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Post by mrsonde on Jan 23, 2018 17:57:47 GMT 1
Hello - everyone on holiday? January blues?
A new topic then.
Quite an extraordinary spectacle in the past couple of days of the Chief of the Army making, one, a direct plea for more government funding, and two, an explicit identification of Russia as a clear and present threat that needs greater defence against. I can't remember in my lifetime (I was too young to recall the Cuba missile crisis) such a bypass of the civil political process by the (still in responsible service) military, nor such undiplomatic sabre-rattling. That's one issue - what on earth is going on? Is Russia such a blatant threat, realistically? And is Britain's military really so inadequately funded? Personally, I don't think either thesis is true - it seems to me that it's Russia that should be justifiably feeling threatened, quite openly, right on their borders; and does this country really still need a military with the standing capacity to fight an overseas land war? After the humiliations of Iraq, and Afghanistan, the disaster of Libya, and our total ineffectual inability to act over Syria - really?
But the issue I'm really interested in is this claim that the military is underfunded, when this government has just splashed out 12 billion on new projects, we've got the most expensive fighter aircraft already under construction, we're renewing our absurd overkill nuclear arsenal (over 200 warheads, enough to obliterate not only Russia but China along with it) and we've just taken receipt of the two most expensive warships ever built, ships that at least some strategic experts claim are already obsolete.
More pointedly - and this goes to the argument I've been putting forward on this board for years, in many different ways - let's consider where our 2% is going every year. At the summit of expenditure in the Great War, this country had over 4 million men in the army - full-time trained fighting soldiers. This compares to about 100,000 today, many of them in the reserves or due for retirement, doing nothing much at the moment but licking their wounds from being soundly beaten by a ragtag bunch of hit-and-run tribesmen. Our air force amounts to possibly 200 aircraft in toto, compared to well over 3,OOO in 1918, with many dozens rolling off the assembly lines every day. The Royal Navy today would be hard pushed to muster 75 serviceable ships, only a small fraction of which would once have been classified as warships, compared to the Great War, when it was the largest navy the world has ever seen, with a fleet of over 500 fighting warships and many more in the pipeline.
Now, here's the crux of the problem - not just this one, but the same one throughout every function of government, directly affecting all our lives, because we have to pay for it. Britain's military today apparently requires a Ministry of Defence employing about 50,000 civil servants. Remarkably, this is half of the number employed eight years ago (without, it would appear, Whitehall seizing up through overwork.) Even so, this is about twice the number required in 1918!! The Ministry of Munitions employed about 25,000 at its peak expansion, when it was not only responsible for the armed services' requirements - many millions of men fighting a world war on land sea and air - but also for most of the country's nominally civilian workforce and, in what was effectively a totalitarian central command economy, almost all of its industrial and agricultural output. And when Churchill returned to government he did his utmost to cut this number by 25%, because it was so unwieldy and inefficient and wastefully expensive, in the Parkinsonian manner we're all familiar with.
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Post by aquacultured on Jan 24, 2018 2:05:08 GMT 1
I’ll restrict myself to anecdotes, as I know what you’re like with your all-comprehending theses, ‘n’all.
A new secretary of state arrives, only to ask within a few days why there were so many staff working in his private (ie, outer) office and whether the number could be slimmed down.
A few weeks later the SofS pounces on various items of correspondence in his red box and says he’ll reply to them himself, as they’re aren’t many, and it’s important for him to ‘connect’. It’s explained to him that there are many more than this, and only the most significant are presented. He demands to have all correspondence presented to him; it can’t be so difficult to manage.
Two days later, he admits defeat – without having answered any of the several hundred letters (or probably even got thru the important things in his red box). It’s explained to him (again) that he has a dedicated correspondence section that filters correspondence and distributes it round the dept to where it can best be dealt with. He looks sheepish, declines to visit and praise the section, and raises the subject no more.
Glory be! The PM whose mentor and protégée the SofS is makes a visit! This is a PM who occupied the office her mentor/protégée now fills. She marches in, criticises the decor, and declares she never had as many staff when she was there, and will have to have a word with her mentor/protégée about it.
She also was unaware that her secretariat was spread over several rooms, and she never saw half of them.
Both of these Ministers, whether in Downing St or another dept, authorised staff increases to support them personally in their work, largely because they stirred up controversy and correspondence that needed dealing with.
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 24, 2018 11:23:30 GMT 1
I’ll restrict myself to anecdotes, as I know what you’re like with your all-comprehending theses, ‘n’all. A new secretary of state arrives, only to ask within a few days why there were so many staff working in his private (ie, outer) office and whether the number could be slimmed down. A few weeks later the SofS pounces on various items of correspondence in his red box and says he’ll reply to them himself, as they’re aren’t many, and it’s important for him to ‘connect’. It’s explained to him that there are many more than this, and only the most significant are presented. He demands to have all correspondence presented to him; it can’t be so difficult to manage. Two days later, he admits defeat – without having answered any of the several hundred letters (or probably even got thru the important things in his red box). It’s explained to him (again) that he has a dedicated correspondence section that filters correspondence and distributes it round the dept to where it can best be dealt with. He looks sheepish, declines to visit and praise the section, and raises the subject no more. Glory be! The PM whose mentor and protégée the SofS is makes a visit! This is a PM who occupied the office her mentor/protégée now fills. She marches in, criticises the decor, and declares she never had as many staff when she was there, and will have to have a word with her mentor/protégée about it. She also was unaware that her secretariat was spread over several rooms, and she never saw half of them. Both of these Ministers, whether in Downing St or another dept, authorised staff increases to support them personally in their work, largely because they stirred up controversy and correspondence that needed dealing with. Hmmm, I see, thankyou for clearing up that little mystery, Aqua. They're secretaries, like all the extra staff the PO takes on at Xmas to answer all the letters to Santa Claus. So for every two men and women in our armed forces we need a chap in a bowler hat answering a letter about or possibly from them - eight years ago it was every person in uniform needed their own secretary doing this vital round-the-clock war work, but since then, after all the defeats, people have stopped knitting mittens. |
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Post by aquacultured on Jan 24, 2018 11:52:56 GMT 1
It was an anecdote, which readers are free to ignore or interpret as they wish. That you have done so sarcastically doesn't surprise me, and was quite welcome.
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 24, 2018 12:59:14 GMT 1
Glad to be of service, as ever. I wish I could say I was as satisfied, so we're both unsurprised, which isn't surprising. But I was hoping for a little more of a reasoned defence of your erstwhile profession, old chap - something along the lines of an explanation of what on earth we need all these hundreds of thousands of very expensive bureacrats for, when there are homeless beggars sleeping under the gates of Downing Street, nurses starving to death waiting in the canteen, everyone is lonely, and even the gingas have mental health.
But I take your point, buried somewhere in your anecdote. People didn't write letters or send parcels in the first world war, and there were no controversies to clear up - what would we do without you! - in those days.
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Post by aquacultured on Jan 24, 2018 14:55:06 GMT 1
Glad to be of service, as ever. I wish I could say I was as satisfied, so we're both unsurprised, which isn't surprising. But I was hoping for a little more of a reasoned defence of your erstwhile profession, old chap - something along the lines of an explanation of what on earth we need all these hundreds of thousands of very expensive bureacrats for, when there are homeless beggars sleeping under the gates of Downing Street, nurses starving to death waiting in the canteen, everyone is lonely, and even the gingas have mental health. But I take your point, buried somewhere in your anecdote. People didn't write letters or send parcels in the first world war, and there were no controversies to clear up - what would we do without you! - in those days. Your big mistake; always has been. For me, it's over 20 years ago. ... something along the lines of an explanation of what on earth we need all these hundreds of thousands of very expensive bureacrats for ...See above, plus (as of c.10 months ago): Civil service numbers under 390,000, 1,100 of them earning over £100,000; median salary under £29,000. But I take your point, buried somewhere in your anecdote.My point was that people, whether politicians or the public, who bay for cuts, cuts, cuts, usually don't consider or are blind to the consequences, and try to evade them as far as their own well-being is concerned. |
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 24, 2018 15:11:24 GMT 1
Glad to be of service, as ever. I wish I could say I was as satisfied, so we're both unsurprised, which isn't surprising. But I was hoping for a little more of a reasoned defence of your erstwhile profession, old chap - something along the lines of an explanation of what on earth we need all these hundreds of thousands of very expensive bureacrats for, when there are homeless beggars sleeping under the gates of Downing Street, nurses starving to death waiting in the canteen, everyone is lonely, and even the gingas have mental health. But I take your point, buried somewhere in your anecdote. People didn't write letters or send parcels in the first world war, and there were no controversies to clear up - what would we do without you! - in those days. Your big mistake; always has been. For me, it's over 20 years ago. What, 20 years ago when the civil service was twice the size again than it is now? What happened - people stopped writing letters when the stamps were put up? Sounds like a good solution to our deficit - you should write to your MP. You left your brain at the door, did you, along with your umbrella? Yes - my point exactly. In the first world war, we were governing over a third of the planet and fighting a war on three continents, yet we managed with a civil service of 200,000 at its peak. And this was after an enormous expansion, required by the revolutionary transformation of a once free country to Lloyd George's totalitarian central command economy mentioned above. Yes - but what consequences? That's my point. The civil service has been cut by more than a half since Gordon Brown - has the country ground to a halt? Has anyone even noticed? It suits your self-image to presume those half a million civil servants (very expensive "public servants", and their wage was only a fraction of the true cost of their ongoing upkeep to working people) were working for our "well-being" - but the truth is, they weren't: they were simply an unsustainable and irrelevant useless burden, and most of them still are. |
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Post by aquacultured on Jan 25, 2018 1:54:26 GMT 1
mrsonde: 20 years ago when the civil service was twice the size again than it is now? What happened - people stopped writing letters when the stamps were put up? Sounds like a good solution to our deficit - you should write to your MP.
aqua: Puerile.
Pueriler. Why didn’t you go for puerilest, by chucking in the bowler hat too?
But the colonial service wasn’t included in the civil service figures.
See below also, if that doesn’t offend your dignity.But there are loads of reasons why: mainly technology and, wait for it – learning to be smart.
And if you want to go back to the beginning of the 20C, I can help you a bit - indeed anyone can who has a brain - but some things are still a bit murky.
Then, pray tell us why the mainly Tory governments over the last 100-odd years have allowed, even encouraged, this scandal, and are still doing so. I’m bloody affronted.
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Post by fascinating on Jan 25, 2018 8:21:53 GMT 1
There are about 160,000 in the armed forces, but the number of civil servants, 56,000, does seem really high. One wonders how a Conservative government is unable to reduce them - maybe they are all needed. CAouldn't explain how though.
All big firms have their HR departments, accountants etc, who do not do the work of making the widgets or whatever. The government of this country has to (or chooses to) collect and distribute nearly half of all the money in the economy. 400,000 civil servants is a little over 1% of the total workforce, so doesn't seem, at first glance, to be an excessive number.
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 25, 2018 9:39:42 GMT 1
No - serious. But do be careful Aqua - please remember how very sensitive you are. No - serious. You claim you can't put forward a view on the civil service because you no longer work there. Oi vey, everyone a critic. Four to six thousand of them. About the same trivial number of officers abroad weren't, that's true - nor were the native administrators, who actually did most of the governing. But this is mere quibbling.  You're serious? We've managed to get rid of as many civil servants as there are teachers in the country, three times as many as there are police, and nobody really noriced their disappearance, because the government actually managed to get a new IT system that worked? Any help with understanding history that you might like to offer would be welcome. It's essential to go back to the turn of the century because it's necessary to understand how and why these errors occurred, what should have happened instead, and how we might dig ourselves out of the mess they've created since. Of course it's true. Whatever pay deal restrictions have been mandated since the crash, the public sector are still better paid than their equivalents in the private, as are their conditions and hours, and for pensions there's no comparison. But the wages are not the principal cost, cripplingly expensive though they are - that's the tax imposition on the working people who have to create the wealth that pays for it that's the real cost. For everybody, because obviously such a burden suffocates wealth creation, which means less revenue, less genuine social benefits for those in true need, and an exacerbation rather than alleviation of virtually every social problem. But this is a profound philosophical problem, trapped within a political system that has no room for either analysis or solution. To be more simply direct then: the pension provision (unfunded, uncovenanted) is a truly lethal cost that has far-reaching implications way beyond a current account entry. The enormous liabilities already met are the fundamental reason every Western country has allowed and encouraged mass immigration and pursued neo-liberal economic policies: an over-abundant labour force of unskilled workers willing to work for less and less and in worse and worse conditions is absolutely required if every Western country is not to avoid bankruptcy within a generation. You understand this basic arithmetical fact? A complicated matter, certainly. Three principal factors required in any explanation: The eternal irresistible appeal to whatever class is in power to increase it, as much as they can, and to hold onto it as fiercely as they can (why it's important to go back to the enormous changes in this polity of the Great War); the basic appeal of simple bribery of the power class to its populace once a universal franchise is established - it's no coincidence that welfare-statism, in whatever country in the world, becomes the status quo as soon as women in particular get the vote; and of course the enormous closed-shop extortionary power of the public sector once it becomes large and dominant enough and once it becomes unionised. There are other factors, to be sure - the well-funded and deliberate infiltration of the West's education, media, labour and political systems so that a santised left philosophy becomes the air we breathe; and the consequent miserable failure of a countervailing political philosophy to defend and promote the values and principles that created the West in the first place and have been so usurped - of liberty, individual responsibility, and social charity. These values and principles have never been the Tories' interest, of course - still less the Left's: why again it's essential to go back to the Great War to understand the sudden and disastrous death of liberalism. |
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 25, 2018 9:49:37 GMT 1
There are about 160,000 in the armed forces About 80,000 full time in the army, about another twenty in the reserves. it's about 45,000 now, with another four or five under some form of semi-private contract. It has reduced them - it's cut the number in half. Yes, but as a tiny proportion of the workforce - and the inexorable urge for those office workers to grow in number so that they threaten the viability of the whole enterprise unless very strictly and consciusly controlled is a well-recognised problem in the corporate world. The Revenue is a small fraction of the civil service, and the civil service is a small section of the public sector. |
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Post by fascinating on Jan 25, 2018 9:59:58 GMT 1
The MoD civil servants administer all the armed forces, not just the army. Are you saying that the MoD civil service was 100,000, now reduced to 50,000? I guess that private companies do have at least 1-2% of their workforce doing admin. Collecting revenue is only a small fraction of what the civil servants do.
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Post by mrsonde on Feb 10, 2018 18:41:12 GMT 1
The MoD civil servants administer all the armed forces, not just the army. The topic was the army. The MoD civil service was well over 120,000, now reduced to 45,000. In that time the number in the armed services has reduced by about 20,000. The process has been the same - attrition, because it's an expensive process making any public servant redundant; the difference is that nobody, except perhaps for their Union, has really noticed or gives a toss about the reduction in civil servants. The only problem is it's such a slow process getting rid of them. Guess away - but you're comparing apples and oranges. MoD civil servants are not doing "admin" - the armed services have their own personnel doing that, in uniform, and they're counted as part of their fighting strength. The civil service is not equivalent to HMRC. I have no idea how you've picked up that impression. To get back to the point, and to be yet more topical, this issue is the same one facing, apparently, every local council. How do you get rid of the vast armies of paper-shuffling employees accumulated under the natural inexorable pressures of government expansion, when it's just as expensive signing them off from their invented duties as it is to keep employing them? How do you keep the expenses of government down when the guardians of the purse are the ones who most benefit from profligacy? I'll give you just one, small example, typical I have no doubt whatever in a thousand different ways of every council in Britain. This county has had its statutory childrens' services taken into central govt. control under emergency measures because it's consistently failed over a number of years to meet the most basic but strict baseline. The excuse of course is lack of resources, yet the resource shortfall actually required would have cost less than a quarter of the more than a quarter million councillors' food and travel expenses bill every year. Not their wage - their dining bill, and the costs (at a very generous multiple of the real cost) of their travelling from A to B, for whatever so-called official reason. Naturally, the council has never even considered touching this huge boondangle, paid for by the working people who elected them - instead they'll claim they can't afford to protect abused kids, or house orphans. |
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Post by aquacultured on Feb 11, 2018 1:43:24 GMT 1
I'll give you just one, small example, typical I have no doubt whatever in a thousand different ways of every council in Britain. MO, then. This county has had its statutory childrens' services taken into central govt. control under emergency measures because it's consistently failed over a number of years to meet the most basic but strict baseline. The excuse of course is lack of resources, yet the resource shortfall actually required would have cost less than a quarter of the more than a quarter million councillors' food and travel expenses bill every year. Not their wage - their dining bill, and the costs (at a very generous multiple of the real cost) of their travelling from A to B, for whatever so-called official reason. Naturally, the council has never even considered touching this huge boondangle, paid for by the working people who elected them - instead they'll claim they can't afford to protect abused kids, or house orphans. Indeed disgraceful, if what you say is true - about the boondangle in the IoW. I did ten years as a councillor, and never claimed for subsistence. Your caricature is absurd, mrsonde. I don't think I ever had lunch paid for, the whole ten years. Very, very few of us did, or do. Very rarely for travel, either; if you did claim mileage on rare occasions, it would be at the AA/HMRC-guided levels. As usual, I think you're woefully ignorant about what you purport to be knowledgeable about. |
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Post by mrsonde on Feb 11, 2018 20:07:34 GMT 1
Typical of everyone's MO who wants to illustrate a point, is it not? Including yours? There's nothing objectionable about Islam because your son became one, wasn't it? Oh, and just in case there's still anyone in any doubt about your superior first-hand knowledge, you're making certain of it by starting to read the Koran? How's that coming along, by the way? Found the bit where Mohammed chops the woman's children in half (trying to outdo Solomon in his wisdom, see) because she shouted out he was a violent nutter and should jog on?
Channel 4 News, that famously impartial and objective arbiter of truth and justice, argued the case that councils in Britain were all in "a funding crisis" by interviewing the attendees of a "Craft Class" doomed to imminent closure - or maybe, this being, naturally enough, a Labour authority, it was a "Kraft Klass". The vital state-sponsored crafting of corn dollies or glittered greetings cards was, it was reported, threatened by the heartless Tories savagely pursuing their ideological policy of "Austerity", making local "vulnerable" people suffer accordingly. What am I to do now, bemoaned one predictably obese middle-aged woman - I'll just be stuck in me flat all week long if they shut this place down. The reporter, you may be surprised to learn, had the forebearance to not respond with a subtle suggestion that she throw her glitter in a bin and get a job, or make some mates in a manner that did not require taxpayer extortion. It was not clarified whether the Kraft Klass participants were Lesbians, I'm afraid, or, as far as could be discerned without detailed spectroscopic analysis, whether they were black.
Well, it's a punt, but a fairly confident one: every councillor in the country has a generous expense account. Certainly they all receive a wage, (since the 60s or early 70s, I believe), though this would once have deeply shocked people.
It's not a caricature - it's the truth. I could probably dig out the news report laying out these facts and photocopy it if you insist - but you know it's the truth, I think. If you never claimed expenses, hats off to you, though myself I think that's a far more dubious claim.
So the quarter million plus a year expenses bill for the IOW is an anomaly, is it, no doubt because it's an unusually small authority lurking offshore out of anyone's oversight? It's nationally renowned for being a rotten borough plagued with corruption, to be sure, but that's largely because they're so inept at covering it up, not because it doesn't happen elsewhere.
Well, ditto to you, Mister Pooter. I've covered three councils in my life as a journalist, two counties and one city, and my dad was a chief officer for nearly thirty years, so I think I acquired a pretty thorough knowledge of how they operate. More thorough than yours, I'd wager. But tell us - what did you actually do during those ten years? You claim - absurdly, if you must insist on trading insults - that you "had no subsistence". You were paid though - by your ratepayers. Unless you were an extraordinarily precocious eight-year old, like Annie, in a ginger wig? How did you earn all that money you trousered in a decade of attending a meeting or two a month, sticking up your hand when you were told to?
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You're serious? We've managed to get rid of as many civil servants as there are teachers in the country, three times as many as there are police, and nobody really noriced their disappearance, because the government actually managed to get a new IT system that worked?