And now for a rant

There are times when the state of this country is in exasperate even me and I tend to think that things have been much worse fairly frequently in the past.

Item 1: today's public sector strike. Without going into all the details, it is sufficient to say that the public sector was the growth industry in this country throughout the Labour years with unemployment being kept low by the public rather than the private sector hiring and money going on various projects that kept young people especially off the unemployment register. As for pensions, let us not forget the repeated raids on the private pension funds in order to raise money for the public sector.

We can no longer afford this and the screws are slowly, far too slowly, being tightened. So we get strikes about pensions that are above what most people in the private sector can afford. The rest of us have to work and manage as best we can.

Yet the moment this is said one gets people (not many but some) who shriek about the public sector workers saving lives and being poor. Nurses and dinner ladies are favourite examples. Just how many in the public sector save lives? And how many of them get paid as badly as dinner ladies? How many, on the other hand, have very nice, safe (less so these days but still safer than in the private sector) well paid jobs which consist of creating ever more forms to fill in and making life difficult for the rest of us? Oh, and let's not forget those nice safe pensions at the end.

Then there are the teachers and class assistants. Apparently I have to feel for them because they work so hard for so little money. Are these the same people who while pocketing a not inconsiderable salary fail to teach our children to read and write, as well as other subjects?

Item 2: the strange hysteria surrounding some unpleasant and probably unwell woman who produced a truly disgusting racist rant on the Croydon tram. These things do happen: rants and rows are not uncommon on public transport and the woman should have been asked to get off as she was a nuisance. Instead, we got what Brendan O'Neill has called a twenty-first century Twitch Hunt, started by some self-righteous little ... oh never mind ... who decided to film the event and put it on YouTube. The rest can be read here.

Rather than showing that ‘racism in Britain is as rife as ever’, as one person tweeted, the #MyTramExperience Twitch Hunt actually reveals the rise of a different backward trend: the tendency for herds of intolerant Twitterers to act like coppers’ narks, to make a massive deal out of their own shallow moralistic indignation, and to be utterly contemptuous of the idea that the public is more than capable of dealing with isolated incidents of racist abuse when they arise. The hounding of this woman was not a great act of anti-racist activism – it was the virtual equivalent of children chasing the local crazy lady through the streets and shouting ‘Nutter!’ or ‘Cow!’.

Of course, one could argue that this is the curse of the social media, which has many good aspects as well. People seem to lose all sense of proportion in their comments and reactions because it is done from a computer or some other electronic application.

ADDENDUM: The Taxpayers' Alliance has published a helpful guide to public sector pay and pensions. Read it if you have time.

Backtracking again

As promised yesterday, I am abandoning the bin Laden story for the time being and going back to other matters. So, when I say backtracking I do not mean the White House and its various unco-ordinated accounts or yet another sob-story from bin Laden's family who, if one were to believe some people, resemble George Washington in their inability to tell a lie.

No, it is the Cleggeron Coalition that appears to be backtracking again, this time on the subject of whether the private sector should take on some of what is known as "public services".

The BBC tells us:

Leaked documents suggest ministers have decided the "wholesale outsourcing" of public services to the private sector would be politically "unpalatable".

Ministers instead want to use more charities, social enterprises and employee-owned "mutual" organisations.

Outsourcing was meant to be a key part of the government's drive to cut costs and reduce the UK's budget deficit.

The shift in policy will raise questions about whether the government can make the savings it has promised - or deliver the services it is committed to - just by using charities and mutuals.

The change will also raise questions about whether the Conservatives are bowing to Liberal Democrat pressure to focus more on delivering public services locally rather than privately.

The government's plans will be unveiled in the long-delayed Open Public Services White Paper which is expected to be published later this month.

The Guardian is cautiously hopeful that its main source of revenue - advertisements of public sector jobs - will not be affected.

A leaked memo of a meeting between business chiefs and the minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, says there will be "no return to the 1990s" and wholesale outsourcing. Maude is preparing a white paper on public services – delayed since February – setting out the future direction of public services, which is expected to contain plans to match private sector companies to charities and volunteer groups to run public services.

Labour accused the government of being in retreat after the fierce opposition to plans to bring in private providers to the NHS and forestry. But Downing Street played down the reports. "We were never planning wholesale privatisation. It was perhaps interpreted as such but that was never the plan," a spokesperson said.

Well, goodness me, we can't have competition within the NHS. Why that would mean patients having a choice and, perhaps, not choosing the pharmaceutical companies that the government and the extensive NHS bureaucracy has set up various deals with. You know how contrary some people can be.

Well, another day, another U-turn. Nothing to wonder about. Nevertheless, the news and its reporting shows up what is so deeply wrong with the Cleggeron Coalition's attitude to the whole problem of the public sector. They see it entirely as a matter of cuts to save money. No possible question that in all ways - economic, social, moral - much of what the public sector does would be better in private hands. Of course, the thousands of people employed to push bits of paper round whenever their computers crash and click on various computer programmes in the odd intervals between those crashes might find that they have get real jobs and work a good deal harder than they do now, and that would never do.

The very language used gives it away: "outsourcing". In other words, the norm is services run by the state and in the interests of saving money they might have to be "outsourced" to private companies who would probably be better at it. This, to the Cleggerons, is a shocking thought. No, no, no. We shall deal with charities, which are really quangos as they live off money handed out to them by the state, and the bloated and inefficient local government that has shown itself incapable of running anything. After all, that is precisely what happened in the nineties (and the late eighties).