Mostly charmless

Here’s a charming vignette of life in Yorkshire’s chunk of the public sector, from the ever-reliable Beeb.

Council chief 'made lewd remarks'

A former children's services manager at Barnsley council told a pregnant colleague "it would be easy to have an abortion", a tribunal has heard.

Douglas Adams, (yes, I know) who was assistant director of children's services, also told another woman he could imagine her in a "Miss Whiplash outfit".

The 56-year-old, from Nottingham, is accused by the General Social Care Council (GSCC) of misconduct.

An aside, only, but this is what it takes to discipline social workers or their leaders without national tabloid coverage. It’s not taking children from law-abiding Christian parents; or leaving them with violent drug addicts living in chav ménages a trois and thus exposing them to repeated violent or sexual abuse and eventually murder whilst ignoring all the repeat evidence to the contrary; nor assuming that soldiers are more violent to their children than other people; nor placing them with homosexual couples in preference to their blameless natural grandparents. Insult other social workers, and you’re toast.

The claims relating to four women were listed as a hearing started in London.

Mr Adams allegedly said he knew that Ms D, a junior member of administrative staff, was pregnant because her breasts had become larger.

He told her it would be easy to have an abortion because it was early in her pregnancy, the tribunal heard.

He is also accused of telling the woman her boyfriend was "using her for sex" and that she would lose her figure.

Mr Adams, who did not attend the hearing, is alleged to have said to another colleague, Ms A: "Oh yes, I can see you in a Miss Whiplash outfit with high leather boots taking them [her male colleagues] in hand."

When managers at Barnsley council discussed the matter with him, Mr Adams told them that while he did not accept all the allegations he admitted his remarks to Ms D were inappropriate.

However, he put it into context by describing it as "shock tactics" to discuss her pregnancy.

Mr Adams was suspended on 9 June 2006 before a disciplinary hearing on 26 July.

Mr Larkin said: "He made some admissions but sought to put his remarks into context.

And the context in which it’s okay to suggest abortions to underlings, openly discuss them dressed as dominatrixes and refer to their lactating breasts is…?

"Nonetheless he accepted that his remarks were inappropriate and he expressed regret."

Mr Adams was summarily dismissed from the authority in August 2006 and lost a subsequent appeal.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine what sort of recruitment, selection processes, training and peer reviews recruits and promotes to great power and influence an individual as crass and ignorant as Mr. Adams and place him in charge of the people responsible for the vulnerable children of one of England’s most famous toilet-towns, and to speculate about the fate of the defenceless kids under his ‘care.’

However, as they say, there’s a larger point here which is: just how low can the public sector go?

This case has got me thinking about the conduct of public servants (please don’t snort – it’s undignified).

I’ve had twentyish jobs, both temporary and ‘permanent’, since leaving school thirty-odd years ago and about a quarter of them have been in the public sector, and the behaviour, manners and morality of those at the public trough are, on reflection, way worse than their private sector neighbours.

Don’t get me wrong. This is no libertarian screed about the essential morality of the market compared with the productive sector. The pursuit of profits is no guarantee of goodness; but it is a pretty fine indicator of politeness and respectful behaviour between colleagues. Now, I’ve worked under sales managers who could never quite get the hang of halting their ‘sell more’ monologues when making speeches at birthday parties and leaving celebrations, and a couple of proprietors were rather slower at handing out pay increases than I’d have liked. And you have to work on a large sales team or in the newspaper industry to know just how foul-mouthed civilised people can be.

But O! my gentles; how insensitive are the tax-collectors and how rude the troughers!

Right now I have a relative whose largish provincial government section of about sixty staff includes; one never-married single mother who goes around complaining at the expense of war-widows’ tiny extra benefits for ethno-religious reasons while running down the British Army that protects her freedoms and her generous tax credits and who abuses Christianity throughout the entire office in a foul-mouthed and high-decibel way without a word of rebuke from management. She is managed by someone so crass as to place her in close proximity to a couple of known Christians – and this is out of forty peers amongst whom she could be placed. There is a socialist consensus so thick and the Labour ‘culture’ so prevalent that allegedly professional suit-wearing types can gleefully and obscenely anticipate the death of The Fatcher right in front of their few known Tory underlings and expect to get away with it. He has a colleague who openly boasts of family support for terrorism, and another manager who was so openly and frequently rude to her subordinates that she was banished to a make-work job to keep her away from any personal contact with other human beings – but only after years of her bullying ways being tolerated by all the levels of leadership above her.

All this in a service which, during an ongoing pay review, saw managers openly running down their subordinates’ roles and responsibilities in order to inflate their own importance and pay grades, and others colluding with the wholesale corruption of the assessment process in order to promote favoured specialisms and personally concocted sinecures.

You have to have worked in the ‘education’ system - or have been brought up by people who worked in it, - to know just how back-biting, clique-ridden and bitchy human beings can be to their neighbours in peacetime.

I have a friend who, when he was feeling excluded from company and support in the staff room of a small country school, was told by his union rep to get the hell out of Dodge and find a nice sink-hole city pre-comprehensive instead as he himself had been reduced to eating his lunch in the car rather than suffer the cold shoulder from the cellulite-clad rural harpies with whom he worked.

Then there’s this other friend who works in a particular, not very big, section of a local authority whose boss is shacked up with the Head of Service, and who has an inordinately hefty percentage of her staff out on disciplinary charges or suspension (and full pay, O taxpayer) on the most spurious and baseless (and indeed evidence-free) of accusations. This situation has lasted for years and yet she seems to be immune to the most basic of employee rights processes and there’s no end in sight for the victims but feigning sickness and resignations for her helpless staff and eventually legal action that will cost – guess who? – a packet whether successful or not.

Don’t get me wrong here either about favouritism. Private sector mangers can show it; especially in sales and other jobs with production quotas; but I only ever recall favouritism shown as lavish praise and some smallish office privileges to the top-level achievers. They were never allowed to be abusive to their peers – at least not without being slapped down by the selfsame colleagues when they got too cocky.

Mister Adams would be out on his ear in no time.

As far as I can see, public sector nepotism and favouritism just go beyond a joke. My first colleague’s boss has made a practice of refusing any and every shop-floor or middle-management suggestions to improve the service they provide, while shunting personnel round regardless of their specialisms and experience at will, and thus wasting talent, experience and training along with your money.

I’ve never known a businessman: director, sole proprietor, franchisee or hired hand supervisor who actively sabotages the daily working practices of their best staff by such micromanagement. Sure, they make big mistakes that annoy and temporarily slow stuff down, but they see the light when the bottom line is pointed out to them – but they don’t email their entire staffs instructing them to never publicly criticise any aspect of an entire Ministry or local authority’s working and costs. Ever.

I’ve worked in fast-food outlets on freezing nights and on production lines on heat-wave sweltering days and been more considerately treated and more politely addressed by potty-mouthed and tattooed dole-class escapees than by the letters-after-their-names suits who rule my little section of Government Hell. You can imagine how good we all are at our jobs with that lot to wade through. Its not that I expect productive sector workers to be sympathetic to the plight of a minor bureaucrat like me, but just think what this does to cost effectiveness and where it all sends your tax pounds.

All this in the most heavily unionized workplaces in the country.

Either they’re putting something in the water in the public sector or the power that comes from monopoly and monopsony; the lack of responsibility; or any sense of ownership of the resources involved leads me to believe that this whole ‘caring public service’ thing is just a tick box talking-point.

Kiss your taxes goodbye – they’re not even making the pen-pushers happy.

Picture from here.

Boxgrove bureaucrats

One inch of Global Warming fell on Castle City on Sunday night, reducing its roads to a sparsely-used 4-by-4 demonstration circuit; unpopulated by Post Office vans and school-run private cars alike.

Off the main drag (say anywhere more than 1/8 mile distant from of city hall, police station, tax offices and court buildings) the ‘main’ roads are today cleared in only the middle and their gutters are used as sidewalks by pedestrians who are utterly afraid to use its ice-rink pavements.

Shops are under stocked and unvisited, the elderly have been banished from the streets, and I’m told that ambulances are now only attending those who firmly state that they are dying.

One of the chief justifications for putting up with government and all its control of us and its endless taxes is that it can provide cheap, efficient, collective protection measures against disasters and thus maintain civilised life in the face of emergencies and routine, large scale problems where there’s not a relatively easy and tax-efficient quid or two to be made in the usual ways of imagination, organisation and hard work. Thus the poor and the weak and the sick and the elderly who could never afford expensive road-gritting services; who don’t have large domestic staffs or employees to draft in to help; and who aren’t strong enough to remove the ice from their own pavements need not be imprisoned in their homes now short of the basic necessities of life, such as food and drink, or rapidly chilling if they haven’t paid their heating bills on time due to the snowbound non-collection of their pensions.

If any natural rights or consequentialist libertarians want to suggest insurance-based schemes in a low-tax environment, go ahead. You might be right on this one. You can scarcely be worse than our tax farming master muppets. The might also suggest that everybody pull themselves together all pioneer manly-like and copper up for snow shoes or skis, but wait till you get arthritis sonny-boy, and see where it gets you.

Castle City is still an ice rink two days after the tiniest snowfall and although the relatively young and fit can get around town - along with those lucky enough to live near where the politicians and their attendants do their stuff; of whom I am one - the suburbs out of shouting distance of the administrative centre was pretty much Wrinkleyfrei today. You could even get around Marks and Spencer’s at lunchtime and teatime. So, one inch of snow = pedestrian death trap for the over-fifties; the disabled; nursing mothers; the mentally deficient, and children.

Sixty-five years of the Welfare State and what you can expect after a couple of hours of ordinary winter weather is the choice between imprisonment in your home or risking life and limb. Lord Beveridge, you should see this day.

As Dumb Jon commented on my disbelieving post yesterday, you can bet that the bureaucracy will grow from this, and not shrink. I was already thinking along these lines, but good ol’ Jon, well, he just loves to point out where I missed a little bit of Leftie evil up there in the shadowy corner where even my polemic splatter marks don’t quite reach.

So I thought; why wasn’t this dealt with better by the authorities? I mean, we’ve always (most of us and most of our ancestors) lived on a large island in the North Atlantic between the Gulf Stream and the Arctic for thousands of years – since it was a peninsula, in fact.

Are snow and its icy consequences any surprise? Who should deal with the aftermath and learn any lessons that need to be learned, I wonder? Do the leaderships of Castle County and Castle City regard their dealings with the weather as a triumph? As a job well done? Mission accomplished? Meh? Must try harder? Do they blame the previous administration? Acts of God? Sabotage? Alien invasion? Diabolic possession? Racism?

Knowing something of the bureaucracies involved, and having filled out several forms for jobs with each authority, I can be sure that whoever will have the job will have been recruited not only for an impeccable CV and a career structure that will have ticked all the right managerialist boxes, but will either exactly fit the desire racial mix that County and City want, or will be statistically accounted for as something to improve upon. And all this useless knowledge will have been gathered, stored and pondered upon by numerous people whose salaries might have been spent on something else. Such as more salt or grit.

Instead, they are likely doing jobs like these, or asking the NHS for protection money, as in: Nice little hospital you go there Sunshine: wouldn’t want it to fill up with all these broken gaffers and grannies, now would we?

Here comes the positive, which we might expect from a conservative government we’re not going to get:

Mandatory emergency work commitment for all jobseekers during times like these.

If your rent, council tax, food, lighting and small quantities of food and clothing are paid for by the public and all you have to do is watch TV and make more babies, then it wouldn’t be reviving the Triangular Trade to insist that you turn up at City Hall to be given photocopied maps and shovels and brushes and directions to a number of residential areas to clear, starting with the main paths from ‘social housing’ and especially sheltered accommodation for pensioners, to the nearest shops or buys stops into town.

One ‘diversity awareness’ session per year for each City and County employee to be replaced by training each one to join a rota to co-ordinate church and youth groups to do emergency shopping for the elderly and those on Incapacity Benefit or Disability Living Allowance. The Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit departments of the local authority who have such information on computer could contact such people by phone to see if they need help after, say, two days to see if there’s any problem, or send scouts out to the phoneless on the third day (hah!)

Phone lines to be made available to charity groups (and the teachers whose schools are closed for ‘safety reasons’) to co-ordinate further and tailored needs of particular individuals such as those who must attend hospital or GPs very soon. Dialysis and maternity cases a priority, perhaps.

Clearly, they’ve got this much worse dahn sarf, but the North will cop its own packet one day, sure enough.

Now, lots of folk can look after themselves, but there are tons who can’t and I’d guess that some of them live all over the country an icy pavement or two away. It wouldn’t take a genius to think up a few coordinating jobs for local government to do in these cases, which is handy because I doubt that local government has one.

Homo Heidelbergensis survived in Britain half a million years ago with sticks, stones, and bones, and unless we go down the Leftie route of saying that things were much nastier in the past, so why all the hoo-hah about violent crime today?, I’d like to suggest that modern man, with all his technology and vast tax wealth and communications, could do a little better for the elderly and sick during a cold snap than just laissez-faire, or enriches vous, or sauve qui peut.

Disgust.

Easy does it

They’re killing us by accident. Mostly.

Stan and Julia both post about the off-duty policeman who followed a mother who chastised her kid in public, and who then caused officers to visit her home, and warn her about her child-rearing methods and to warn her that she was now on the local authority’s list for years to come.

As Julia points out, they don’t seem to be so keen to follow up real cases of persistent child abuse from people who just might kick off in court, or in police stations, or on their doorsteps if police ask them how they’re bringing up their kids. Thanks to The Ranting Penguin, we learn that this one got away with arson. Baby P was seen often and his awful plight ignored but there are many cases of officialdom picking on the law-abiding, but it’s not only because they’re Gramscian Marxists, but because they are officials.

It’s not deadly, yet. What happens is that, if officials aren’t kept to their duties; to the idea that some conduct is wrong; that there are duties as well as rights that their ‘customers’ have, then anything is seen to go, and eventually the loudest and the nastiest will prevail – out of bureaucratic inertia.

This is so true in the whacky world of welfare benefits. Those who politely ask how their benefit claim is coming on because the bills are mounting up are told that their claim will be paid in chronological order. Please wait your turn. Take a number. All in due course. Those who ring or visit every single day are helped faster because otherwise their harassment of officials will waste even more time. Screamers go straight to the head of the queue, and will have their cases looked at again and again even though they are not entitled or are only minimally entitled because they’ve got enough money already. We put up with under-age kids who say they’ll get pregnant if they don’t get the accommodation they want – and not report them to the police. What manager wants the fuss of the Data Protection ‘issues’ that would arrive on his or her desk a week later? We fail to report to Social Services families who are clearly having too many children for their meagre accommodation to be safe or well-rested – let alone to get any homework done, ever.

Don’t rock the boat, don’t tick the boxes marked ‘refer’ or ‘call security.’ It’s just too much trouble.

So the irresponsible breeders and the drunks and the junkies who can come into the office and raise merry hell or to keep our phone lines busy and keep other work undone get a free pass and the red carpet treatment. We’re taught to be customer–friendly, non-judgemental, and diverse. We mustn’t think of them as scum or ever allude to their misdeeds (that’s never stated openly – it’s just part of ‘customer service.’)

So the Baby Ps it kills by inertia, and the seven kids squeezed into a housing association terrace built for four people, tops, whilst the parents trouser the benefits intended to buy more for them, and they’re well on their way to uneducated criminality, addiction and knife fighting to pas the time. The Reds are right in this one: poor housing kills because it creates poor human beings who kill or die young.

All this lacks malice and conspiracy on officialdom’s part – but still people die.

It gets worse, as Mark Steyn and Melanie Phillips point out.

Once extreme political correctness is added to the amoral moral equivalence of state bureaucracies everywhere, then the biggest fuss-makers and the biggest kickers-off of all get a free pass for years - until the get the message and decide to spread the word big-time.

And then the innocent die in handfuls.

Slaughterhouse 2010

The abolition hit list.

From Julia’s post on the war against patriotism in education I had a little idea.

I have a little list.

My list (and yours if you want to join in) sets out the organisations that promote the destruction of the four nation states that comprise Britain, and along with them the customs, morals and rules which make us what we are and largely make us as safe and free as possible in this fallen world.

The Local Education Authorities. Destroying education since 1974. Try this instead. Or better yet, this.

The Probation Service. Keeping criminals on the street and doing harm since getting the Christians out of their faces.

Next, please..?

James suggests Common Purpose.

I don't like them. I think they're up to no good. They're on the list to lose all their state funding.

Pavlov's Cat says the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Yep, we’ll have that down the dole ASAP I think – the banker in any British game of Victimhood Poker...and excellent practice for getting us out of messes that Edward Heath got us into.

Cloudesley Shovell, a welcome newcomer, says cease funding ASH - Action on Smoking and Health. Yes to that one too, sir. We’ll need them out of the way when we start to rebuild property rights again. And it’s a wizard wheeze…

The Human Rights Act per Mark Wadsworth -and the Tories' latest response to it.

Next?