According to the Adam Smith Institute, public sector jobs such as “walking officers”, “anti-social co-ordinators”, “diversity co-ordinators” and an army of other such appointments are costing the British taxpayer more than £1 billion a year.
The job section of the Society Guardian supplement has been monitored by the researchers at the ASI for a month. They calculated that public sector jobs whose purpose it at best vague, at worst utterly non-sensical amount to around £1bn a year.
How did this come about? Dr Madsen Pirie, the president of the institute, explains that one enters “the twilight zone of political correctness translated into situations vacant“.
In some issues the Society supplement consists of over 100 pages. Each page features several jobs. The sheer volume of them is immense. It is like entering into another country. One leaves behind the world of productive activity, of goods and services for which people are willing to pay. One leaves the wealth-creating process which sustains our present and future livelihood and Britain’s economic position in the world. One enters instead into a world of public sector services, some of which seem to be of dubious, if any, economic value. The pages take the reader into a world inhabited by anti-social behaviour co-ordinators, of racial equality officers, of social inclusion officers and community liaison officers.
Indeed, job descriptions sound all pretty barmy, here are some of my favourite ones:
Durham County Council – Young People’s Substance Misuse Tier 3 Service Manager (£30k)
Chorley Borough Council – Anti-Social Behaviour co-ordinator
East Kent Coastal Care Trust – Smoking Cessation Specialist: Inequalities (£20k)
Herefordshire Council – Public Rights of Way Developments Officer (£14.8-20.5k)
Blimey, £1 billion. Is that all? I’d have guessed it was more like £100 billion! $-)
Oh, that’s the cost of jobs they don’t even advertise!
How do I rewrite my CV to apply for Anti-Social Behaviour co-ordinator position. Seriously, it sounds more like a Monty Python sketch.
How do you qualify for these jobs? I mean, what would your degree be in?
Well, whenever I need a good laugh I can turn to the Guardian jobfest. You know what I mean … Asian Women’s Male Violence Coordinator, One World Recycling Enforcement Officer … Homosexual Youth Outreach Specialist etc … pages and pages of gloriously unabashed PC garbage, the final gasp of the last charge on the bastion of white male hegemony. If ever the council culture bastards who want our hides get too wearisome here’s the antidote. Boy, are they a scream. And a scam – one billion sounds decidedly light to me. These young pooftah pain expellers really get paid. They do no work, of course. But they really get paid.
I often wonder, as I beat my wife and curse the negro neighbour, why the likes of Harry Hatchett, British Spin, Junius and the other Labour slaves don’t die of embarrassment over this stuff. I mean, they seem like such sensible people – especially Chris B. What are they doing supporting a culture war that spawns such utter, wasteful, festering claptrap? Have they no shame?
Answers with CV, student demo experience, salary requirement and proof of previous buggery to the Guardian, please.
Gabriel – “the jobs they don’t even advertise!” Pulleeeeze! You cannot have any job that wasn’t advertised in The Guardian because then how would potential appointees “access” them and how would employers know whether their quotas were being met? How could the appointers be sure that the appointee who had slid into an unadvertised job was representing an over-represented group or an under-represented group or a to-date totally non-represented group? All such jobs must be advertised in The Guardian and carry the tagline: “We are dedicated to positive discrimination, but other than that, we are an equal opportunity employer and we are too stupid to see any contradiction in this.” This is by cosmic fiat.
It ‘s not just us who will be paying for them either.Everyone of them is practically unsackable and consequently will be in those jobs for as long as they want,or until they retire, [or take early retirement] on index linked pensions paid for by us and then by our children.Most of them will” work ” for around 20 years on average and then draw taxpayer-funded pensions for longer than they have actually “worked”.
Liberty Belle writes:
…You cannot have any job that wasn’t advertised in The Guardian…
Hmmm. Is there any reason why it has to be our favorite newspaper, The Guardian?
This continual public sector back-door subsidy to this nauseous rag could easily be plugged. Why don’t all public sector jobs get advertised on a government web site, and nowhere else?
This would deliver 100% coverage, and would provide an “overarching single-portal access outreach domain” for all public appointments (click down on the BBC link, for the governmental apology provision unit…:)
Better than that though, it would save the taxpayer millions, and wreck the finances at The Guardian. A double-whammy to die for! $-)
You know, for government to give all its advertising monies to one paper does seem to smack of…something…illegal. Doesn’t it?
Actually it doesn’t have to be The Guardian, there are plenty of public sector jobs in other national papers–not to mention the various trade presses and the locals.
So keen is The Times to get its snout in this particular trough that it has a new Tuesday supplement entitled “Public Agenda” in which today there are several pages devoted to free ads. Once the audience has figured out where to look, it will charge for them, I assume. Meanwhile let’s not hope for too much in the way of criticism of the public sector snowball from that quarter. (Or not on a Tuesday, anyway.)