Simple really. Give them a vested interest to do so, a financial interest in fact. Create vast numbers of public sector jobs funded from the disloyal private sector and then what do you have? You have 7.4 million people (plus their families) who owe their ‘jobs’ to an expanding state and whilst the Tories are hardly the party of small government, it will hardly have escaped the notice of state employed workers that the number of public sector jobs from Maggie Thatcher onwards had been falling for 15 years… and under Labour they are growing at an astonishing rate.
However the real ‘loyalty lock-in’ comes not from merely giving people a job but rather from providing them with not just a lavish pension but an unfunded one at that! This means that only tax money can redeem these pension plans in the future because, unlike a private sector pension which is backed by investments (investments the state regularly raids for their own uses), there is nothing other than a government promise to pay with other people’s money underpinning what Mr. Buggins from Whitehall intends to retire on. As this is of course economic madness, only someone with a direct vested interest would vote to perpetuate such a giant ponzi scheme.
Alas, people directly effected by something like that are far more likely to be dependable focused voters, whereas a private sector employee may well not see the direct causal link between their declining purchasing power and their public sector neighbour’s pension plan.
Labour’s strategy is multi-election political genius. And of course by the time the economy implodes, people will have either largely forgotten what caused the problem or when faced with cutting pensions in fiat money to telegenic old grannies, will find someone else to blame (Capitalists, Jews, White People, Black People, Arabs, Americans, etc. etc.).
But then as the high priest of amorality once said, in the long run we are all dead anyway.
Oh rubbish, if institutional, widespread socialism was a loyalty lock-in, the Thatcher revolution could never have happened, nor would the USSR have collapsed.
Less with the cynicism, it’s getting so damn tired. People don’t vote like some short-term-selfish abstraction, they go with what they reckon is “right”. The fact that they’re objectively mistaken doesn’t take away from the honest good intentions.
You won’t change minds with contempt.
I am not a propaganda machine, Julian, I just write what I see… and the fact millions happily vote themselves other people’s money should hardly be an earth shaking revelation to you. That is hardly voting for what is right.
The reason the Soviet Union collapsed was not because people did ‘what was right’, it was because their economy finally collapsed under the absurdities that finally became impossible to finesse. Likewise Thatcher ‘happened’ because the UK was clearly circling the drain and all but the most demented statist could see that, not because people ‘voted for what was best’… they could have done that anytime from 1945 onwards. Disaster is the eventual fate of all economic ponzi schemes and it is only when the absurdities become impossible to ignore that people are actually forced to do something… politicos know that but as long as the ‘evil day’ comes long after they have left office, who cares? The lessons of history seems fairly clear on that, which was the whole point of my article.
I’m solidly in agreement with Perry on this one. In fact, as I read it, I had that shock of realization that comes of seeing something for the first time. I had thought that unfunded liabilities happen because politicos want to give out benefits, but don’t want the political pain of having to assess taxes to pay for them. I had unconsciously assumed that if money could be picked from trees or would fall from heaven, then the government would prefer to fund these liabilities.
But no. There is definately a benefit to the statists in holding the taxpayer hostage for these future costs. The beneficiaries absolutely need the statists to stay in power if they hope to be paid off.
If Julian believes this is ‘rubbish’, then he hasn’t considered the Social Security system in the US; the so-called ‘third rail’ of American politics. A long line of well meaning people, going back to at least Barry Goldwater, have learned to their cost that you DO NOT even speculate on touching Social Security if you have any desire to hold public office. Recent events have shown that even the sainted Alan Greenspan is not immune to this rule! It is one of the main reasons that much of the public votes for quasi socialists like Clinton and Kerry even if they have to hold their noses to do it.
But now I see that this is not stupidity, it is design. Thanks a lot Perry. I was wondering what I could think about when I awaken at 4 am and can’t get back to sleep.
Sounds good to me.
As an ex-public servant (LB Lambeth, LB Islington, Norwich County Council, Surrey County Council), as well as being a white, working class male with opinions I tend to agree with your conclusions.
My so-called work colleagues of the past few years have consisted of single mums, blacks and, you might be surprised to hear, very few gays. When a workforce comprises the low end of the IQ pool, tolerance isn’t in great supply. Quelle surprise.
What’s that old saying? “Weakening the strong doesn’t strengthen the weak”.
I left (was driven out?) in disgust. I am now a motorcycle courier with an avid interest in right wing political parties and firearms. And an overwhelming desire not to pay taxes. Or enter into dialogue with multiculturist scum.
I thank you.
Sounds good to me.
As an ex-public servant (LB Lambeth, LB Islington, Norwich County Council, Surrey County Council), as well as being a white, working class male with opinions I tend to agree with your conclusions.
My so-called work colleagues of the past few years have consisted of single mums, blacks and, you might be surprised to hear, very few gays. When a workforce comprises the low end of the IQ pool, tolerance isn’t in great supply. Quelle surprise.
What’s that old saying? “Weakening the strong doesn’t strengthen the weak”.
I left (was driven out?) in disgust. I am now a motorcycle courier with an avid interest in right wing political parties and firearms. And an overwhelming desire not to pay taxes. Or enter into dialogue with multiculturist scum.
Tony is radicalising more than he is pacifying/placating He’ll hang. Sooner or later …
I’m not accusing you of propaganda, but of unnecessary cynicism.
It’s not objectively “what’s right”, but is is what they think is right. Socialism has held the public moral high ground for a century. That’s why it’s so tenacious, even despite universally failing. Folks think socialist freebies have fed the starving, housed the homeless, educated the ignorant, healed the sick, and given dignity to the poor. They think of it as the very definition of “civilized”.
Where is the evidence that public sector workers vote for left wing parties?
And who do you think issues the giro/benefit/pension books to pensioners? Who deals with the applications (you need SIX weeks training to be able to just deal with Income Support forms. That’s ignoroing forms for carers allowance, diability living allowance, incapacity benefit and any of the others). Who would aminister the emergency ‘social fund’? Or the crisis loans?
If you’ve ever been to a post office like my local one, they struggle to keep up with demand for stamps and car tax, they would NEVER agree to deal with pensions, incapacity, and all the rest.
Who would administer the court system? Who do you think does all the paperwork, arranges the court hearings, and the paraphernalia that goes with criminal court proceedings, civil proceedings, divorce, bankruptcy, personal injury, the list is endless.
Our public sector is doing a good job.
“My so-called work colleagues of the past few years have consisted of single mums, blacks and, you might be surprised to hear, very few gays. When a workforce comprises the low end of the IQ pool”
So you equate “single mums” and “blacks” with “low end of the IQ pool”, do you? I’m normally no defender of the public sector, but I must say your ex-colleagues can’t be all bad if they managed to find a way to give you the boot. No doubt your “high IQ” also explains your current choice of profession …
Claire Tyler wrote:
Here in the States, government sector teachers’ unions are one of the biggest supporters of the Democrats. It’s one of the reasons we can’t get a sane education policy.
Late last year I was at a meeting of libertarians and conservatives at which there was widespread support for cutting back the state starting with education and health. One of the attendees was a senior Tory councillor. He disagreed, saying: “We couldn’t do that. We’d never get elected if we pissed off all those teachers and nurses.”
Perry is correct. The public sector pension scam is an outrage. Over on my blog I have often suggested that the terms of government pensions should be linked in some way those obtaining in the private sector – bearing in mind that most non-state workers get no employee pension of any sort unless they save for one themselves.
There are millions of private sector retirees out there whose own pensions have been reduced by the depredations of Gordon Brown. Now they are faced with ever-rising council tax bills to pay for public sector bureaucratic leeches to retire at youngish ages on gold-plated, inflation-linked pensions. There’s still more of us in the private sector. Why aren’t Tory politicians raising hell on this issue? Oh, I forgot: they’re on the state payroll as well
I’m 100% with Perry and David Farrer on this. The Blair patronage machine is creating millions of dependents with a long term interest in keeping Labour in office and has created a monstrous body of blackmailers.
These millions of ticks are now so embedded in the body politic that we need a radical rethink of our system.
First, when the Tories get in, they have to make every Diversity Outreach Officer, every Real Nappies Officer (yes; this is a real post created by the Labour government) and so on redundant. It is cheaper to have them on the dole than have them on salaries and benefits and pensions.
Second and final step: voting rights to be withdrawn from people working in the public sector. This would be voluntary. Acceptance of a job in the public sector would automatically carry withdrawal of voting rights. Your choice. But you can’t be paid out of the productive sector’s pocket plus have the right to vote to help yourself to ever more of other people’s money. I prefer to spend my money on myself, not Nappy Officers and Diversity Coordinators and other parasites. It is a lunatic situation. It has to be one or the other.
This system of the disenfranchisement of public sector employees would ensure the end of sleazy Blairite vote purchasing. The wealth creators who drive the engine of the economy simply cannot be held to ransom by the passengers.
Though I’ve long advocated civil service disnfranchisement, there is a serious snag. It would create (yet more) perverse incentive to expand the quango state with its off-the-books public employees through state support of “self-funding” regulators, charities, trades unions, political parties, vetted sub-contractors, and PFI projects.
Better explicit evil than hidden devils.
I note that Clare Tyler’s admiration for the public service is based on assumptions that what it does, in all its bureaucrat-created complexity, is what it has to do. Her state underpins every aspect of our lives. The key battle is to make it clear to most people that their lives are the wall, and the state is Virginia Creeper.
Guy – first: yes, Claire Taylor is under the misapprehension that there should be a public sector. That’s such a big misapprehension that I couldn’t be bothered to address it.
I love your Virginia creeper analogy and intend to use it without credit. But I’m afraid I didn’t understand your first paragraph. Obviously, every last quango in Britain should be demolished. They’re an undemocratic obscenity. But would you mind expanding on the charities and trades unions problem? The taxpayer isn’t paying for trades unions, and contributing to charities is voluntary – unlike contributing to the salaries, benefits and pensions of pencil pushers and meetings-holders who are infesting the rest of Britain at a rate of knots, which is done by force.
Verity:
Many (but not all) charities act as catspaws for the state and get large government grants, either directly or by subventions from lottery grants and other quangos. Trades unions are subsidised in a number of ways, most indirect. (Union representatives in the public sector get to be paid while carrying out their union duties, for example.) But a particular quid pro quo for the state controlling their constitutions under the Thatcher reforms was that state-mandated ballots be funded by the state.
Guy – OK. Fine. I take your points. But one step at a time. First, let’s get the public sector slice ‘n’ diced – at least all the new jobettes created as a pivotal instrument of Blair’s vote-protection racket. So that’s around 350,000 immediate sackings. It’s a start.
Then, for the ones who are still on the payroll, we have to spike their ability to vote themselves rises and special privileges by removing the right to vote from them.
This would clear the decks and enable us to see what still had to be addressed – including the quangoes and your charities and trades union concerns.
The public sector, by the way, would include all Blair’s 600 or so unelected placemen in the House of Lords. They have no democratic legitimacy as legislators and therefore should not be paid out of the public purse.
The USSR did not collapse because people voted against it (they never had the chance), but because it didn’t work and its rulers ghave up trying. Most former Soviet citizens yearn for the return of the old days,
institutionalised as they are. In most of the old Warsaw Pact countries, Communists are back in power or highly influential, and former Communist Parties are extremely successful. Nor did anyone vote for the Thatcher revolution a) because they had no idea what she was going to do and nor did she, really, and b) what revolution? The public sector actually grew in her
time. It was the private sector which was slaughtered. If people had understood what she was doing, many oft hem would have been less hostile. But Labour needed to get into power for other reasons, so used the public sector argument. After all, who votes to eb put on the dole? Which is why public sector workers DON’T vote for Conservative Parties. Which is where I
came in. The evidence, of course, is in the behaviour of electirates throughout the advanced world. Wherever the public sector predominates, all the major parties are of the left, committed to high public spending.
thgere are no conservatives, as we understand the word, in Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium Holland, France, Italy or Spain, just Christian Democrats,
who are Social Democrats with vague rightist hankerings on marginal policies. This is what Mr Blair hopes to achieve here, the creation of a British CDU which will continue new labour’s work when it eventually loses an election. Or if it does.
While arguing for public services, Claire Tyler unconsciously makes a good point against them. So it takes six weeks to learn how to deal with income support paperwork, and there is a byzantine profusion of other allowances and benefits as well? Such ridiculous complexity sounds like a job creation scam to me. Old fashioned charity never needed all this to help the poor.
On Perry’s original point – hmmm, maybe. A countervailing force might be the very public implosion of public sector pensions somewhere abroad. Germany seems a likely candidate.
Abiola,
DerZornGotte’s intervention here is not without significance. In reacting in your usual way to his identification of blacks with low IQ you overlook what actually matters.
This a long game, but I grow ever more certain that the DerZornGotte’s of this world will proliferate as the tranzi programme goes unaddressed by conventional politicians. His is the path of the future, whether he is right or wrong on racial IQ differentials, whether his manner is gracious or not. No people has willingly accepted racial dissolution in full fore-knowledge of the event. DerZornGotte’s people – my people – WILL resist when resistance is widely enough apprehended as the only remaining means of self-maintenance.
Your current M.O. may serve your personal and professional interests. But, as I have said to you before, the security of immigrants in the ancient states of Europe lies in the modesty of their numbers. Do you, though, actually favour the replacement of Europe’s population? Do you do so even at risk of a violent last throw of the dice by an host society in the throws of dissolution?
huh? dissolution? what in tarnation are you talking about, man? i have a black girlfriend and no one i know thinks anything of it and sorry fellah, we are as mainstream as it gets. you sure as hell aint ‘my’ people, buddy. feel free to stay in whatever inbread genepool you like, just stay the hell away from me and mine. i wonder if you and derzorngotte realise how far out on the lunatic fringe you really are. probably not. this is a pretty sane website but you sure as hell aint
How on earth did a post on the voting patterns of the public sector get onto race and immigration? What ever the race,creed,sexual orientation,intelligence,sanity,sentience they are is irrelevant,what matters is that they are paid out of the public purse.The government has constructed a feudal entity upon which the livelihoods of it minions depends.Hence there is a torrent of bizarre jobs and regulations that those employed by the government never question.Beard Hygene Outreach Team Co-ordinator,marvellous idea Minister..Meanwhile some poor old lady is boiling her cat for soup by candlelight.
Vote for it ?Of course they will.
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Another blogroach killed.
What to do? It’s a big problem. And the problem isn’t at core the hundreds of thousands of damaging excess bureaucrats, it is the embedding in public consciousness of attitudes like those shown by Clare Tyler.
Making the Little Masters redundant is near the end of the process. Getting the power to do it is the difficult bit. I daresay it isn’t helped by uncompromising rhetoric about ending the state sector altogether. The state isn’t going away ever. But may be open to us (though I’m pessimistic) to transform its form and functions. To do so requires a reconception of the terms of argument, and a determined attempt to impose the new ones.
Guy – I don’t think there’s a hope in hell of getting rid of the state sector, but I do think it could be trimmed to around half its present size. Huge sackings and redundancies would discourage others from entering such an uncertain area of employment. Especially if those made redundant, being no longer employed by the state, were no longer entitled to money from the wealth creators to pay for their pensions. It might encourage Tiffany and Duane to look to the private sector for employment, or go on the dole, which is a whole lot cheaper and less irksome than actually allowing them to do toy jobs.
Natalie Solent brings up an excellent point that the rest of us arguing for a vastly reduced state sector missed: “While arguing for public services, Claire Tyler unconsciously makes a good point against them. So it takes six weeks to learn how to deal with income support paperwork, and there is a byzantine profusion of other allowances and benefits as well? Such ridiculous complexity sounds like a job creation scam to me.” And I understand the complexity has worsened a thousandfold under Gordon Brown’s priggish stewardship.
Natalie – France is also a candidate for the public sector pensions coffers running dry. The government wanted to raise the pensionable age for the public sector – it’s currently 55 – by a couple of years and whoaaa! the tumbrils were out on the streets. The French public sector is the best organised, most ruthless, most efficient protector of its government money and privileges in Europe. The politicians are scared to death of them. They’re vicious. Try adding one hour a week to their 35-hour a week workload and they will close the rail and school systems down overnight.
Wait until the British Exchequer – or our oil – becomes a “common EU resource” and makes up the shortfall for French public sector pensions failure.
On the problem of overcoming the political obstacles to trimming down the bureaucracy-
Howard Ruff, the newsletter guru of the 1970’s once had a bizarre but otherwise workable suggestion.
Each year for a ten year period, offer the first 10% of government employees to volunteer the following: for one year you may collect 90% of your salary for .. doing nothing. Or starting a business or anything else except public service.
The following year they would receive 80% for the same thing, then the next year 70% and so on.
Do the math. This would be a savings of money every year. It also would be an irresistable gravy train for the erstwhile employees. The only ‘problem’ would be the loss of government ‘services’. I suppose this might distress some people but I think we could manage to get by somehow.
The bureaucratic bosses would oppose this. Presumably their legions of government employees would differ.
There are a couple of problems with Doug Collins’s suggestion:
(1) It doesn’t deal with getting power as a state-cutter, which is a tough first step. There are lots of things one might try, and a few that might possibly work.
(2) He assumes doing nothing or being subsidised to move to the private sector is significantly more attractive than doing a civil service job. It probably isn’t to those who choose the civil service in the first place. Public sector work appeals to specific character types who are less likely to be happy elsewhere, as well as to the idle and the politically committed.
We already do have something very similar in Britain. It’s called early retirement on grounds of ill-health (subjective “stress” being sufficient) and is particularly popular with teachers, and with policemen under disciplinary investigation. It is not much used by those you might want to cut, even though it is much more generous than Doug Collins’ reducing balance. It doesn’t reduce headcount at all, and is actually hugely expensive.
The problem of ripping power away from the socialist state aparatus is a truly hard nut to crack. It’s not like it was in 1979, when an even larger share of UK employment depended on the public purse, via the nationalised industries. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party of 1979 had the huge advantage, as others here have noted, that the unionised and thoroughly marxised left had been self-evidently destroying the economy for thirty years. Whilst Blair’s methods – though I think they are principally Peter Mandelson’s – are not separate from the thirty years of culture war that we have suffered todate, the electorate understands nothing of it. They see the surface effects but do not connect them with the Labour Party. Indeed, they are constantly told that Blair has moved the Labour Party to the centre.
That’s not even true in economic terms anymore, as middle class taxpayers know to their cost. But the broad presumption lives on. On the politico-cultural divide, meanwhile – where the action really is – the Conservatives have moved to the left, indeed are the PRISONERS of the left and of political correctness. It has been so since Heath felt obliged to sack Enoch Powell.
I agree with Verity that a mass assault on tranzi employment is the quickest way to turn the cultural tide. But I also agree with Guy that, at present, there seems little hope of the right having such an opportunity.