Who Would You Rather Lose?

So now public sector workers are fair game for pay freezes until they match their regions private sector levels.  Our armed services are losing good people to more attractive pay guarding ships from pirates.  Our cops, if they have any sense, will be applying to Canada, Australia or the EU if they speak anything other than English.  John Yates is no doubt on a good bung in Bahrain, where his ability to turn a blind eye will be useful.  I am also off to sell my skills abroad, though this won’t extend to ignoring torture.

Public servants in the UK can expect pay cuts to bring them in line with the Chinese-serf levels the private sector manages through its innovation, creativity and competition.  The rich, meantime want more and more or they will all go abroad leaving the country they ‘owe allegiance’ to to sink to its knees.  Who do you think we can afford to lose – skilled professionals in health care and the public sector and armed services, or a bunch of shits who think they are so special the deserve salaries that amount to more than a life’s earnings for most?  I rather gave my own view away there!

I think we should have a cull of those allowed vast wealth now – I’m rather against killing people off, but we could just strip them out of our system at around £80K a year equivalents and give them three months to settle elsewhere with their in demand skills.  Rooney would no doubt leave his ‘beloved’ Manchester United and City have to put out the youth team, but who cares – do we really think we  haven’t got replacement talent to run the necessary show?

Even in the “industries” (like children’s games played by men) where the best have to prove themselves on level playing fields on open display, there is no need for the absence of reasonable salary caps (this just removes the competition via money element).  When you can hire bent accountants to “prove” success it’s even worse.  I’d be happier to live amongst people who accept reasonable pay and wealth retention as part of an obligation to everyone else, than grasping Einsteins (which they ain’t) prepared to live off the backs of everyone else – where will they be if we go to war – next to you in the trenches or suddenly off on holiday to neutral territory?

I understand “modern economics” and have seen how little benefit those on big  pay bring, and how the wealth is manipulated through various offshore, transfer pricing dodges, land and mineral theft and the rest.  We can do better than this pornographic society and have the technology to rebuild from the bottom-up, embodying management knowledge into a machine utility needing regulation.

In Bahrain, a colleague was asked to prevent an IT system operating at a particular point so a favoured bureaucrat could make decisions. A bit like the days when police investigation systems produced format (more or less wordperfect) incompatible with prosecution systems – with the outputs needing re-typing.  We are doing this over and again in management and finance, largely to allow fraud and the high-paying jobs of the machine overseers whose skills are obsolete.  The last successful innovation in financial services was the ATM.  Give me decent cops, soldiers, nurses and doctors to form a community with, not money-grubbing creeps selling bags with the smell of cakes, or bananas produced at subsistence wages at a price inflated by offshore management dodges to ten times the price that would provide a fair wage for pickers, transport and retailing.

The truth about most work is that it is routinised and we need to share it under fair exchange and regulation.  We have failed to organise a fair global society, yet insist that management organisation is so good its worth 150 times the reasonable salary we can’t pay our  soldiers or public sector workers.  In science, stuck with a core research programme as dud as this we’d abandon it.

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UK 2012 And The Rolling Lies Of Debt

Britain is much worse off than statistics claim and our vapid bimbo-media lead   Part of that lazy thinking that inspires journalists to keep speaking of “the government” spending money on this or that, as if “the government” were somehow sitting on an infinitely large pile of “government money” that most of the time it was unreasonably withholding from worthy causes.  This money essentially comes from the people.  Further lazy right-wing thinking then starts to say we must rely on a healthy private sector and treats tax as an evil.  We need deeper thinking than this.

Before getting to the depths, one needs to understand we are being lied to and that a big confidence trick is taking place.  The reason our economy is knackered is not because successive governments have indeed pandered to subjective worthy causes with money that those governments did not possess.  Stuff like hospitals and the rest of the public sector arise because the private sector is crap.  Otherwise Mr. Plod and surgeons would be working for it.  We will be paying bill. It is not government money because the government doesn’t have any. It has liabilities only. It is taxpayers’ money.  Yet we would be spending the money to “private landlords” otherwise.

The only achievement to date of the UK’s coalition government has been a triumph of PR – hardly surprising given that PR appears to comprise the only work experience Cameron has ever had outside politics.  Our ignorant media is complicit with the line that the British government has started to deal with the grotesque debt inherited from the previous government. Yet government spending was actually higher for the fiscal year 2010/11 than under the last year of the hapless and reviled Nulabour.

The UK debt figures are also much worse than conventionally believed because 2011 debt including “interventions” stood at  about £2,270 billion as at September 2011, or 150% of UK GDP. To this we should add public sector pensions (£1,100bn+), PFI (£400bn+) and sundry other off-balance-sheet obligations of the state.  The bleak real summary is that after five years of supposed austerity, UK government spending will be back to 2005 levels… but with twice as much debt.

There has been no real austerity yet in the UK, unless you’ve lost your job or benefits, or seen your pension halved.  There has been no real deleveraging in the global economy at an aggregate level either.  Global credit market debt stands at $220 trillion, having grown by 11% annually since 2002, versus 8% nominal GDP growth (and no one really believes this nominal figure).

I understand people wanting government off their backs, but is the public sector really the great drag or is it really a highly inefficient private sector that is the problem?  Nothing is more private sector than the banks.  We’re in much deeper than we’re being told and part of this is the expectation that the private sector is just waiting for the opportunity to bring about a rally.

If the problem is the public sector we seem doomed the the privatisation of health, education, policing and the rest.  There  is no evidence this is a good thing.  Drivel about private sector efficiency isn’t going to help us.  The actual system is that the government is lying about how bad it is and using the clapped-out private sector cavalry bullshit.  Nothing has been done for 4 years now except extend and pretend in the hope of a windfall from “growth”.

 

 

Police Pay Cuts

The police wage bill is £11 billion and this is around 75% of total spending.  The real cuts being made aren’t as advertised – the bulk of the savings are ‘back door’ through the inflation being stoked up through QE and our farcical focus on financial services and the speculative economy.  If we are lucky, two years down the line the average cop wage will be worth 20% less than last year. The cuts themselves are typical of the tinkering done across the public sector.  Wages generally have been in decline since the 1970s.  If one was able to price police pay to market, they would be much lower – perhaps 30% less.  I’m not advocating this, just pointing to the obvious market conditions.  I don’t believe much if any of the pay targeted at the front line will get there.

The situation is almost the reverse of that in the late 60’s when police pay had fallen way behind in an environment of generally rising wages.  We threatened and later voted for strike action then.  Hard to justify in these circumstances.  The only way to get higher wages is it insist on them across the board and for full employment.

The current offer is no or less business-as-usual and doesn’t represent the kind of radical overhaul the CJS needs.  Cops will be less well off like the rest of us except the rich top 10%.  This is what most of them voted for, though one expects they didn’t know as it would have happened if Labour had won.

Our force showed no signs of knowing who its best officers were and who among them was prepared to concoct criminal lies to cover their bad work.  I have no faith in performance based pay when such basics are not entertained.

Are Police In the UK Bent?

My over-riding feeling is we don’t have many bent cops – this despite knowing even in local dealings they can provide very shabby service and will lie to protect themselves at the expense of severe distress and unlawful conspiracy against victims.  The real problem is how to get the majority into a position to do the better job they want to do.  The constraints that have grown against this are probably typical of the work most of us do.  The biggest lies outside of our jobs in economic matters.

Whether you think police or other agencies are corrupt will largely depend on what happens in direct dealings with them and what you glean from ‘admass’ reporting, literature and any contact you have with more academic material.  I’m not aware of an objective reporting or body of knowledge to refer to as I might refer to books and papers on molecular biology.  There is academic work and in that you will find reference to a ‘rotten orchard’ and a lack of accountability.  This is not material I would regard as scientific, though I’ve seen some good arguments made.  Jack Regan and Dirty Harry figures were unknown in the reality of my police work, but dubious practices like those in Charlie Owen’s novels and his characters strike a chord.  I’m sure I worked ‘Horses Arse’, GMP’s missing ‘H; Division.  GF Newman wrote long ago, and is worth a retrospective.

The IPCC have just published a 36 page interim report on corruption – it;s on their website and converts to less than a side of A4 – once you strip away the undergraduate dissertation part it says little  and manages a few lies in the form of bureaucratic-speak. They aren’t up to the job and even say 87% of us think they should investigate police corruption – a classic of village idiot consultancy.  We would be unlikely to ask members of the public who should conduct hot fusion research and this area is as complex in its own way.  The public have as little idea on the requirements of major corruption enquiry as of the technologies of a tokomak (and I don’t know how to spell it).

The thing about corruption is that perpetrators can usually only practice if they can hide what they are doing, though there are counter-examples.  And who better at hiding evidence than police officers (bankers? accountants? lawyers? politicians? press?)  The Americans prided themselves on having no moles as we were being embarrassed by Philby, MacClean and Burgess, but in reality weren’t finding them.

My own view is we get off already off-kilter in trying to bring accountability in our public sector.  We are generally failed by our public enquiries, judge-led this and that and so on.  One tedious enquiry after another on Iraq hasn’t even really the full scale of the Blair-concocted horror – we can’t get past secrecy and closing ranks.  The Murdochs and others put up the standard CEO excuse recently – that what went on went on without their knowledge.  They never make this admission when taking bonus payments.

In a sense we have no right to dare ask for investigations into police corruption when there are no police investigations worth speaking of into much wider banking and other business-financial corruption.  It is quite likely that our privilege and selection systems prevent the kind of people we need to do ‘regulation’ having any access to the work, and there is much evidence around the world of a ‘political class’ of jobsworths dominating them.

We need fresh ideas and to take into account of such realities that the kind of bureaucratic structuring of organisations around corruption prevention as a focus will be a disaster – and that there are plenty of examples of this to learn lessons from.  Elected police commissioners seem a good idea until you look at the politicians we already get.  We’ve had them on police authorities with no good effect I’m aware of.  Most of us already hold politicians in much greater disapproval than our cops.

One big problem in the mess is getting proper investigation done and done under open challenge.  Judicial review is open only to the rich (with a few token counter-examples) and it is possible to think of (cheaper) expansions of this that could organise new forms of enquiry with high degrees of power to demand evidence and get to it before cover-up opportunities, and reversing normal credibility issues and police or other organisational players colluding.  Much ‘corruption; is not criminal, but comes about through poor cultures, supervision and so on.  I would guess this is the biggest problem in our police, but we shouldn’t have to guess on the extent of criminal corruption.  The figures should be listed in the police record of recorder crimes as a special appendix and cases of miscarriages of justice should be available, in full, for public scrutiny – the opposite is the general case.  The idea, of course, is for the question of whether our police are bent not to arise because we would have reason to know either way.

The general way to prevent corruption is to involve countervailing interests.  I would put forward Nico Bento as the paradigm case of our failure to do this with almost everyone involved duped or corrupt (who knows which in the absence of full public scrutiny?).  Welsh officers are on trial at the moment for a case dating to 1988 and I heard interview tapes being played the other day.  It now appears we throw away relevant evidence ‘as a matter of course’ in considerable haste. There is no reason in this digital age, and this hardly helps us believe our CJS wants to come clean..

 

Police Pay in the Light of Rioting

There is no special attack on police pay.  Wages have been shafted for everyone else other than an elite for more than 30 years.  This is clear in GDP figures.  The rich and well-paid have been getting vastly better off as the rest of us have had our wages cut in real terms.  Police and public sector pay and conditions fared better than the private sector.  The police and public sector did not stand up and be counted when this started and, indeed, police enforced much of the deterioration in the Miner’s Strike and other attempts to prevent the collapse of manufacturing.  We should note that the anti-union propaganda and similar are never aimed at those groups in our society using ‘guild’ techniques to maintain their earnings like lawyers (including judges), accountants, bankers and the rich.  The idea that we have a “meritocracy” is farcical – tossers like Blair used to go around quoting books with the term in the title that were highly critical of the notion as though they were arguments for it.

Cops are not generally well qualified, trained or skilled and the work could be done by any reasonably fit people.  In the past police wages were severely cut in times like this and the blue line still did what it was told.  There is no special case now and to make one is only likely to further inflame those who are really suffering poverty thanks to the rich and their toady-politicians.  None of this is to say .I don’t think cops should be paid less than lawyers, judges and bankers – I value police more than these parasites.

The reason there is no money is that the rich have had it – through investing abroad to take advantage of near slave conditions of employment and tax evasion (it is evasion because they use threats to leave with all their money to prevent fair rates).  The only investment in anything real (almost) has been through the public sector or highly subsidised by our taxes – the rich have formed a vast Ponzi scheme to get unrealistic rates of return and have stolen vast sums we needed to invest in meaningful jobs.

Most have not understood the extent and nature of the criminality of the rich – which is as bad as any of the evil poor’s doings – worse when land grabs involve forced evictions and killings.  If the reality sinks in, our police are going to be a thin line between a vengeful poor and their masters.  This is likely to be done by decimated ranks that will be protecting the bankster-terrorists and their smug political lackeys.  They are likely to find themselves between ‘white racists’, ‘disaffected immigrants’ and other factions – and with no political solutions offered because we have no real politics.

We are so dumb as a populace we haven’t spotted that the rich have been keeping more and more of the world’s wealth as debt and deficits rise – this is almost like your neighbour always having potatoes just after your crop has been raided and not making the connection.

There’s some chance this government may re-think on police numbers and pay.  As Gadget points out the amounts involved are nothing in comparison with banking thefts.  No doubt this would be a red rag to the rest of the public sector bull – but the Tories might risk it under some crime and disorder propaganda.  Policing as we’ve known it in the UK would disappear, and cops turn to a semi-military militia.

I won’t be here, having decided to up sticks long ago.  The IPCC make a statement later tonight.  I expect bullshit – hard to imagine what they could say now they couldn’t have managed yesterday when whatever they didn’t do played some role in making people angry and setting off the angry.

In Support of Strike Action?

We are probably seeing only the start of public sector protests today.  Strikes are generally not much use, and the back of supposed union power has been broken everywhere other than the public sector.  The arguments we hear in the media will all be nonsense and biased and factional.

The key underlying factor is that wages are no longer fair anywhere and massive inflation is in the system.  Housing is unaffordable and about to become even more so as interest rates go up.  Food is going through the roof, as are energy prices and something none of us seem to understand lurking in the system – this is the ‘debt problem’ and the ‘demographic time bomb’.

The ‘debt issue’ is not being presented properly.  This has arisen through collusion between governments and banks to create a false economy in which money was supposed to make money.  In fact this is no more than the creation of a parasite financial services sector and a wider form of professional leeching and organised criminality.  The underlying story is one of the Emperor’s New Clothes and a massive Ponzi scheme – so much of a ‘Baldrick cunning plan’ that many didn’t spot that Sooty’s Magic Wand has replaced real accounting.  The story of the pig in a poke is involved with losses hidden in the same sacks as profit.

The essential problem is we have no way of addressing any of this in available forms of public dialogue other than blogging – and this remains largely disempowered.  Talk on the economy is constrained by metaphors that link to our experience of household budgeting.  The idea in most prominence is that we can somehow recover by tightening belts and waiting for the private sector cavalry.  This is so dumb.

Soon, I guess, our cops are going to be pitted against rioters.  If we took the cost cutting seriously, then our officers would also be exposed to global matters as surely as manufacturing workers and unskilled labour.  Cops would be imported as surely as plumbers, waiters and so on and paid these ‘immigrant rates’.  This is clear nonsense, yet is also clear in the government line in general on cuts and the snide way public sector workers are being vilified as a ‘burden’ on the rest of us.

While the farce plays itself either out or to Greek crescendo, the rich get richer.  One suggestion made today is to cut the EU – (calm down Dickiebo!) – and the argument is very attractive.  Thanks to the ludicrous Human Rights Act we can’t evict lousy, tribal criminals and see our soldiers unable to claim compensation for being sent into dud wars with inadequate equipment.  Who would miss the droves of highly paid lawyers and others giving us this pseudo-legislation.  Why not just cut this crap out for 3, 5 or 10 years?  Personally, I’d like to see these duckeggs get gaol time, but it isn’t the answer.

Remember the ‘three-day week’?  We lost only about 4% of production.  The problem is we use jobs to spread resources around and they are associated with power and influence.  Most jobs are not connected with real production of anything.  In the Middle East and Greece, public sector jobs are doled out in a ‘wasta’ system – and who can say the same does not happen here when you look at QUANGOs and characters like Louise Casey?  Japan was once heralded here as the kind of super-efficient model to follow.  I was sent to discover their secrets – and found a dire, hidebound system of bureaucracy, notably in banks and big companies.

I teach many methods of productivity improvement, but all of these rely on a massive fiction – that we can achieve the gains other than in the company restructuring.  You can see this when you consider agriculture – it’s 4% of world GDP.  In fact agriculture and manufacturing have a burden of three times their GDP in “services” and “government”.  It is only by not having this burden on their balance sheets that allows anyone to trade real things.  If the better ways of doing such real work translated into more people being available for more real work we would have a different world – but there is no evidence this is what happens.

Half the UK population own less than 5% of the stuff we can put monetary value on – this is standard material in Human Geography (e.g. Danny Dorling).  Get any notion of this from BBC coverage?  This hardly suggests a fair return for the hard day’s work.  And this situation has been getting worse.  Massive increases in productivity have only led to falling wages and the rich taking more of the cake.

Our wages in the public sector are paid in relation to the job market.  A cop’s or teacher’s wage is linked to what they could otherwise get washing-up or fobbing some punter off in a customer service function or digging turf, minding a lathe and so on.  There are currently no real jobs to change to and we are all leveling down to whatever a transported Chinese peasant can ‘command’.  If we applied real efficiency in the public sector, we could reduce it by over 50%.

The real issue concerns how we should be investing resources and how we make money do the investment we want.  This is almost totally out of control and the ‘banks’ have failed as surely as the Soviet Politburo.  For banks we could substitute ‘rich’. The subsidies are not to public sector pensions.

The strikes are really about the abuse of power and lack of any sensible public dialogue that always hides the ‘rich problem’ – just look at the highly paid media tossers putting questions to people aid much less than them as though they are the ‘drain’ with no consideration of their own situation.

The answer is not some dire Communist Paradise but a new view on competition.  The model (creaky though it is) to follow is competition that encourages competition along the lines of rugby league.  It needs to be global and needs salary caps and transparency.  I don’t propose this as a solution but as a simple question on why we are allowing such a massively unfair situation to continue.

Greeks are already trashing their own town centres and it’s likely our current strikes will descend to brutal disorder as the poor find it difficult to get food, stay warm and so on.  The answer to our problems is work, but we seem to have no resources to build homes people can afford to live in, tap energy sources under our feet and around our coast, grow our own, produce our own entertainment – this is clearly rubbish as the real resources needed concern our commitment and work.

The strikes evade the real questions, but show that we do not have means to negotiate properly.  What are our teachers doing teaching if they are so ‘stupid’? Our cops don’t like the cuts and like everyone else see themselves as somehow ‘deserving’.  The good news for them is the Government is going to need them and will make them a special case.  The morality of this is dire, but what’s new in this.

My own view is that the crash and the killing fields are coming.  I don’t think this on the basis of inevitable economics, but on the general levels of ignorance on what is really going on.  The strikes are on because there is no fair public dialogue – but this itself hides the real issues.

Government is involved in all kinds of blunder.  We are importing crime, failing to impose the same law and conditions in migrant communities of all kinds, can’t treat our soldiers properly, waste vast amounts of money and all kinds of stuff the ‘right’ hate – but we aren’t looking at the ultimate problem of political relationships with the rich and banks and seeing this as the actual governance that is letting us down (I suspect fearing the only alternative is even bigger government).  Democracy has died and we haven’t spotted it.

Strikes are obviously irrational – not least because strikers never get their money back.  I prefer this irrationality to belief that the rich are necessary and good for us.  As for the teachers, they must know this is a token strike and that if they are to be effective they will have to really hurt parents after the summer break to change any of this idiot government of the rich, for the rich.  They will realise they are fighting our battle long before that and give in.  Poetic justice in some senses – they have failed to teach what matters for over 30 years!  The last hope is that it has sunk into our collective unconscious.

If we have seen massive productivity rises (and they are huge), shouldn’t we expect to be able to work proportionately less – this equation should mean earlier retirements even given longer lifespans.  Agricultural and manufacturing has achieved massive productivity increase – we have clearly wasted this on “services” and counter-productive accumulations in few hands.  We should be taking on the ‘power’ responsible for this – but we clearly have no democratic means.  It’s an old story and previous versions end in war.

There’s a parallel between the lies of official police statistics – with ‘crime’ allegedly contained and on the way down – the truth being massive increases in anti-social behaviour and crime in areas not recorded – and ‘the economy’ – both using similar accounting techniques similar to those in banks – hiding losses behind a dam about to break.

Twice as many cops with much better equipment and vastly more civilian support seem to be doing less well than those in the much smaller force in which people like me, Hogday and Dickiebo served along with an array of decent people and blundering buffoons,  It could be that we were drawn from a better pool and worked in a cleaner ocean.  Yet the average cop is now better ejukated than our peers and when I meet them seem not much other than chips off the same block and mostly decent souls.

What I suspect is that not much has changed and this is the problem.  We lied about crime rates, detection rates and exposed officers to hopeless situations without the right laws and equipment then and it continues now.  Many of the problem people we dealt with are the same now – what’s changed is there is no economy to suck them away from crime – and particularly no factories or easy places to find work lifting things or digging holes at a rate of pay well above benefit levels.

IQ has perhaps budged up a fraction, but the intelligence pool has not, despite all the qualifications people think they have ‘earned’.  A degree is worth about 2 ‘O’ levels in old currency – tell me what the ‘efficiency gain’ is here!  Ejukation has replaced the old training grounds in big and small companies, the merchant marine and the armed services.  It does none of the old job for people who don’t ‘get’ school.  GCSEs look remarkably similar to CSEs, the old qualification for kids who couldn’t hack school.  Many of the eastern Europeans who nipped over to ‘take our jobs’ were educated in the old Soviet system.

The pit and factory were almost certainly better alternatives than yet more pointless school for those not suited to school ejukation than further incarceration as bricks in the wall and we should have done much more to ensure well paid jobs at the bottom.  Instead, we have failed totally to protect this group of people and pretended they could be educated.  In my view this is an example of the intense cruelty forced on this group who have also been the biggest victims of immigration.

There were no strikes in the USSR (there were really), and though we had adverts from Japan about imagining factories that had never had strikes they didn’t tell us these had been brutally suppressed by US Armed Forces.  The Germans do much better than we do, but we pay no attention to what is different in their system.  It’s better, more democratic and more successful – not bad for a bunch of failed nazis.

I support the strikes on the basis they show just how backward, undemocratic and stuck in the same mud we are.  I suspect we haven’t realised we lost two wars to the USA and are mimicking what we see as their success instead or working out how well we were doing before their ‘help’.  HRM coming from the States these days is fascist.  We should throw in with the Germans and start selling them comedy!