@
vorian Preceded by a Labour Government that had shouted blue murder at the previous Conservative policies - then pursued the same policies with the same zeal if not more.
I do
not believe the "profiteering" jibe at all - it is oh-so-easy to shout cliched accusations and slogans - but I
do believe of any Party, that governments largely work in short-term ways without thinking decades beyond the next election; tend to concentrate too much on what the Public and Press see (or perceive) rather than the deeper levels; and think much more of cost than value.
Though on the last failing, the politicians, unlike the Press and too many members of "the public",
do appreciate that there is no such thing as "government money", that it is all tax-payers' money.
What they seem
not to appreciate is that now so much of that money just disappears abroad as the added burden of profits, under the myth of "inward investment", a slogan that looks as faulty as it looks American.
..............
I saw this from the inside, as a low-ranking, technical-grade civil-servant whose state-owned research employer was sold by Messrs. Blair and Brown in a very shady deal brokered by some dubious
American money-outfit. Not our own commercial brokers. Oh no!
I now belong to my union's Retired Members' Group. It was and is a very progressive union; not one of the antiquated, commercially-suicidal types that wreaked havoc on their own livelihoods. Nevertheless, its magazine carried story after story of campaigns to try to stop the destruction of one public asset after another by random cuts, sales to God-knows-whom or just outright closure, by both Labour and Conservative governments, without the slightest analysis of purpose, value and consequences.
The main targets were the easy, mainly more background but state not "government" property: higher academia, museums and libraries, the arts, the utilities and transport services all too easily taken for granted; the Armed Forces, and the less obvious Civil Service administrative and technical organisations. Why?
- a) They are not the cuddly fluffy animals in the pet-shop window, as are Schools, DHSS, NHS and Police though these were and still are squeezed too; and
- b) The civil-servants' , local government officers' and military's own, much-valued and staunchly-defended neutrality made it very hard for them to defend themselves against any-party government's attack on their work - work
for the country, not the government of the day.
Especially against first Conservative Prime Ministers who genuinely thought the "private sector" better at running things than State employees (I now see this as a huge mistake!); and by an overly pro-American, anti-English, Labour Prime Minister who seemed to despise that neutrality.
Let alone newspaper proprietors too ignorant and lazy to understand their work, but too quick to insult the staff with gratuitous insults about "gold-plated pensions", "inefficient" and similar lies; to a public largely unaware of many of the institutions from which they benefit, directly or indirectly.
Hence the mess now.
