Pilgrims

Jane Pilgrim: the face of union corruption and theft. And what a face it is...

Many despise Guido as a muckraker and a "bad" blogger: these allegations may be true, but your humble Devil has always found him rather entertaining (and thoroughly fond of a good drinking session).

And, let's face it, by certain measures—namely making money from blogging, and setting the government agenda—Guido is rather more successful than most of the rest of us.

One campaigns that I am fully behind is Guido's crusade against "Pilgrims"—union activists funded by the taxpayer and not by the unions themselves.

Eighteen months ago Guido was chewing the cud with a source who works in education in some Westminster watering-hole. Even after four Guinnesses, he still did not believe the story he was being told. Apparently there were teachers that were paid full-time salaries, yet worked full-time on trade union activity. Another teacher had to be employed to cover for this activist, this pushed a particular school over budget. Guido didn’t really think much more on the subject until a piece of research by the Taxpayers’ Alliance [PDF] came across his desk a few months later. Their formidable FoI team had scatter-gunned almost every area of the state, trying to work out exactly how much of our money was was being wasted on unions bods who are paid for by us rather than out of the union members’ subscriptions. That leaves plenty of union money around to prop up Ed Miliband and bus people around the country for astro-turfed protests. It was on…

Heavy unionisation is largely a public sector phenomenon (although ex-public sector businesses—such as BA or BT—tend to carry this legacy too) and a great many professions are de facto closed shops (the education and medical sectors spring most readily to mind).

As long-time readers will recall, your humble Devil is not a fan of The Unions. In fact, I have written numerous posts—most pertinently, this one—laying out why. In summary, unions were formed to counter a problem that, largely, no longer exists (unbridled employer power over an unskilled workforce with few options), they increase unemployment, and because they are damaging to their employees and to their customers (largely the British taxpayer).

The unions now largely exist to extort more money from you and me, on behalf of their members, through our taxes—subs that you and I must pay involuntarily. These subs are then used to enforce collective bargaining so that you and I, despite suffering from a massive recession, must pay out ever more to a public sector that delivers less and less.

Furthermore, of course, such collective bargaining diminishes the quality of the workers in that industry—it doesn't matter whether you are good or bad at your job, you will still get the same pay. It is a system that rewards mediocrity at the expense of skill and dedication—thus calling into question whether the unions actually serve the best interests of their members. After all, if a bad teacher must get the same pay rise as a good one, then the good teacher's pay rise is less than it might have been.

In a near-monopoly such as the education system—especially since education is compulsory—all of this means that the general public have no option but to pay the higher (and often undeserved) wages, and reward failure; not only this, but their children's education is then screwed up and these young people's lives irreparably harmed.

For the purposes of this post, the really valid line in that quote is the first one:

The unions now largely exist to extort more money from you and me, on behalf of their members, through our taxes—subs that you and I must pay involuntarily.

And since most of their members are in publicly funded industries, that means that the best way for the unions to get more money for their members is to play politics. And they do this very effectively, mainly by providing the vast majority of the funding for one of the two main political parties—the Labour Party.

The Labour Party is famous for basically bankrupting the country every time that they are elected‚ and this dubious skill is—in large part—due to the fact that a Labour government must pander to its union paymasters.

There are several ways that the last Labour government did this:

• large salary increases for public sector workers (especially if you belong to a union. Interestingly, I was in a hospital in the North, recently, and in the main entrance lobby, they had a large banner setting out why members of staff should join a particular union. The first point was "you will get paid more".);


• provided millions of pounds of funding through entities such as the Union Modernisation Fund (what this modernisation consisted of or who it was supposed to benefit, I've never been sure. But if it doesn't benefit the taxpayer, then why are we paying for it?);


• providing taxpayer-funded staff, venues and facilities.

The first is pretty obvious really—and has, in fact, brought this country to its knees financially.

The second was (and is), as far as I am concerned, a straight piece of money-laundering by the Labour Party, as Shane Greer pointed out in2007.

Without dropping a beat Gordon has today given a further £2.8m of taxpayers’ money to the unions to top up the Union Modernisation Fund; a fund that has already received £10m of taxpayers’ money. Oh, I almost forgot to mention Labour received almost £17m from unions last year.

But if the unions can afford to give £17m in donations to Labour doesn’t that mean they have more than enough money to pay for ‘modernisation’ without the taxpayers’ help? In fact it looks a lot like they’d even have enough left over to make a hefty donation to the Labour Party (and pay for some placards).

If anyone can explain how the Union Modernisation Fund is anything more than a money laundering operation to turn tax revenue into political donations I will be eternally grateful.

It was in 2006 that Guido posted this helpful little diagram illustrating this concept.

Why are taxpayers funding the "modernisation" of the unions anyway? Isn't that what union subs are for? Taxpayers' money is being handed over to a bunch of thugs whose main aim is to increase the amount of taxpayers' money they get: this is akin to me giving some of my money to a man so that he can extort more money from me.

Actually, it's more like me extorting your money from you, and then using that money to pay a massive, psychotic, baseball bat-wielding Glaswegian to come over and extort more from you "in order to pay for ma' fucking weans Christmas presents".

It's even more ridiculous—and really fucking annoying—that Cameron has decided to continue with this Union Modernisation Fund farce.

This does not bode well for Cameron's tactical nouse, fiscal responsibility or his supposed belief in individual liberty. In the massive fucking financial hole that this country is in, we simply cannot afford to keep giving tens of millions of pounds to the unions so that they can ensure that their members—who are overwhelmingly in the public sector—can continue to squeeze as much money as possible for as little work as possible.

Cameron is not only continuing to fund his enemies, he is continuing to fund our enemies—and he is doing it with our fucking money.

Further, from the angle of liberty, Cameron should be able to see that it is absolutely flat-out wrong for the general public to be taxed so that a vested interest can continue to operate how they please. I mean, for fuck's sake, I never expected the Tories to be much different from Labour, but surely even they can see that this kind of thing is wrong in principle, as well as practicality.

One can make a case for any number of things being of benefit to society as a whole and, thus, eligible for funding through taxation. The unions are not one of those things.

Cameron and CCHQ knew about the Union Modernisation Fund, because they explicitly confirmed that it would stay (presumably to pursue some stupid bloody policy of appeasement); it is safe to say that the Coalition were also well aware of the third method of funding the unions—which brings us back to Guido's "Pilgrims"...

With the unions agitating it was only a matter of time before someone said something stupid. In April one such taxpayer-funded trade union official put her head above the parapet and claimed to the Standard that Andrew Lansley had lied about NHS cuts at a pre-election visit to St Georges Hospital in Tooting. Unfortunately for the now infamous Jane Pilgrim, Mark Clarke, the local Tory candidate who had organised said visit, had a slightly clearer recollection of events – mainly that Jane had refused to meet Lansley on political grounds. The first shots were fired and suddenly Jane Pilgrim, the union-funded smearing liar, began to unravel. She had a private consultancy firm on the side and lived at the expense of the taxpayer too. Eventually she was forced back kicking and screaming to frontline nursing, but the can of worms had been opened…

Given CCHQ's attitude to the unions, it is unlikely, I think, that they would have done anything about these kinds of disgusting abuses of taxpayers' money (we can only assume that they need the Labour Party to stay afloat: I suspect that some deals were done in the back rooms of Parliament—something to speculate about in the future, methinks*).

It is only because the Taxpayers' Alliance and Guido started kicking up such a stink (with the press then picking up on it), that the Tories suddenly found themselves under pressure to do something about this scandal.

Guido has seen emails sent around senior brothers expressing concern that the activities of Unison’s poster-girl could be the thin-edge of the wedge and they even speculated that her big mouth might ruin the taxpayer funded fun and games for everyone. How right they were. Suddenly, with personification and a focus point, the outrage about the concept of taxpayer-funded trade-union staff grew. Speeches began to be made in Parliament, motions were put down and people began to realise that there is a Nurse Pilgrim in every hospital, school, government department and pen-pushing office in the country. The TPA numbers came alive and the bandwagon was rolling…

As Guido began smoking out further pilgrims, David Cameron was put on the spot about at PMQs in May. June saw public opinion turn in the polls. The tabloids waded in and Eric Pickles and Frankie Maude soon got behind the issue. As conference season approached word reached Guido that a breakthrough was imminent. On the eve of Tory conference leaked CCHQ briefings saw MPs given anti-pilgrim lines and Pickles and Maude opened fire from the podium. In less than six months a full government consultation had been announced and the figures mooted as potential savings saw even more people get behind the campaign. Union funded Labour MPs went berserk…

Because of the pressure piled on, the Coalition were forced to act—or, at least, promise to act—against a practice whereby the British taxpayer subsidises the unions to the tune of over £113 million a year, through paying for the full-time employment of some 2,840 staff. Plus, of course, the taxpayer gets whacked twice: we have to stump up for another nurse or teacher or council idiot to do the job that the union person was supposed to do.

This is a total disgrace: there is only one group of people who should pay for the unions, and that is the union members. It is time to put the costs back where they belong—or, of course, the unions could cut their costs (perhaps by refusing to bankroll the basically bankrupt Labour Party, or not paying their lying bosses £100k+ every year).

Your humble Devil has been particularly lame this year: whenever Pilgrims have come up, it has been at a time when my blogging inertia was at its height. As such, this is the first time that I have written about them (although, in the future, I shall be following Mark Clarke's Trade Union Reform Campaign with interest).

Luckily, Guido claims that he is in this "for the long haul" and, in this case, your humble Devil is happy to support him.

* It's interesting to note that, shortly after the Tories promised to abolish Pilgrims, the "poison" of state- taxpayer-funding of political parties started bubbling up again.**

** Apparently, there won't be any state-funding "in this Parliament". So, expect to see it seriously proposed for the next one then...

The problem with education...

Via Timmy, here's the teaching unions' attitude to education... [Emphasis mine.]

Unions said a proposed review of primary and secondary school subjects would render the curriculum unfit for the needs of a modern education system.

They insisted that a renewed focus on detailed subject knowledge was “elitist” and would alienate thousands of children, particularly those from the poorest backgrounds.

So, knowing about stuff in anything greater than the most cursory detail is "elitist", is it?

And poor people cannot possibly be interested in learning because, presumably, they want to ensure that they and their children remain poor for ever...?

These people have got to go.

Union says "no"

[This post was edited after the Andrew Neil debacle.]

NASUWT president Chris Keates: the evil is writ large upon her hideous melting-candle face.

And so here's a typical union leader refusing to put her money where her mouth is.

The Tories want parents and other organisations to have state funds to set up their own schools.
Shadow schools secretary Michael Gove issued the call in a speech to the NASUWT teachers' union conference.

And can you guess what the union response was? Go on—have a guess.

Was it (a) yes, what a wonderful idea: we'll show you how a school should be run, given how much we profess to dislike the constant state interference, or was it (b)...

The union did not want to run a school, [NASUWT president Chris Keates] said. Schools should be "democratically accountable" and not operated for and by "the pushy and the privileged".

Ah. So, schools should not be run for and by "the pushy and the privileged" unless those pushy and privileged are the union members under state sanction.

To describe people like "Ms" Keates as disgusting bottom-feeders seems disrespectful to various families of single-celled organisms but, mostly, it's disrespectful to those parents who might want something better for their children than the state-sanctioned pap supported by the likes of union thugs like Ms Keates.


UPDATE: Chris Keates has previous—feel free to revisit some of her greatest hits...

• The Unions—a clarification


• Destroy the unions


• Where's the evidence?


• Hannah Pool is an idiot

Struck off

I see that Bob Crow and his merry men have been forced to cancel their rail strike because of dodgy balloting.

A High Court judge rescued the travel plans of millions of Easter holidaymakers and commuters returning to work next week by granting an emergency injunction against a national rail strike that threatened to halt 80 per cent of trains.

Superficially, there's only one thing that I can add to this news...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Ahahahahahaha...

There is, unfortunately, a downside to this news.

Mrs Justice Sharp also spared the Prime Minister untold political damage by halting the four-day strike, which was to begin on Tuesday — the day on which Gordon Brown is expected to call a general election.

Bugger.

Oh well: at least one can say that—strike or no strike—Gordon Brown is still an absolute cunt.

And so is Bob Crow.

Cameron: in thrall to the unions too

Although a great many unofficial posters have appeared, slapping the Gobblin' King and his henchmen for the massive amounts of our money that they have thrown at union leaders, I haven't seen any official Conservative ones (there may be some—I just haven't seen 'em). I wonder why that could be...

I was a bit disappointed to read this morning, therefore, that the party is likely to continue with the Labour government's taxpayer-financed union modernisation fund. The FT has the full story. [I've asked CCHQ for a confirmation of the FT's story but haven't heard back yet. 10.30am - CCHQ has confirmed the story IS true. The Trade Union Modernisation Fund will continue if Cameron becomes Prime Minister].

After a long strike-free period when Labour gave them all they wanted in terms of higher public sector pay and protected pensions, the unions are already awash with money and have a £25m warchest with which to "unleash hell" on any Tory government. The trade unions don't need extra funding and they are unlikely to be bought off with even more.

Tim Montgomerie maintains that this is a "discouraging sign". It isn't. It's far worse than that.

It isn't just that it is barking insanity to fund a bunch of people who hate your guts—surely a fact that would make most people doubt Cameron's sanity—or that Call Me Dave has pledged to take on the "vested interests" (apart from some); no, the worst thing about it is that this is our money, and Cameron is going to keep on throwing millions of pounds of our money at a bunch of creeps who couldn't give a fuck about anyone other than their members.

If the unions want to "modernise" then they should pay for it themselves. If they do not have the cash—ha!—then they should appeal to their members for extra funds. These cunts should not be entitled to fleece millions from taxpayers who simply do not support them; if the taxpayers did support the unions, then more taxpayers would be members of unions.

This does not bode well for Cameron's tactical nouse, fiscal responsibility or his supposed belief in individual liberty. In the massive fucking financial hole that this country is in, we simply cannot afford to keep giving tens of millions of pounds to the unions so that they can ensure that their members—who are overwhelmingly in the public sector—can continue to squeeze as much money as possible for as little work as possible.

Cameron is not only continuing to fund his enemies, he is continuing to fund our enemies—and he is doing it with our fucking money.

Further, from the angle of liberty, Cameron should be able to see that it is absolutely flat-out wrong for the general public to be taxed so that a vested interest can continue to operate how they please. I mean, for fuck's sake, I never expected the Tories to be much different from Labour, but surely even they can see that this kind of thing is wrong in principle, as well as practicality.

One can make a case for any number of things being of benefit to society as a whole and, thus, eligible for funding through taxation. The unions are not one of those things.

So what the fuck is Cameron playing at?

Fuck knows. But if you don't mind, Dave, could you stop playing at it with my fucking money...?

UPDATE: writing about the BA strikers, TravelGall at A Very British Dude maintained that the strikes "could be the gift that keeps on giving for the Conservatives". Indeed. So perhaps Cameron's decision to keep on flinging millions of pounds of our money at the unions is him keeping his side of a bargain that he cannot lose...

Union boss Dave Prentis is a lying cunt

The TPA's Matt Sinclair sticks it to Dave Prentis, head of UNISON.



Say, Dave: you ever thought of becoming a politician? After all, it takes a special kind of person to lie like an absolute bastard on television knowing that the proof of their lie is in the public domain...

Fly away, you Union cunts

I am not a fan of everything that Margaret Thatcher did, but she should go down in history as a hero for her breaking of the Unions. Had she not done so, not only would our economic situation be far worse than it currently is—more akin to 1978/79's Winter of Discontent—but you could be facing the daily intimidation that is being doled out to some BA cabin crew.

The emails, posted late on Friday evening, were chillingly concise and their content clear: "If any of you go into work tomorrow, your life won't be worth living,'' one read.

Hours earlier, as the news spread among British Airways cabin crew that last ditch talks between the airline and the hard-line union Unite had failed, a tirade of malicious text messages had been fired off to specifically targeted staff – those brave enough to have voiced contempt for the union militants – telling them they were "scrum" [sic] and "scabs" if they crossed the picket line to begin their shifts on Saturday.

"Suzy" wasn't surprised when copies landed in her in-box and on her mobile phone.
...

Inside Heathrow, [Suzy] says, menace and unease are everywhere. When BA suggests a new service Unite generally instructs its members to ignore it.

"Ridiculous things,'' Suzy says. "We were asked to distribute hot towels on short haul. Unite said no. We got on board and everyone was in a state.

"Do we give them out or not? Usually workers—quite rightly—fear not doing what the boss asks. But we are just as frightened not to do what the union asks."

In the 1970s and early 1980s, this kind of treatment would apply in almost any job; the majority of the workforce was unionised. In some businesses, the unions operated a "closed shop": if you weren't part of the union, you lost your job (or would never get it in the first place).

Last year, British Airways made a loss of £401 million: the airline is currently losing more than £1 million—every, single day. No business can carry on like this.

At the very least, these silly cunts are going to have to realise that they certainly can't carry on partying like this.

I must say that I am very impressed with BA Chief Executive Willie Walsh: not only because he has stepped up to the plate and made public statements personally, rather than through some press officer, but also because he has obviously got down onto the shop floor, as it were, and talked to his staff and customers; he has reassured customers and supported those staff who, like Suzy, are facing down Unite.

Suzy and her colleagues say they are more than happy to work harder if crew numbers are reduced. "We are just glad to have a job in this climate. And we already have more crew than the recommended CAA minimum.

"Becoming an air hostess was my dream as a little girl," she says. "I've always been proud to wear the BA uniform. It means I work for the best.

"But yesterday I stopped at a filling station to buy petrol and, before walking in to pay, I put on my coat. I know the public has no sympathy for us.

"Who can blame them? And I couldn't be sure what sort of reception I would get in a BA cabin crew uniform. How sad is that?"

It is, indeed, very sad. But the choice is clear: Willie Walsh must be allowed to sack those who strike, and those cabin crew who disagree with Unite's bullying must stop their union dues.

This isn't the 1800s: much of the support for workers that used to be dealt with by the unions is now enshrined in law. The unions are not only redundant, but actively malignant. It is time for the union bosses to be deprived of their big, fat pay-cheques and thrown onto the dole queue.

Note that I am not saying that they should be made illegal, or that the state should destroy them: I am simply saying that ordinary workers who do not want to be bullied and threatened because they disagree with the actions that a union is taking—actions that could potentially bankrupt the employers, thus ensuring that all of the workers lose their jobs—should stop paying their union dues.

As a happy by-product of the utter destruction of the unions, the Labour Party would go bust and we could all sleep easier in our beds, knowing that our money and our freedoms were not being handed over to thugs in order that maleficent politicians can continue to line their pockets with our money.

What's not to like...?

UPDATE: I see, via Timmy, that not only have we been lining the unions' pockets through the Union Modernisation slush Fund—also known as The Labour Party's Money-Laundering Fund—but we have also been subsidising them through staff placements.

Ministries and Government agencies spent more than £17 million paying staff to carry out “trade union activities” last year.
Some departments are paying staff to work full-time on trade union business.

And some full-time civil servants spend three days a work carrying out union activities and still receive a full salary from the Government.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are being stitched up by our government: our freedoms are being sold down the river to vested interests, whether those interests be the unions or big business.

It's time to make these politicos pay for their treachery: is it too much to hope that, after the General Election, we are faced not with a Hung Parliament but a Hanged Parliament...?

Unions: a clarification

Some commenters have been astonished—nay, horrified—at my call to destroy the unions. Long-time readers will not have been so surprised, for a rampant dislike of the unions as they currently exist has been a theme at The Kitchen ever since its inception.

However, for those who are rather more recent visitors, I feel that a slight clarification is in order—and the key to it is contained in the sentence above, i.e. the unions as they currently exist.

The trades unions were formed to solve a specific problem...

Originating in Europe, Labour unions became popular in many countries during the Industrial Revolution, when the lack of skill necessary to perform the jobs shifted employment bargaining power almost completely to the employers' side, causing many workers to be mistreated and underpaid.

... and they were a good balance in these circumstances. This balance of power is, of course, entirely A Good Thing—as a libertarian, your humble Devil is against the use of force or fraud against people and it is usually when one particular group has far more power than another that this can happen.

Further, of course, I do believe in free association, etc. and would therefore not ban trade unions. Not to mention the fact that many trade unions also acted as Friendly Societies
which, as you will know, I am heartily in favour of.

However, the trade unions of today bear very little resemblance to those of the Industrial Revolution. The exploitation that they then sought to redress has largely been resolved, e.g.

• The development of the British economy has largely switched from a dependence on unskilled jobs to highly skilled ones (compared to screwing on the same nut onto the same mudguard 83,000,000 times a day, even a call-centre job requires more aptitude—if only an ability to read and write.


• This trend has led to a shift in the balance of power from the eeeeevil exploitative boss to the worker.


• Workers' rights are now enshrined in law, especially (and I hate to say it) as regards to health and safety, etc.

As such, the formerly minor political ambitions of trade unions shifted into overdrive and, in the Seventies, brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

Worse than that, however, in many cases the trade unions essentially ceased to be voluntary organisations. In many companies, the unions ran a "closed shop": in other words, if you refused to become a member of the union, then you lost your job, e.g. Reuters (and many other journalistic organisations) in the Seventies and early Eighties. Indeed, you could lose your job for belonging to the wrong union.

At that point, as far as I am concerned, the unions stopped being a voluntary organisation and also lost their legitimacy from a libertarian point of view.

Further, in the same way that I heartily loathe the attempts by corporations to bribe or bully democratic governments for advantage, I also despise the unions who do the same. Why, for instance, has the Labour government handed over more than £10 million of our money to the unions for "restructuring"?

As far as I am concerned, if the unions can afford to pay their bosses salaries of the order of £100,000 per year, then they can bloody well pay for their own "restructuring". Instead, they steal money off the taxpayer—which is also very far from being a voluntary exchange.

Perhaps I was a little harsh in my post: after all, no one denies that unions fundamentally exist to serve their members—although one can argue that, in many points throughout history, the actions of the union leaders have served their members very badly. I think, particularly, of the miners' strikes which destroyed the livelihoods of their members in the short term, i.e. they weren't getting paid whilst on strike, and in the long term, e.g. the unions had not only jacked up the wage bills to a point at which British mining was unprofitable, but also the constant striking ensured that no one would take on such an unpredictable workforce.

But it is the fact that the unions try to pretend that they are, in some way, working for us—the general public and general consumers—that so enrages me. They. Do. Not.

If you care about the education of your child, then the union will not fight for better teaching: they will fight for more money from the taxpayer but not for school books, or better teaching or better schools—they will fight for that money to pay their members higher salaries.

Which is why this particular pronouncement from Mrs Chris Keates...

"We put teachers first so we can get the terms and conditions that allow us to do the best for the children."

... so absolutely pissed me off. This is just an outright fucking lie.

As regular readers will know, education is one of your humble Devil's bug-bears: screw up a child's education and you screw up their life. Education is absolutely fucking crucial to individuals being able to realise their potential and it really annoys the hell out of me that so many people in this country (about 50%) still leave school with incredibly low levels of literacy.

There is a reason, of course, that the state services are still so riddled with trade unions—because they are basically monopolies. Since the education service is an effective monopoly, it is very difficult to face down any concerted action from trade unions and, as such, they perpetuate in such industries when, in more nimble modern companies, trade unions are all but extinct.

The unions now largely exist to extort more money from you and me, on behalf of their members, through our taxes—subs that you and I must pay involuntarily. These subs are then used to enforce collective bargaining so that you and I, despite suffering from a massive recession, must pay out ever more to a public sector that delivers less and less.

Furthermore, of course, such collective bargaining diminishes the quality of the workers in that industry—it doesn't matter whether you are good or bad at your job, you will still get the same pay. It is a system that rewards mediocrity at the expense of skill and dedication—thus calling into question whether the unions actually serve the best interests of their members. After all, if a bad teacher must get the same pay rise as a good one, then the good teacher's pay rise is less than it might have been.

In a near-monopoly such as the education system—especially since education is compulsory—all of this means that the general public have no option but to pay the higher (and often undeserved) wages, and reward failure; not only this, but their children's education is then screwed up and these young people's lives irreparably harmed.

It's a disgrace.

There are a number of other reasons that I could throw into the mix, but the upshot of all of this is that I heartily dislike the trade unions as they currently exist—which is, more or less, where we came in.

So, yes, I would like to see these dinosaurs destroyed. But I am not advocating banning them, or using the law against them in any way. No.

What I do advocate is opening up the industries in which they have a stranglehold: the prospect of the eradication of unions within education is just one reason why I support a voucher system and Swedish-style "free schools" (the main reason that I support them, of course, is that the educational outcomes are so much better).

And yes, I also excoriate teachers who—like their medical counterparts—are often painted as veritable angels, noble public servants whose primary aim is the education of the nation's children not their own narrow self-interest. This, too, is a lie.

Or, if it is not a lie, these teachers can leave the union—a body that doesn't give two shits about the kiddies, for all of Mrs Chris Keates' weasel words—and thus destroy it. No subs: no union (except, of course, for the constant stream of stolen money provided by the Labour government—also due to stop soon).

So yes, I would like to see the unions die: they serve both their members and the general public very badly.

Destroy the unions

Via Iain Dale, I have found an interesting article by John Gummer* (I never thought that I'd say those words); the man's conversation with some fucking stupid, piss-arse NUSWT union shitstick is more than revealing.

I've been thinking about an exchange I had in Manchester. Britain's second largest teaching union, the NUSWT, promoted itself at the three Party Conferences. Their stand was uncompromising. The posters contained no hint of renewal or improvement; no recognition of the huge increase in attainment that the nation demands. Simply a series of statements opposing even this Government's relatively feeble attempts at reform. Above them all the keynote claim 'PUTTING TEACHERS FIRST'.

I approached the imposing woman behind the counter. "Shouldn't that read 'putting children first' I ventured. "Certainly not! We're a Trade Union and I'm its General Secretary."

Boom! There, right there! That is why the unions are such a bunch of fucking cunts and should be destroyed, utterly, at the soonest opportunity. It is also why the public sector is full to the brim with these bastards: those working in the sector don't give a crap about their customers and, as far as the unions are concerned, the general public aren't their customers anyway.

Look, 150 years ago unions had a place: they were there to redress the balance between poor workers and over-mighty industrialists. And that's fair enough.

But in the days of buckets of equality legislation and the National Minimum Wage, unions simply have no place. The only reason that these fuckers exist is because they continue to shore up the Labour Party's finances.

We should utterly destroy them, and do it soon.

learly I'd struck lucky and this was the big boss. "We put teachers first so we can get the terms and conditions that allow us to do the best for the children."

Yeah, and how's that working out for you? Oh, wait, it's working great for you: it just isn't working out quite so well for the poor children, is it? You stinking whore-harpy of aspirational destruction, you.

"But haven't you noticed that on the commercial stalls around you businesses are saying that they put the customer first?" Mrs Chris Keates drew herself up to her full height. "I won't take lessons from the private sector with their bonus culture," she expostulated

Uh-huh. Is it just me, or do many teachers not get bonuses these days? And could I just remind you, Mrs Chris Keates, that "the private sector with their bonus culture" pay your fucking wages? Not voluntarily—after all, what sensible, hard-working person would pay a screaming shit like you even to lick their arsehole clean?—but through extortion.

I simply cannot be bothered to comment on the rest of this tedious woman's excrescence: however, you can read the whole thing for yourself and, I hope, hold you head in absolute despair. And then punch your screen in rage as you contemplate that hidebound shits like Mrs Chris Keates will happily crew up your childrens' education—and their entire future—simply because she can and, worse, because she believes it's right.

"But," I hear you cry. "None of this is the teachers' fault: they cannot help the fact that their union representatives are turds of the very first water."

Bollocks.

Teachers deserve better than this. They deserve a professional body run by people who recognise that education is much more than the classroom; that there are lessons to learn from the private sector; that independent schools might have ideas worth borrowing; that a new generation needs new methods as well as old. Above all a professional body that could only label its stand PUTTING CHILDREN FIRST because that was what it was all about—day in day out from first thing to the moment the last script was marked.

You see, the teachers are just like all of those corrupt fucking doctors who are memebrs of the BMA and other fucking societies: they could refuse to pay the subs, they could refuse to condone this disgusting behaviour.

But they do not: they continue to fund medical and educational mediocrity: they continue to grasp greedily at the golden apples and fuck everyone else—including those who they are charged with protecting and nurturing.

Some of you might argue that this is fair enough—that humans are motivated by self-interest and none of this can be changed. Sure, that is fair enough.

But let's stop painting these cunts as angels. Why?

Because the sooner we realise that these public servants are not, in fact, wonderful angels then the sooner we will realise that throwing them out of their jobs and on to the street is not some moral outrage: it is simply the price that must be paid in order to ensure that our society thrives and that our children are not irretrievably fucked up by the venality of those who claim to protect them.

Sack them: sack them all.

* No deep link. Seriously, I know that you politico fuckheads are pathologically incapable of getting to grips with technology but don't you think, since you try to tell us which technologies we should adopt, that you should understand this web thing?

More on the railways, and thoughts on the privatisation of services

Further to your humble Devil's criticism of rail privatisation—they aren't really private at all—the Adam Smith Institute blog has covered the renationalisation of the East Coast Line; and Eamonn Butler's piece raises some issues that I failed to notice.

This is, of course, exactly how rail franchising is supposed to work. Services are put out to tender, and are run by private companies, but if one of them comes a cropper, the government steps in until another provider can be found. The only trouble is that the government has been stepping in rather a lot lately. Not because the private sector is inherently flaky, but for a couple of other reasons. First, the government screwed the operators down too hard on price. Many of them already had made considerable investment in the rail industry and were not prepared simply to write it off. So they paid over the odds. Then boom turned to bust (thanks, Gordon) and their figures started to look a bit sick. Second, the government drew up its franchise agreement so ineptly that when the chips are down, it is far cheaper for an operator to fold than continue operating a service. Step forward, the taxpayer. Frankly, it's no way to run a railroad.

The thing is that the "privatisation" of the railways is, in effect, simply one of the private finance initiative (PFI) and public-private partnerships (PPP) idea that both the Tory and Labour governments latched onto in the nineties.

The idea, very broadly, was that the private sector—in return for the potential to make large profits from monopolies—would pile huge amounts of capital into these public services. The quid pro quo was that they would run them in a way that the state dictated.

The private companies make massive, easy profits off a captive customer base, and the government get to look good by improving services (or at least modernising them) but—and this is absolutely crucial—it also keeps the capital expenditure off the government books.

I believe, however, that both the Tory and Labour governments had an even more subtle agenda: the privatisation of public services by the back door.

No, bear with me here! Although, I'll admit that the following is purely speculation...

As I intimated in a comment on my Friendly Societies piece, many people in the apparatus of the state (although Brown is possibly not one of them) have started to realise that current levels of government spending are utterly unsustainable. Not only that, but the huge increases in cash simply haven't produced the rise in service quality that was hoped for.

What to do? The government is already spending billions more than it is getting in tax revenue—nearly £200 billion more this year alone. Yes, this year is particularly bad for the public finances, but even in the good years the government has borrowed ten of billions.

This simply isn't sustainable: even the British government will reach a point at which they can no longer get credit (although they are likely to reach a point where it is simply too expensive for them to borrow more). That point obviously hasn't been reached yet, but should the state stick to the projected spending rises, it won't be too many years before they do.

Think about it: not only is the government not paying down its debt, it is actively increasing it—by about 40% of total spending—every single year. This is not prudence, that's for sure.

At the same time, having splurged on public sector appointments and then increased salaries (and, in far too many cases, having to up the pension payments), the government now finds itself in a bind: if it starts sacking thousands of public servants, not only will the unemployment figures rocket upwards but they will also have lost a good number of voters. Besides, the politicos know as well as we do that "efficiency savings" simply don't happen, c.f. the Gershon Report savings, which have been largely illusory.

Not only that, but the NuLabour government is further hamstrung by the fact that the Party is now almost entirely funded by the unions—the bulk of whose members are in the public sector. And the unions are already starting to cut up rough.

Government-sponsored cuts are going to be hard enough for the Tories: they are impossible for Labour.

So, it's time to turn to the private sector—those evil companies sack people all the time, right? And the unions don't have nearly such a strong hold there either. And the government can deny all responsibility as far as job losses go, too.

But the British love their public services—the NHS is the wonder of the world, our education system churns out A grade after A grade, and the oldies are thrilled with the state pension.

So how to make this transition? Now, were I in this situation (and not so damn impatient), I would carry out the exercise in three parts.

1. The first part would be the transfer of the assets to the private sector, whilst maintaining government control.


2. The second part would be the transfer of the administration to private entities, whilst maintaining some control through full or partial government funding.


3. The third part would be the handing over of complete control of the service to the private entity and, crucially, the privatisation of the funding.

The first part has, in many cases, come to pass; many of the schools and hospitals built under PFI remain within the control of the private company even at the end of the contract. The company often runs some of the repair and maintenance services, or other facilities, throughout the life of the contract too.

The second part is also coming to pass. Think about the Tories' plans to make some schools effectively independent along the Swedish "free school" model—not to mention NuLabour's Academies.

In the NHS, more hospitals are applying for—and being granted—Foundation Status, giving them far more control over the administration and budgets (and they are no longer run directly by the Strategic Health Authority but by an "independent regulator" called Monitor).

The Primary Care Trusts, too, are being split—separating their commissioning and providing arms into what are, nominally at least, entities independent of each other. Moves like this suggest to me that the so-called internal market is being set up to become a proper market of competing companies.

For the moment, the third part—the independent funding—has not yet been implemented, although there have been rumblings and rumours of the NHS being a paid-for service, as well as compulsory medical insurance to cover your old age care. The government has most certainly suggested that everyone should be forced to contribute to a private pension.

Now, as I freely admitted, the above is all total speculation on my part—but I'm willing to take a long bet that I am not totally wide of the mark. Even if the privatisation of public services is not on the current government's agenda, all of the foundations for doing so are in place—it just needs someone to start pulling the levers...

Privatise the railways

Constantly Furious is absolutely fucking raging about the fact that many people were prevented from getting to Remembrance Services because First Capital Connect's drivers decided not to turn up for work this Sunday in "a dispute over pay".

The Unions are really starting to flex their muscles at the moment, and we are being reminded just what a bunch of cunts they are. Of course, people like myself couldn't give a shit about Royal Mail staff striking—which is why, I suspect, the CWU have come to an arrangement—and, now that I have a car, I don't take the train very often; similarly, the fact that BA staff are being balloted doesn't bother me one jot.

However, it is worth noticing that all three of the businesses cited above have something in common: they all used to be state-owned monopolies. And, actually, all but BA still are.

"What?" I hear you cry. "But the railways were privatised years ago!"

Um, no...

The railways are not run, in any meaningful sense, by private companies. Consider the evidence, m'lud:

1. The tracks are not run by private companies; they are maintained by a state monopoly called Network Rail. Yes, yes: technically it doesn't appear on the government's books, but it's £19 billion or so of debt is under-written by the state and the vast majority of its income is also derived from the state.


2. As regards the running of the train services, the government controls the franchises.
   
   • These franchises are made so short-term that—given the capital cost involved in so doing—there is little incentive for the private companies to invest.
   
   
   • A company can lose the franchise just like that if the government so wishes—and it often does, e.g. Connex South Eastern, National Express East Coast.
   
   
   • The private companies must pay a guaranteed amount of money to the government in order to run these franchises regardless of earnings, e.g. GNER (although one cannot ignore the fact that GNER negotiated spectacularly badly, such that they were about the only rail company paying a nett amount to the state. Which brings us on to...).


3. The state pays out a massive subsidy—currently sitting at about twice what it was under British Rail—to rail companies to operate these services. Of course, you might look at the whole thing a little differently if—instead of calling it "a subsidy"—you use the word "fees".


4. Of course, many of these subsidies are necessary because the state also broadly controls:
   
   • the train timetables: the companies involved cannot decide to axe or reduce the frequency of many services. (Remember that the biggest destruction of the rail services was carried out by the state.)
   
   
   • the price of tickets: the state sets maximum pricing, and many of the conditions pertaining to those prices (as the state has done almost since the railways' inception, by designating them a Common Carrier).
   
   
   • the relative priority of passenger and freight services.
   
   
   • the rental prices of the lines, through Network Rail.
   
   
   • The terms of employment (and many other conditions) by insisting that the companies that are picked for the franchises recognise unions, etc.

This is not to say that the private companies do not exploit the Simple Shopper—I am sure that they do. It is also not to say that, were the railways properly privatised that they would, in fact, be any better than they are now. (Indeed, since the railways are, like the banks, "too big to fail" they might be worse.)

All I am pointing out is that the railways, right now, are not privatised. What the Tory government did was precisely what Gordon and his merry men have done with schools, hospitals and many other public services: they have entered into a public-private partnership in order to run these services.

The idea is that the private sector puts capital into the services, and the government pays them a massive fee for running those services. The fee has to be pretty massive because private companies cannot borrow at the same favourable rates that the state can: however, the state gets to keep the capital investment off the Treasury's books since the fees count as expenditure rather than capital investment (the reasons why the state would want to do this would make up a whole other post).

And that's all I wanted to point out: that the railways are not privatised. But maybe, just maybe, we might look at whether proper privatisation could work.

But it would have to be proper privatisation—without the constant and crippling interference and condition-setting, occasional nationalisation (e.g. WWI) or commandeering (e.g. WWII) or the companies and network that the state has indulged in almost since the very inception of the rail industry.

Just a thought...

Education: an institutional failure

Your humble Devil tends to get more angry about the piss-poor state of our education system than anything else. Why?

Quite simply because if you give someone a good education then they have—regardless of social background—the tools to better their life. You cannot get a good job if you are unable to read or write, or even speak, at least your own language properly.

If people choose not to take advantage of this potential... well... we shouldn't have to support their laziness. But if they have never been given the most basic equipment, then it becomes far more difficult to blame them when they cannot make a life beyond the dole.

In our modern world, education makes a life: it's that simple.

And no matter what the tractor statistics say, our education system is failing appallingly. One only has to read To Miss With Love on a regular basis to get the personal stories of how and why this is happening; to gain a wider perspective, articles like this are depressingly common.

The analysis of final year work produced at Imperial College London found that UK students made almost three times as many errors in English compared to their foreign counterparts from China, Singapore and Indonesia.

Bernard Lamb, Emeritus reader in genetics at Imperial and president of the Queen's English Society, found that his 18 home grown students had an average of 52.2 errors in two pieces of assessed course work and the final degree exam, while the 10 overseas students averaged only 18.8 errors.

The UK students, attending one of the best universities in the world, all had excellent A-level results, or equivalents, yet all their written work had to be corrected for English.

"Overseas students were much better in avoiding word confusions and errors with apostrophes, other punctuation, grammar and spelling," he said. "We need to raise the very poor standards of UK students by introducing more demanding syllabuses and exams, more explicit teaching and examining of English and by consistent and constructive correction of errors by teachers of all subjects," he said.

As Tom Paine points out, this is because of a systematic failure in our education policy.

As someone trying to learn Chinese, I know the height of the language barrier those Chinese students have crossed. If they can write better English than a native speaker with "good" A levels then, trust me, something is rotten in the state of British education. I do not hesitate to name that rottenness for you. British educationalists are more concerned about agitprop than truth. They are interested, not in opening minds, but in closing them.

As someone who had an excellent education, your humble Devil is often excoriated as being out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. This is not the case: as an Etonian, I know what good education looks like.

Further, unlike those who continually and tediously advocate the return to legitimacy of grammar schools, I am more interested in policies that will deliver a good education to everyone—not just a select few.

Having compared the outcomes from our education system with others, I firmly believe that the Swedish-style voucher model is the way to go.

This model was profiled by the Economist some time ago; unfortunately that article has disappeared behind a pay-wall, but the introduction there can be combined with a quote from the article that I put in one of my older posts.

Introduction:
FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers—letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer's expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.

Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable—and often fatal—opposition from the educational establishment. Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.

Quote from older post.
The strongest evidence against this criticism comes from Sweden, where parents are freer than those in almost any other country to spend as they wish the money the government allocates to educating their children. Sweeping education reforms in 1992 not only relaxed enrolment rules in the state sector, allowing students to attend schools outside their own municipality, but also let them take their state funding to private schools, including religious ones and those operating for profit. The only real restrictions imposed on private schools were that they must run their admissions on a first-come-first-served basis and promise not to charge top-up fees (most American voucher schemes impose similar conditions).

The result has been burgeoning variety and a breakneck expansion of the private sector. At the time of the reforms only around 1% of Swedish students were educated privately; now 10% are, and growth in private schooling continues unabated.

Anders Hultin of Kunskapsskolan, a chain of 26 Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the first-come-first-served rule—the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place. So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector (bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).

More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves. Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.

Schools must be entirely freed from government control—no national pay deal for teachers, no national curriculum, abolition of catchment areas, and no pen-pushing Local Education Authorities stealing a third of the money.

Almost unbelievably, Cameron and his merry men seem to be stutteringly edging towards such a policy. In the Telegraph, Dave writes that he will address our educational failure.

Take school reform. In today's top-down system, all too often parents have to take whatever school they're given. We're going to put meaningful choice in their hands by smashing open the state education monopoly so that any qualified organisation can set up a new state school. This will help raise standards across the board.

What some of these changes might entail were viewed by your humble Devil on Channel 4 News last night. Although Michael Gove might be one of the creepiest-looking men on the planet, he might actually be pushing the Conservatives down a positive route.

The Conservatives are threatening a cull of teachers in poorly-performing schools if they are elected to government.

They plan to get rid of what they call bad teachers and put the poorest performing schools in England into the hands of independent organisations. Based on what has happened with academies taking over failing schools, senior Tories expect a quarter to a third of staff in these schools would be removed as part of their plans to improve standards.

It is part of what Conservative strategists plan as an assault on teaching standards in the classroom which would also see the end of national pay awards and a massive switch from traditional teacher training.

Good. National Pay Awards are one of the stupidest things ever devised—a £2000 pay rise quite obviously buys you more in the depths of Yorkshire than it does in Surrey.

Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove believes that academy schools like the Harris Academy in Norwood, south London show the way.

Since the new team took over the old failing school half the staff have gone. The academy thinks that was central to turning around results.
...

A basic minimum for teachers' pay, currently just over £20,000 a year, would be set but individual headteachers would be free to spread around their own budgets in salary and bonuses.

This is entirely sensible—it gives schools the facility to control their own spending, to set their priorities. Oh, and it'll piss the unions right off—something that was imediately obvious when some bitch from the NUT popped up on the programme, making the usual veiled and not-so-veiled threats.

However, some argue that such a plan would not be effective.

Fuck the teaching unions: as I have consistently argued—most recently in the case of the Royal Mail—the public services are not supposed to be run for the benefit of those who work in them.

On top of all that, Mr Gove wants to parachute thousands of new teaching recruits straight into schools, bypassing the established courses and traditional teacher training and replacing what he believes is a seam of underperforming staff.

This is another good thing: if you want good people to go into teaching, then you need to lower the barriers to entry. Making people do pointless shit like the PGCE simply discourage them from entering the teaching profession in the first place.

All of these things are good measures, but they are meaningless without the crucial element of customer choice.

If a school wants to pay bonuses to good teachers, where is the money going to come from?

If a business provides a good product, then it grows because more people will buy that product: there is a reward.

Under a voucher system, good schools would gain more pupils and, thus, more funding through the vouchers. If there is no reward for the school through increased funding, then how will that school reward teachers? Or gain more money for investment?

It can only be through artificial assessments by bueaucrats, and that brings us back to the central, box-ticking problem.

The Tories are stumbling in the right direction, but they are still missing the central point of setting school free: that these schools do, indeed, compete for customers. If they cannot, there will be no incentive for improvement, and no way to measure it that does not include tractor statistic-style bureaucracy.

As such, I find myself moved to repeat what I wrote the last time that Cameron announced something of this sort.

Yes, Dave, you are quite correct in all of that but as usual you are totally unable to understand what makes these systems work. For fuck's sake, get the state out of schooling!

Abolish the hugely wasteful LEAs, pen-pushing institutions which gobble up huge amounts of money—money that should be going to the schools—and produce precisely fuck-all of any use (apart from keeping large numbers of extraordinarily lazy people in work).

Issue school vouchers to children so that they and their parents can make the choice of school for themselves. If a school is failing to educate the child properly, then the child can move to a better one. This sustains competition between schools which, as we have seen, raises the quality of almost all establishments.

Privatise all schools and colleges, and allow any two teachers to start one. Do not interfere in teaching methods and do not interfere in disciplinary procedures. Just measure the results at the end: ensure that schools publish their results and allow the parents to choose where to send their children.

Half of the problem with our "broken society" is that people do not feel that they have enough choice. And remove choice and consequence from people and you infantilise them: this is the legacy of 60 years of the Welfare State. If you start to give people a choice in their future and the future of their children—which is pretty much what education is: their future—then you will be a good way along the road to fixing the problems that we have.

In the name of fuck, Dave, you have a working system in front of you. You have cited the Swedish model and yet you seem determined to subvert the system because you do not seem to understand why it works.

OK, that's fine: you are too stupid to understand. In that case, don't try to understand it: just accept that it does work and implement the fucking system!

And, in the name of all that's unholy, get the state out of education.

Right now, we have an education system in which 50.4%—yes, that's over fifty fucking percent—of adults have low literacy levels.

Get the state out of the education system and give people their future back.

And if the NUT get in the fucking way, hang the cunts. I'm fucking sick of these bastards destroying the future of thousands—nay, millions—of people.

Here's an idea, in fact: let us calculate the difference in life-time earnings between a literate and non-literate person, multiply that by 30 million and then bill the fucking teaching unions.

That ought to shut them up, the evil fucks that they are.

Royal Mail: bag o'shite

On the fourth of September, I ordered Apple's Snow Leopard from their online store. Using the postal service, it was estimated that my package would arrive between the seventh and the tenth of September.

It did not.

Days passed. Finally, on the seventeenth of September, a Royal Mail "sorry, you were out" note was pushed through my flat door. Apparently, the postman had tried to deliver my package at 11.00 that morning.

Except that no such attempt was made. I know this, because the wife was in all day.

My conclusion, therefore, is that Royal Mail "workers" are a bunch of lazy, shifty, dishonest little shits and, given that, my immediate reaction to the news that said "workers" are contemplating a national strike is quite simple...

How the hell will we tell?

As The Appalling Strangeness says in his comprehensive fisking of the above article...

Finally, maybe Deputy General Secretary [of the Communication Workers' Union] Ward might want to use some empathy and consider why—after a summer where Royal Mail employees have devastated the already tatty reputation of that organisation and made mail deliveries even more of a joke than they have been before—those running the Royal Mail believe increased automation and employing fewer people might be the best way forward for them.

Quite. And maybe—just maybe—Deputy General Secretary Ward might like to consider that Royal Mail is not run for the benefit of its workers: it is run for the benefit of Royal Mail's paying customers and for the benefit of the taxpayers who subsidise the whole shebang.

Because private companies cannot be run for the good of the workers or they go bust. This is why the privatisation of state-run businesses and monopolies has led to so much better service—union demands are anathema to running an efficient business: as a result, those ex-state monoliths have had to curb the unions, or die.

I say that we should properly privatise the Royal Mail and—furthermore—that said privatisation cannot come soon enough.

London Underground

Your humble Devil was little affected by the RMT strike that brought the Tube to a halt. However, there really is only one comment to make...


I doubt that I shall be the only person who posted this...

Teachers rise

It seems that the teaching profession is as fucking blind to circumstances as always...

Teachers demanded a 10 per cent pay rise yesterday and said they refused to take “lessons in morality” from Government ministers over money.

The National Union of Teachers(NUT) voted to campaign for a £3,000 or 10 per cent salary increase, whichever is greater, because they said they had been underpaid during the boom years.

Being teachers, you will, of course, understand your humble Devil's reply to this demand...

Fuck. Off.

Apart from anything else, there is no money left: you fucks are going to be incredibly fucking lucky not to be facing a pay cut. As such, I suggest that you shut your fucking traps.

Dave Clinch, who proposed the motion, said young teachers were being forced to leave the profession because they could not afford to live, adding: “Teachers are being forced to grovel for money that’s rightfully theirs.”

No, you cunt, that money rightfully belongs to the taxpayer; it is the result of our toil, and you have fuck all right to any of it.

You certainly have fuck all right to any of my money, since I have not used, do not use—and intend to try to make damn fucking sure that I never do need to use—your services, you bunch of useless cretins.

How about we make your pay performance-related, eh? Here's a proposal: you can have a pay rise when not one single child leaves state education unable to read and write.

You fucking sort that—by, y'know, actually teaching—and we'll talk again.

In the meantime, fuck off.

UPDATE: if teachers want higher pay, The Englishman has a few suggestions...

Abolish LEAs and all rules and restrictions as to who can run a school.
Hand over the keys and deeds of every school to the governing bodies
Give 100% of the education budget to parents as vouchers for them to spend where they want to on education.

And then if junior teachers can earn £100,000 a year because they are worth it, great.

Quite so. But right now, what teachers are paid does not reflect their market value (either up or down). So, let's instigate a system which we know—from Sweden if nowhere else—actually works and improves outcomes for the kiddies (that is why we are doing this education thing, isn't it?).

Until then, and whilst it's my money their demanding, teachers can still fuck off.

Define democracy...

I really do think that it's about time that this bunch of clowns changed their name.

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Tavish Scott is to demand the Scottish Government ditches its planned independence referendum.

Mr Scott will tell his party's conference that Holyrood ministers should focus on tackling the recession.

He will say debating the minority SNP government's Referendum Bill is a waste of taxpayers' cash.

It has been said many, many times: the Liberal Democrats are fans of neither liberalism nor democracy—surely we can sue them under Trading Standards laws?

Me? I hope that Scotland has their referendum, and I hope that the Scots vote for independence. And then we can ditch the first fucking millstone—these five million looters—from around our necks and get on with being productive.

Because it is instructive to remember that we have been bailing out Scotland for as long as the Union has been in place; we have been bailing that country out ever since its bankruptcy—as a result of the ill-fated Darien scheme—and it is time to fucking stop.

Don't get me wrong: I believe that the Union has served us well, and there is no doubt that Britain benefited from, for instance, the Scottish Enlightenment. But that is long gone, and the Scots are nothing now but looters and parasites upon the productive. Furthermore, their arrogance and intractable stupidity—and, having lived in Edinburgh for a decade, I know of what I speak—ensures that all too many Scots are utterly unaware of just how much they owe to England.

Fine. Cut them loose and then, when they are bankrupt (again) and come crawling to England for a bailout (again), we can decide whether or not we wish to take them on (again). Although I cannot imagine why, in all sanity, we would do so.

Scotland is a busted flush: it produces nothing of any value—even its banks are shit and have been bailed out by the English (again).

It's time to stop.

Rocking that bonus boat

I find the news that Northern Rock staff are to get a 10% bonus to be quite incredible.

Northern Rock triggered a political row last night when it revealed that it was preparing to pay about £9 million in staff bonuses.

The nationalised bank confirmed that almost all its 4,500 employees would receive bonuses worth 10 per cent of annual pay tomorrow. For an average employee, that will amount to about £2,000.

Now, there are a couple of things that annoy me about this. The first is that I thought that we had all agreed that the "bonus culture" was a bad thing? Was the government not condemning it? Indeed, they were essentially laying all the ills of the banking crisis at the feet of said culture.

The second thing that pisses me right off is that, in return for government loans, most banks were stopped from paying any dividends to shareholders. So, now that Northern Rock is paying what are, effectively, dividends to its employees, will it also be paying dividends to shareholders? In fact, will the government be lifting the ban on dividends entirely?*

But it is this utterly hysterical defence of this bonus scheme that gripped my shit. [Emphasis mine.]

Unite, the trade union, defended the payments. “Staff at the bank have worked exceptionally hard in extremely difficult circumstances. They have experienced the loss of friends and colleagues through compulsory redundancy yet have continued working solidly,” it said.

What? That phrasing—"experienced the loss of friends"—that I find a bit insane: it's not like these people are dead, for fuck's sake. Perhaps I should send cards to Northern Rock employees reading "so sorry for your loss".

And these people should be congratulated and rewarded for the fact that, despite their tragic loss, they "have continued working solidly"? Seriously, what the fuck?

Seriously how out of date are Unite (don't answer that)? The reason that Northern Rock employees have carried on "working solidly" is because, if they did not, it would have been them who would have been made redundant.

You see, Unite, that's what happens in the private sector when you are lazy, incompetent and generally shit at your job: you get fired. Now, I know that you union cunts are used to dealing with the public sector but surely you must understand that the rest of the economy—the productive part of it—doesn't work in quite the same way?

Fucking hellski...

* I only ask because I would like to see some return on my now-near-worthless RBS shares. I bought the shares with some of the large profit that I made from Apple, so easy-come, easy-go, I suppose. Even so, it's a little irritating to see £5k reduced to about £100...

Unions are a law unto themselves

Apparently, the TUC believes that the unions should not be subject to the same laws as everyone else, as Croydonian has discovered.

Yes, that's what they are saying, via the European Trade Union Confederation, of which it is part:

"The ETUC therefore calls on Europe to fight for workers' rights, for fair and decent wages, for stable jobs and for strong collective bargaining practice, independent of and not subordinated to law courts and judges".

That is just one part of a frankly extraordinary document to which it has put its mark, 'The London Declaration: a call for fairness and tough action'.

Do go and read the rest of the frankly horrifying post, which outlines the unions' desire to nationalise just about everything under the sun, and then some.

Fucking hellski...

The stupidity and intransigence of the unions

I should probably go to bed, so that I can get on with some work tomorrow, but I thought that I would leave you with Travellgall's comment on the collapse of Alitalia Airlines, over at A Very British Dude's place.

Alitalia, the Italian state run airline has had a rescue deal pulled from it after the intransigence of trade unions meant those trying to save the company had to deal with workers who were physically incapable of adapting to real market conditions. Silvio Berlusconi said that this was a “catastrophe for Italian Society and trade unions”. Yet it was those Trades Unions that were responsible for the collapse in the first place, and every subsequent action made the medicine harder for them to take and the condition to get worse. Bad management had a hand in it too, but the lack of flexibility in the workers meant that the company was doomed by the unions. They refused longer hours for the same pay, well guess what Alitalia pilots, you’ll have all the spare time in the world now, just with no pay.
...

Yet the demise of the airline is best explained by this part of an article in the Times…

Despite the crisis, Alitalia's planes continued to take off and land normally. Fifty flights were cancelled yesterday, but the airline said that this was because of a one-day strike by a small trades union.

So let's get this straight, your Company is fighting for its life, everybody knows this is the last chance you've got to save your job, and YOU GO ON STRIKE!

And really, don't think that the Italian unions have a monopoly on utter, mind-boggling stupidity: the Trades Unions in this country are just as bad.

0.04% makes all the difference

As you will know, I think that RMT boss Bob Crow is an evil fucking cunt. Still, I was happy to see that the Tube strike had been called off at the last minute but I was just a wee bit puzzled: you see, the papers were reporting that the strike was called off after the pay deal was raised from 4.95% to 4.99%.

Does 0.04% really make so much difference? I mean, I know that there were allegedly problems with "bullying" suchlike, but surely that was a job for TfL managers and not worth holding a strike over?

On an entirely unrelated note, here's Banditry with a tongue-in-cheek (I think) conspiracy theory. [Apologies for quoting in full.]

[phone rings]
BJ: Wot ho, Bozza here.
BC: Hello. I’m Bob Crow, and I’m evil. I’m going to lead the Tube maintenance workers out on strike (a 5% pay rise just isn’t enough, you see) and paralyse the city.
BC: [evil laugh]
BJ: Oh. That’s dashed inconvenient. Is there, erm, anything we can do to appease you?
BC: Hmmm.
BC: [evil laugh]
BC: Well, there is one thing…
BJ: Jolly good, I always say that reasonable chaps can work things out reasonably.
BC: The guy you hired to run TfL—you know, the one with the record in taking over badly run, overmanned companies, cutting costs, improving services, breaking union strangleholds, that kind of thing?
BJ: Oh yes, Timmy. A bit of an oik—his daddy was a squaddie, what, but the only chap on my team who isn’t a completely useless buffoon.
BC: Hmmm.
BC: He goes.
BC: [evil laugh]
BJ: And that way your chaps will take the 5%?
BC: Oh yes…
BJ: Spiffing fun. Timmy goes, strike’s off, let’s all have tea and cakes.
BC: …until next time.
BC: [evil laugh]

I know, I know: it sounds ker-azeeeee, eh? But I wonder...

UPDATE: Guido's thinking along the same (Tube) lines, it appears...

Parker said when he started in June: "Throughout my business career I have been accountable to exacting shareholders. In my new role, my shareholders will be the taxpayers of London." He took a symbolic £1 in pay. 24 hours after he quit TFL and TubeLines caved in to a ludicrous London Underground pay deal. Hence the RMT's Crowe cancelling the strike. Do you think that perhaps Parker, a famous cost cutter, quit for this reason? Can it be a coincidence? Could Boris have hoisted the white flag because he was petrified of "Tory Cuts" rhetoric?

Hmmmm...