Its Begun

I've been saying for some time that the permanent State bureaucracy would frustrate the Liberal-Tories attempts to slash the size of the State, thereby sending the economy into a serious recession. Yesterday, the BBC headlines covered statements by senior doctors at the BMA Conference saying that cuts being introduced by Health Authorities were already resulting in decisions being made that impacted healthcare adversely. This in the NHS, which is supposed to be ringfenced under the Liberal-Tory proposals.

Today, the BBC headlines have highlighted statements by senior Police Officers that proposed cuts will inevitably lead to a drop in the number of Police Officers out on the streets. Its no coincidence that in opinion poll after opinion poll it is the number of cops out on the beat that the Public see as being most important. We can expect to see a flurry of such stories, intensifying in their description of the horrors that will result from any cuts to budgets.

Anyone that has worked in Local Government or any other bureaucracy will be familiar with this. The top bureaucrats when asked for cuts will look for the most unpopular, the most visible things to cut, and offer those up first. In Local Government, if you can find something to cut in some of the more influential Councillors wards, all the better. This opens the door to putting forward some smaller, more acceptable cuts as part of the negotiation. In most cases this works its way out as low status services, employing usually low-paid, low status workers being cut back or axed, and some reorganisation of departments and services as a result. The reorganisation usually requires some higher status bureaucrats to be seen to be taking on greater responsibility, and requiring a higher salary for doing so, usually accompanied by a bigger office, new equipment for it etc., and possibly a couple of lower tier bureaucrats extra to assist with the task.

For example, under CCT at the Council where I worked the Manual workforce of over 1,000 was decimated. Where a handful of fairly low grade Supervisors and one manager had been able to deal with this 1,000 manual employees the situation changed dramatically as the work was farmed out to private companies. Now a fairly high status "Contract" manager was required, as well as an equivalent "Client" manager. Considerable work was created for quite high status legal staff, to check Contracts, and similarly considerable work was created for simialrly high paid Accountants to ensure that the Contracts were kept within budgets, payments made properly and so on. But, in addition to that it was necessary to employ a clutch of middle ranking Supervisors whose job it was to monitor the performance of the Contracts, and so on.

The Manual workforce all but disappeared, but a sizeable management, supervisory and administrative bureaucracy sprang up in its place. All good for the top bureaucrat whose salary and status rose in line with the number of other bureaucrats he now had within his Empire. Expect the same here.