Rachel Reeves’ days as Chancellor look numbered after her Spring Statement went down like a lead balloon among her MPs. Coming so soon after the disastrous flop of her Budget last autumn, the pressure on her now after this second fiasco will become irresistible, especially when the welfare cuts and tax hikes kick in. To misquote the famous lines of Lady Bracknell from Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, “to make a hash of one financial statement may be regarded as a misfortune. To make a mess of both looks like carelessness”.
But even if her execution of policies was abysmal, her instincts were often correct, as in her call for significant efficiency savings in Whitehall. Having expanded its workforce remorselessly over the last decade, with the headcount rising from 384,000 in 2016 to 545,000 now, the civil service is ripe for some drastic pruning. When Reeves spoke of Whitehall cuts last weekend, Mike Clancy of the trade union Prospect responded with a note of sanctimony: “The Government should remember that a cheaper civil service is not the same as a better civil service.” But the converse is also true: “An expensive civil service is not the same as an effective civil service.”
That is all too obvious from the sorry state of much of the public sector where absenteeism is rife, productivity low, waste chronic and duplication endemic. As the Chancellor argued, there are far too many staff employed in back office functions, including 33,000 in policy, 14,420 in human resources, and 7,000 in communications. If most of those staff left their jobs tomorrow, the public would hardly notice.
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As a pallid Ulsterman who tends to wear boots even at the height of summer, I have never embraced the sandal. The great writer George Orwell had the same suspicion of such footwear, warning that “the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, quack, pacifist and feminist in England”.
So Orwell would have been as dismayed as I was to learn this week that the Office of National Statistics has added men’s sandals to the official basket of goods that is used to decide the rate of inflation. The triumph of open-toed masculinity is as frightening as anything he wrote in 1984.
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I was amazed to learn this week that the dreary children’s TV show Blue Peter is still broadcast live by the BBC. But, thankfully, not for much longer, as it is about to disappear into the twilight zone of online video coverage. Good riddance. I always loathed the programme, even as a child. It was woke before wokery was invented, as dull as it was condescending. It appealed to goody-goodies who were into recycling and walking holidays in the Pennines.
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Exactly 50 years ago, a sad milestone was reached in the demise of Britain’s last home-grown volume car maker. In April 1975, the businessman and government advisor Sir Don Ryder produced his ground-breaking report on the future of the troubled giant British Leyland.
In accordance with his proposal, Leyland was nationalised by the Labour Government, but that did nothing to arrest its decline, which was epitomised by dire industrial relations and even worse models. Cars like the Austin Allegro and the Morris Marina, widely regarded as among the worst types ever to come off a production line, were symbolic of the collapse in standards of a once great British industry.
