Have you ever noticed that politicians must be superstitious because they like the magic number 3? Questions have to be taken in threes, there are always three letter acronyms (and however much they protest they hate TLAs they keep on propagating them) and the latest is the catchy straplines. Take Mr Pickles for instance (I can't help but smile at the similarity between Eric and Jonathan Ross's pug Mr Pickles!), he makes a joke of saying he only has 3 priorities Localism, localism, localism. Ha ha, very funny Mr P - we get it. What I would rather get though is a straight explanation for what he means. The mantra is we will leave it to local people to decide. Hmmm, when did you last look and see local people really getting involved in decision making. I'm afraid the vast majority of local councillors are well past their sell by date and simply do not get that housing and schools are way more important than dog poo or how often the bins get collected. Seems like Mr Pickles scored an own goal on the whole bin collection mullarkey too. He's told local councils that he has reversed that nasty labour government recommendation of fortnightly collection and they can have their weekly collection back. Oh dear Mr P, surely the whole idea of less bin collection was to save money. No? Oh I see, all these cuts we are making is to ensure that bins get collected weekly. And I thought we were dealing with a fiscal crisis - though clearly not when it comes to having your bins emptied because obviously that's more important than saving jobs or providing acute services. I know - lets stop feeding elderly people shall we? That'll save millions.........
Mr P is certainly not my favourite at the moment. Purplepumkin may be about to lose her job because he has decided that our office is bureaucratic and like the badgers, needs to be culled. Shame he hasn't considered the financial case which actually proves we are good value for money, an ideology that I thought he was really hot on. Seems not so when his cronies are whispering in his ear to get rid. In their naivety they think he will pass our funding over to them - get real chaps, there is no money, haven't you been keeping up?!! So anyway, there was supposed to be an announcement this week but its been put off. Seems Eric hadn't reckoned on other departments actually having a view and trying to redeploy thousands of civil servants is no mean feat - oh Eric, haven't you noticed David has imposed cuts everywhere so whatever you shut or abolish is going to cost a lot more than keeping them going. Basic budgeting - why don't you ask the public their views on that!
I caught up with the diary of the anonymous civil servant in the Observer this week - I was a bi miffed actually as I thought I had the idea first but nevermind, this mandarin is obviously more senior than me and closer to the action so I'll give him that. But I could have written the words - it was completely spot on. If you haven't read it use this link - its worth a scan http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/11/civil-servant-diary-turmoil-whitehall
And I haven't even mentioned what they are doing to redundancy payments and pensions yet...........
No comments:
Post a Comment