who asked, now were lending to nobody at all. The taps had been closed at last; and not before time, since two major lending institutions - belonging, what a surprise, to the group of privatized former "building societies" I mentioned - had already gone under and were kept alive by monstrously expensive government support.
Over this storm of horror and despair there was heard, like the crazy shriek of some demented parrot, yet another call for public employees to accept below-inflation pay rises; because, wouldn't you know it, this was not the time to go on a spending spree, restraint was the order of the day, sacrifices must be made. And from every office in the land, there was heard a voice like the shudder of a coming storm: "If sacrifices are to be made, someone else can make them this time." As in 1979, and with much greater justice, the whole public sector is going to seize up.
Gordon Brown - or Burden Grown, as Britain now ought to call him - was an ambitious young political student in the days of 1979, when the whole public sector rose in revolt and the dead went unburied. The events of the last few weeks must have given him nightmares: surely he must have felt that he had seen it all before - the revolt of the public sector; the explosive growth of inflation; the collapse of what industry was left; and last and final, the collapse of Labour into a squabbling mess of defeated individuals, while the Tory enemy settled in to govern Britain for the long run.
He still had one card to play. And so, this morning, he has made an announcement that shows just to what abysmal depths of cynicism the notions of political correctness can be bent.
A new "equality" (very much in brackets)law is to be enacted. For the first time in British history, ageism in employment is to be absolutely forbidden; and that is good, though absurdly belated. You had had ten years to pass this law, boys, why did you wait? Is it that your contractor friends would have been displeased? And while this belated piece of justice is welcome, the rest of the bill is one long abomination. Confidentiality in payments is forbidden: every employee is to know what every other employee is being paid. Employers are allowed to discriminate on the grounds of race, sex or any other consideration if that is necessary to achieve a more balanced environment. (Of course, this is only if the prospective candidates are otherwise equal in their merits. Interviewers can very well make sure that two different candidates come out equal so that the one with the favoured skin colour or between-the-legs gear can get the job.) It is all designd to set employee against employee, sex against sex, race against race, in order to make each of them the worst enemy of the other - and break up any rising consensus against employers. Egalitarianism is used to set employees at each other's throats; in the expectation that the jealousy of women for the supposed pay superiority of men, the jealousy of whites for more successful Chinese and Hindus and of Africans and Muslims for the supposedly more successful whites, should degenerate into a million petty squabbles. This is not even to the advantage of a private employer, who will have a million workplace squabbles to arbitrate - and nothing does more to ruin a company - and will feel the eyes of the thought police glaring at him to make sure that he has always the correct proportion of persons. It is only to the advantage of government, which is at present by far the biggest employer of unionized labour, as well as of women and ethnic minorities, and that hopes, by this expedient, to break any common front between its own employees.
How clever, Mr.Brown. How clever. I am sure the Devil in Hell (in whom you do not believe) will have a place ready for you as his counsellor, when you finally go to Hell as you deserve.
All this amounts is the most colossal job of picking the public pocket in history. The English upper classes have always been rapacious: they were formed, after all, in that sinister orgy of theft and murder in the reign of Henry VIII, and reformed in an even more thoroughly corrupt and rapcacious form in the course of that abominable act of treason that they, but nobody else, have good reason to call the Glorious Revolution. The transfer of public goods into private pockets is their frequent if not constant habit - just look up "enclosures" in any English history if you do not believe me. But even by English standard, the assault on the public pocket in the last 25 years has been particularly vicious, sustained, and bipartisan.
However, the party always comes to an end. There was an end of church goods to steal (or else where were the younger sons of those very thieving lords to get their sinecures as Anglican vicars?); there was an end of land to enclose. And now the end of the looting of the public purse has come, in the shape of the worst recession in a quarter of a century. The great privatization and consultancy racket was ran on he profits of a long period of supposed prosperity - which itself was largely artificial, the result of the monetization of an enormous amount of assets. To keep the British public spending, a number of clever devices were invented. For instance, collectively owned "Building societies" - financial institutions for the purchase and building of houses - were privatized, and the members issued with money supposedly equal to their part in the society. But the cleverest was also the simplest: the price of housing was allowed to drift insanely upwards. The vast majority of British families own or have a mortgage on their own homes, and many people own a second home intended to be rented as an investment. Incredibly, to keep house prices rising, the government deliberately destroyed thousands of perfectly sound but unwelcomely cheap houses in the north of England.
You may not believe me, but I have been saying this since before John Major fell: that growth based purely on the public purchasing, with a constant negative balance of imports and exports, house price inflation rising well beyond the rise in wages, and borrowing on bricks-and-mortar capital to pay fr it, were false prosperity. I was saying it in the nineties and in the "oughties", and I have the copies of letters to friends to prove it. Tory and Labour policies in this have resembled each other like evil twins. House prices just kept getting nudged up. And everyone was getting more and more in debt, and being told that they were getting richer.
Now, as we say in Italy, the Castigamatti, the Punisher, has arrived. And like the last time this happened, a Labour Prime Minister is caught like a rat in a hole. In order to finance his continued looting of the public purse, he has kept public wages at the minimum possible level. Each year, he informed the people who cured the nation's sick, watched the nation's streets, pursued the nation's criminals, fought the nation's wars, paid the nation's bills, taught the nation's children, guarded the nation's coasts, and carried out in a million ways the nation's business, that this was not the time to go on a spending spree, that restraint was the order of the day, that sacrifices must be made. Meanwhile contractors, shareholders, and their placemen in politics and top bureaucracy, grew richer and richer. And as the habit of kicking the public sector in the groin grew more and more rooted, it grew more insolent. Last year, the government cheated the police, bold-facedly and openly, and did so over a pitifully small amount of pay - one that would not probably have paid for one of the bigger thieving PFI contracts. The police, for the first time in decades, manifested their anger in a huge nationwide rally that the government boldly ignored. It is illegal for the police to strike, and the ministers know it, so they calculate on being able to rob them at will.
However, as this year began, people went out to make their first weekly purchase of the new year. And they found an ugly surprise. The prices of basic foods had gone up - and by up, I mean anything between a twenty-five and a hundred per cent. The weekly shopping bill had been blown out of all recognition. And then, horrendously, like the unstoppable terror in some horror movies, the prices of gas and petrol started going up.
Normal householders who have been encouraged for decades to debt-spend in order to purchase not just the luxuries but the necessities, and whose income was as often as not anticipated for months ahead, could not possibly cope with such a blow. Add the fact that the crazily rigged inflation figures informed the public that inflation was only about 3%, and that pay rises, even if over inflation, would in any case be infinitely too small to cope with the monstrous rise in real inflation - the kind you have to pay for at the shops, week after week, or in your bills. And then house prices started going down - and down, and down. And even worse than the fall in house prices was the unimaginable collapse in the number of mortgages granted; the banks who six months ago were lending to anyone who asked, now were lending to nobody at all. The taps had been closed at last; and not before time, since two major lending institutions - belonging, what a surprise, to the group of privatized former "building societies" I mentioned - had already gone under and were kept alive by monstrously expensive government support.
Over this storm of horror and despair there was heard, like the crazy shriek of some demented parrot, yet another call for public employees to accept below-inflation pay rises; because, wouldn't you know it, this was not the time to go on a spending spree, restraint was the order of the day, sacrifices must be made. And from every office in the land, there was heard a voice like the shudder of a coming storm: "If sacrifices are to be made, someone else can make them this time." As in 1979, and with much greater justice, the whole public sector is going to seize up.
Gordon Brown - or Burden Grown, as Britain now ought to call him - was an ambitious young political student in the days of 1979, when the whole public sector rose in revolt and the dead went unburied. The events of the last few weeks must have given him nightmares: surely he must have felt that he had seen it all before - the revolt of the public sector; the explosive growth of inflation; the collapse of what industry was left; and last and final, the collapse of Labour into a squabbling mess of defeated individuals, while the Tory enemy settled in to govern Britain for the long run.
He still had one card to play. And so, this morning, he has made an announcement that shows just to what abysmal depths of cynicism the notions of political correctness can be bent.
A new "equality" (very much in brackets)law is to be enacted. For the first time in British history, ageism in employment is to be absolutely forbidden; and that is good, though absurdly belated. You had had ten years to pass this law, boys, why did you wait? Is it that your contractor friends would have been displeased? And while this belated piece of justice is welcome, the rest of the bill is one long abomination. Confidentiality in payments is forbidden: every employee is to know what every other employee is being paid. Employers are allowed to discriminate on the grounds of race, sex or any other consideration if that is necessary to achieve a more balanced environment. (Of course, this is only if the prospective candidates are otherwise equal in their merits. Interviewers can very well make sure that two different candidates come out equal so that the one with the favoured skin colour or between-the-legs gear can get the job.) It is all designd to set employee against employee, sex against sex, race against race, in order to make each of them the worst enemy of the other - and break up any rising consensus against employers. Egalitarianism is used to set employees at each other's throats; in the expectation that the jealousy of women for the supposed pay superiority of men, the jealousy of whites for more successful Chinese and Hindus and of Africans and Muslims for the supposedly more successful whites, should degenerate into a million petty squabbles. This is not even to the advantage of a private employer, who will have a million workplace squabbles to arbitrate - and nothing does more to ruin a company - and will feel the eyes of the thought police glaring at him to make sure that he has always the correct proportion of persons. It is only to the advantage of government, which is at present by far the biggest employer of unionized labour, as well as of women and ethnic minorities, and that hopes, by this expedient, to break any common front between its own employees.
How clever, Mr.Brown. How clever. I am sure the Devil in Hell (in whom you do not believe) will have a place ready for you as his counsellor, when you finally go to Hell as you deserve.