Booze Matters - Daily Testing

My thanks to a loyal reader who pointed me to a pretty ghastly story about Nanny's desire to introduce daily alcohol testing (via a fingerprint scanner) at the workplace.

Nanny intends to start with public sector and security staff etc, then doubtless all and sundry will be targeted.

As anyone who has ever worked in the real world knows, half the workforce (especially in an office) turns up hungover each morning.

Once one has been found to be hungover in charge of the photocopier, what does Nanny (public sector or private sector) propose to do?

Sack you?

Such nonsense will require massive rewriting of employment contracts, and will turn the already dismal workplace into a soul destroying place of misery and drudgery.

The fact that technically the tests can be done done not mean that they should be done.

It is a terrible idea, and contrary to the basic tenet of a "grown up" society that an adult should be treated as an adult so long as he/she behaves in a responsible manner.

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Prats of The Week - Lothian and Borders Police

What a gloriously sunny and cheerful Monday morning it is!

What better time to award my prestigious and internationally renowned "Prats of The Week" Award?

This week it goes to Lothian and Borders Police.

For why?

For their incredibly complex and expensive sandwich order.

The force have put out to tender a contract for the supply of 7,500 packed lunches per annum.

Fair enough, until that is you look at the cost and the tender document.

How much do you think they intend to spend on 7,500 packed lunches?

£10K?

No!

£20K?

No!

£30K

No!

A staggering £70K!

That works out at over £9 per lunch!

Moving on from the very high cost of what should be able to be sourced for less than £5 per lunch, I direct your attention to their tender document.

It comes in at a stonking 10,000 words spewed across 45 pages.

Good grief!

Baguettes must measure 11 inches long and contain one of 17 different fillings (specified in a separate spreadsheet), which include brie and cranberry, smoked salmon and cream cheese and prawn mayonnaise.
The document also states that 75% of the baguettes must be made from white bread, and 25% from brown. The filling must be “the standard size and weight stipulated by the British Sandwich Association”.

Other sections of the document cover health and safety rules, requirements for environmentally friendly packaging, compliance with anti-discrimination and anti-bribery laws, plus financial and legal clauses.

Any hapless caterer, brave enough to wade through this nonsense has but one month to submit a formal tender.

Is it any wonder that the public sector is so short of resources for front line jobs such as nursing etc, when it wastes so much time and money on this shite?

Only large, bureaucratic, wasteful private companies would have the resources necessary to wade through this nonsense. The result being waste and inefficiency.

Lothian and Borders Police, well deserving Prats of The Week!

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Auntie Suffers Sense of Humour Failure

Unsurprisingly I see that Nanny's best chum, Auntie, suffered a major sense of humour failure over Jeremy Clarkson's comments on "The One Show" in which he said that he would have public sector strikers shot.

Auntie issued an apology, and has withdrawn the show from the BBCi Player.

Censorship Auntie?

Are we not allowed to watch the show and make our own minds up?

Never mind, here is the clip (out of context), before judging it you should also be aware that he prefaced the comments by asserting that he liked the strikers, as the industrial action meant there was no traffic on the roads.

He then went on to say that he had to be balanced as he worked for Auntie, at which point he talked about having them shot.

Could it be that he was having a dig at Auntie's pc attitude as much as at the strikers?

UPDATE

Seemingly Unison (according to Auntie) is "to take urgent legal advice over "appalling" comments made by TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson".

Oh by the way, where was Unison when Ken Livingstone suggested that George Osborne should be hanged?


FURTHER UPDATE

Auntie now reports the following quote from Jeremy Clarkson:

"I didn’t for a moment intend these remarks to be taken seriously – as I believe is clear if they’re seen in context.

If the BBC and I have caused any offence, I’m quite happy to apologise for it alongside them."






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Got To Pick a Pocket or Two.. II

Following on from yesterday's article about Nanny ignoring fiscal reality, and merrily devising new methods of taxing us further in order to meet her personal expenditure requirements, I think it would be appropriate to mention public sector pensions.

To be precise, if the word "precise" can ever be used to describe public sector pensions, the aggregate public sector net liability for unfunded pensions which is estimated by some to be around £1 Trillion (note the total level of public sector debt of the UK stands at £4.8 Trillion).

How do we pay public sector pensions?

Via tax revenues as, unlike the private sector, there is no pension fund (pot of money) set aside to pay for them.

How does the government budget, ie set tax rates, for public sector pensions that are payable for another 10-20 years?

They use a discount rate.

What is a discount rate?

This is the rate applied to current pension payments to tell Nanny what she will need in terms of funding to cover them over 10-20 years.

What is the discount rate used by Nanny to set her tax/pension budget?

According to Robert Peston it is 3%.

OK so far?

Not really!

Why?

The UK economy hasn't grown at 3% for quite a number of years!

In other words the pensions/tax budget that Nanny is using to calculate/cover future unfunded public sector pensions liabilities is bollocks!

This means that when the bills need to be settled over the coming 10-20 years, either taxes will have to go up or public sector pensions will have to be cut.

Needless to say, Nanny hasn't told anyone that yet!

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The Non Jobs

In 2003 (yes that many years ago!) I wrote the following on my "In Your Face" site:

"...The jobs being created in the state sector are not “front line” jobs such as; nurses, doctors or teachers. They are newly invented bureaucratic creations; risk officers, empowerment managers etc. None of these positions actually “adds value” to the quality of life in the UK...

..The state, unlike the private sector which is not shielded from economic reality, is inherently wasteful. A report issued in the last few days highlighted the fact that the state sector wastes £70BN a year; that is the equivalent of over 10p in the rate of income tax! On a personal level I can attest to this waste; on applying for a senior position recently in the state I was sent by post an information pack exceeding 200 pages, no private sector employer would ever dream of being so wasteful.

It is a matter of great concern to me and should be to the citizens of the UK that the Chancellor, despite being an intelligent individual, appears to be possessed by the old socialist disease of political dogma; namely:

'State good, private bad'.

This disease is clearly deadening his ability to see that the current path that the UK is taking, in building up the state at the expense of the private sector, is in fact the 'road to nowhere'."

Somewhat prescient wouldn't you say?

Here we are in 2011, and the penny has finally dropped that all the extra money that Brown lavished on the public sector has been wasted.

Local authorities have taken on an extra 180,000 workers since 1997, with the total number not employed in traditional front-line roles now standing at almost 750,000.

Bob Neill, the local government minister, has said:

"Crazy non-jobs like cheerleading development officers and press officers tasked with spinning propaganda on bin collections provide no value to the public."

The number of people employed by local authorities in Britain stood at 2,728,000 in 1997 when Labour came to power. Last year the figure was 2,907,000.

Among the jobs that have been created by the boom in 'non-jobs' were a 'bouncy castle attendant' (£13K per year) at Angus council and a 'cheerleading development officer' in Falkirk.

The crusade by the coalition against non jobs is all very well, but why did they not start their crusade years ago?

It's not as though I didn't warn them is it?

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The Big Society?

Nanny's so called "Big Society" may or may not be quite as "big" as we were led to believe. Those who publicly "swim against the tide" of whatever the media/politicians deem to be the "big society" will find themselves ostracised.

The departure of Lord Young, David Cameron's "enterprise tsar" and scourge of "red tape and health and safety", may well backfire on the government.

It most certainly can be argued that Lord Young, given that he is a very experienced politician, should have known that by saying that those who have mortgages have "never had it so good" that his words would be twisted by the media.

However, he is technically correct. Those with mortgages and jobs are better off in this recession, with low interest rates, than they would have been in earlier recessions when rates were higher.

He also noted that the spending cuts are not as "harsh" as they are being made out to be. In fact the "cuts" will take government spending back to levels last seen in...wait for it...2007! Also bear in mind that the national debt stands at a staggering £4.8 Trillion, the cuts are but a "gnat's piss" when compared to that figure.

With regard to the loss of 0.5M public sector jobs, this should be taken against a backdrop of a workforce that numbers 30M and the fact that there are many public sector jobs (eg back office diversity officers etc) that are non jobs.

Needless to say, if you have no job or are on a very low income and rely on the state then the recession will bite.

Lord Young though was pointing out that the self flagellation of the government and media, over the depth and harshness of the recession and cuts, may well in fact be overdone.

His straight talking advice and commonsense wrt cutting bureaucracy and rolling back the state (which is responsible for getting the country into this mess) will be badly missed.

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I Predict a Riot

I have been gemused with how all of the main political parties would have us believe that a vote for "the other lot" would cause financial chaos.

Well, that has been rather blown apart by the unsurprising revelation that none of the main political parties are being entirely "honest" (politics and honesty do not go hand in hand) with the long suffering electorate.

It seems that were the political parties to actually implement their manifesto "promises", wrt cutting the deficit and not raising taxes, then we will see cuts in public expenditure the like of which have not been witnessed since the Second World War (if Tory) or the dark days of the Labour government of the 70's (if Liberal or Labour).

Were the parties inclined to minimise the cuts, if they want to get the economy back in good shape, then they will have to raise taxes to unprecedented levels.

I could of course point out that had Brown not frittered away the surplus revenues during times of plenty, on hiking public sector pay and on the fees of consultants, we might be in better shape now.

However, we are where we are and we cannot put the clock back.

Either way given that the tax payers are already massively overburdened, and that the country as a whole seems totally reliant on the state to wipe its collective bottom, the results of the cuts and tax rises will provoke civil unrest not seen since the 70's.

For what it is worth, I don't think we should get too stressed out by the debt levels. They are manageable.

What is actually required is a whole scale restructuring, and re design, of the public sector ie:

- public sector pensions
- pay
- what it is actually meant to do
- simplification of the tax system (see www.hmrcisshite.com for my views on what needs to be done)
- simplification of the benefits system
- a return to self responsibility and a recognition that actions have consequences

However, none of the political parties have the stones to do that.

I predict a riot whichever bunch of BS artists gets in!

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Happy St George's Day!

Happy St George's Day everyone!

As we take today to celebrate being English, we can also take a little time to digest yesterday's budget.

A remarkable piece of engineering by Darling and Brown, based on the fantasy that growth will shoot back to 3.5% by 2011. They did what every amateur schoolboy physicist does, make the results fit the theory.

Regrettably for us, living in the real world, growth will not hit 3.5% in 2011 and Darling's "budget" will fall apart.

Aside from the fact that Treasury forecasts are always bollocks, even if they were for once accurate we find ourselves facing a debt of £1 Trillion.

Yes, read that figure again, £1 Trillion!



Given that we are now facing the worst economic situation in living memory, thanks to Brown's debt boom and unwillingness to put something away for a rainy day during the boom times, Nanny's expenditure will have to be cut.

Factoid: I warned about this in July 2003 "The Road To Nowhere - The Delusion of the Burgeoning Public Sector"

The question is will she cut areas that genuinely add no value; eg diversity awareness roles, non jobs in local councils, spin departments, government misinformation films on smoking/eating/boozing, the ego massaging Olympics etc?

This financial disaster, brought to us by ZaNuLabour, does offer an opportunity to roll back the frontiers of the state.

However, the short term effects will be very unpleasant, as all those people who have had their livelihoods paid for by Nanny start to experience the real world. We can expect some very unpleasant confrontations in the coming months, as the reality hits home.

Happy St George's Day!

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White Is Shite

Almost as if the news stories are designed to link together (who could ever accuse media organs of doing that?) it seems that Nanny has legislated against the concept of "white is right".

Nanny's new operational phrase is "white is shite".

That at least is the case for people living in Corby Northamptonshire.

Nanny has decided to denude Corby of some public sector jobs, because its residents are "too white and British".

There you go folks...in Nanny's Britain it is now official policy for it to be illegal to be white and British!

Nanny's much "respected" Prison Service will relocate jobs from Corby to Leicester, where there are more ethnic minorities.

The decision is regarded by most sane people as being utter bollocks, and as such the Commission for Racial Equality may well launch an investigation.

It seems that Nanny, having pushed for people from around the world to move to Britain (to shore up our rapidly declining public sector) is now worried that ethnic minorities are in fact not as "fully employed" as they should be. As such, Nanny is trying to buck market forces and boost the number of ethnic minorities working in the public sector.

When the issue of the movement of 80 jobs in the Prison service to Leicester was raised, the director of finance Ann Beasley replied that the town had too many white British residents.

Quote:

"Our ability to attract a more diverse workforce

- 93.7 per cent of the population of Corby are white British,

compared to 59.6 per cent in Leicester."

Mrs Beasley seemingly went on to imply that Corby's residents are also too stupid to keep the jobs.

The Home Orifice doesn't give a fark, and states quite baldly that attracting a "more diverse workforce" was a "key factor" in moving the jobs.

This is of course a breach of the Race Relations Act 2000.

A spokesman for the Commission for Racial Equality said that if they receive a complaint from any of the workers involved, they will start a full investigation.

Let us trust that at least one affected employee makes a complaint.

A Prison Service spokesman said:

"The key factors that influenced our decision to relocate

to Leicester were the closer proximity to a greater number

of prison establishments, better transport links,

the ability to recruit professional staff

and the ability to attract a more diverse workforce."

This absurd policy will all end in tears, for Nanny and for the people of Britain (whatever their ethnic origin); as it is sowing the seeds of anger, resentment and division.