White poppies from the Peace Pledge Union

It has reached – hopefully – its zenith this year with an argument with FIFA about whether British football players would be allowed to have some poppies embroidered onto their football shirts during international football games over the next few days. Even though there has never been any desire on the part of British football players to do this before, even though to do so is clearly against the FIFA kit rules, and even though no other nation which observes Remembrance Day has been clamouring to do this, all of a sudden the wearing of a poppy has become An Historic National Tradition, the initial refusal to allow it was Political Correctness Gone Mad, and the compromise which has been reached with FIFA is a Victory For Common Sense.

Apart from my early years in primary school (when I didn’t understand what the whole thing was about, and when I was basically intrigued by the actual physical product) I’ve never worn a poppy, and I’ve never actively participated in Remembrance Day activity. Usually when 11 November falls on a work day, out of respect to the 99% of my colleagues who do wish to observe the two minutes silence I usually absent myself to the toilet around that time rather than ostentatiously sit there carrying on working, but this year it’s probably fortunate that I’m actually off on leave on that day because, the level that poppy fascism has now reached, I might end up saying or doing something somebody else might regret.

Why do I feel this way?

There are a number of reasons for it, but many of them can be summed up in one succinct phrase.

Because it’s bullshit.

The message of Remembrance Day as it was conceived was supposed to be Lest We Forget; it was instigated in the aftermath of The War To End All Wars to honour the millions who gave their lives – or rather, were forced at gunpoint to give their lives by their so-called class superiors – in what was humanity’s biggest act of utterly pointless industrial slaughter ever. In its early years it was a noble tradition, but sadly even then probably not truly believed in by those responsible for that slaughter.

But now? Lest We Forget has nothing to do with it; we Remember for precisely four minutes every year (or only two minutes if 11 November happens to fall on a Sunday). We barely Remember in the lead-up to Remembrance Day, and at precisely 11:02, after we’ve done our Remembering, we immediately Forget. The killing continues, the political grandstanding continues, and nobody in any position to actually do something about stopping the killing does anything about doing anything to stop it; our media and political class publicly and ostentatiously mourns every one of Our Boys announced to have died, whilst publicly and ostentatiously celebrating the deaths of The Baddies. And similarly the other way round; in their own communities jihaddi terrorists are fêted as Heroes Of The Revolution, whose deaths at the hands of the kafirs will be avenged, regardless of the number of children of those kafirs who were liquidised by the bomb planted on the bus or outside the pavement cafe.

Rarely does anybody stand out from the crowd to say Enough! Rarely do we hear anybody call for the madness to stop; the few who do, and the few who refuse to play the game, who refuse to stand up in a sham token of respect, are pilloried by the media and their peers.

Whilst the original meaning of Remembrance Day was about Remembering those who had given their lives in defence of Freedom, it has mutated into being about showing visible support for Our soldiers who are engaged in State-sponsored killing overseas; to question that support is framed as being unpatriotic, and of Spitting On The Graves Of Those Who Died That I Might Spit; the meaning of Remembrance Day is no longer a moment of private reflection, but instead has become a When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife? question.

But apart from anything else, why are only soldiers given a special day to be Remembered anyway? Why do we have no Remembrance Day for firefighters who’ve died saving lives? Or police officers? Or paramedics? Or accident and emergency nurses? They too risk their lives in the line of duty, but we have no special symbol or special day to remember their sacrifice. Our soldiers are acting under their own consciences on the orders of our government – but so are Their soldiers. It is patently ridiculous to assert that Our soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Right and Their soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Wrong – so whilst Remembering Our soldiers who have been killed in action, why can we not also remember Their soldiers who Our soldiers have killed? As the throwaway line in Austin Powers goes, “henchmen have families too you know”.

Some people often suggest that I might sport a white poppy instead; it’s an attractive suggestion, but actually I see it as a bit of a cop-out – whilst it promotes a conversation, it’s still buying in to the whole attitude that for the first two weeks of the year people must display their support.

Now, whilst I fit into the wider set of people called ‘pacifist’, I’m not a naïve one – I do agree that regrettably there are indeed Bad People in the world, who end up running countries, who manage to inspire other people to kill on their behalf, who cannot be stopped with strong language and the promise of a trip to the seaside if they promise to be good, and that We need soldiers to stop them. I’m the kind of pacifist who accepts that whenever a situation reaches the state of armed conflict, then armed conflict is the inevitable consequence – but that the seeds of the next conflict are always sown in the aftermath of the ending of the last one. I accept that sometimes there’s no reasoning with Bad People – but I do wonder if some Bad People might turn out to be not so Bad after all if our media and politicians were willing to make just that little bit more effort to reason with them.

Don’t get me wrong – I accept, respect, and support right of you, the 99%, to hold your Remembrance Day commemorations. Why do so many of you have such difficulty in accepting my right to dissent from them?

(Further reading: Adrian Short on the crass commercialisation of the Poppy Appeal, and Dan Slee recounts a moving personal family tale)

“Thirteen children under the age of 10 have been issued with shotgun certificates in the UK over the past three years. The youngest child to be granted a licence was seven years old, figures obtained by BBC News show. Last year, the Association of Chief Police Officers suggested that under-10s are banned from using shotguns”.

James Purdey shotgun, by eschulz

At first glance, the idea of a seven-year-old wielding a shot-gun is somewhat alarming.

But on the other hand, this isn’t a bunch of kids running around a playground packing heat – these are either children learning a sport – just like football, cricket, skiing, or badminton. Or archery, which I myself used to do in our back garden when I was seven. Or they’re children living on farms, where gun use is a standard tool of the job, like a plough or a tractor, learning how to carry out the family business.

Just because they have a firearms certificate, that doesn’t mean they keep a sawn-off in the toy cupboard next to the action man, rather they have access to a weapon which is constantly kept under lock and key when not in use, and when is being used it is done so completely under close adult supervision.

In short, these are children who are being brought up to have nothing but a healthy respect for firearms, to understand fully the implications and responsibilities of their use, and to understand that a gun is not a toy.

Compare that with 90% of other children, who grow up with toy guns to play with, who run around playgrounds shooting each other in games of cowboys and Indians, or cops and robbers. Or indeed sit in their bedroom in front of a screen laser-blasting the invading Ayleeyons, or their friends in networked Call of Duty. Objectively, which is actually worse?

The cornerstone of a liberal democracy is freedom, where legislation is only enacted to protect the public, and new legislation is only introduced in response to clear problems, and only then introduced in a considered manner after full weighing up of the pros and the cons.

So, alarming as a 12 year old having a firearms certificate might seem, in the absence of any problems having manifested as a result of it, what objectively is the problem?

On the panel were: Dominic Fisher, Chair of the Ladywood constituency Conservative Party, Councillor Paul Tilsley, LibDem Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council, Jonathan Bartley, Co-Director of the liberal Christian thinktank Ekklesia (and also speaking as a member of the Green Party), and Jack Dromey, Labour MP for Erdington.

How to reform the House of Lords without giving too much power to one party and/or preventing gridlock between two houses?

PT: the problem with an elected upper chamber is if you get it wrong in the electoral cycle you’ll end up with stalemate, but he does think we have to move to an elected Lords.

DF: one of the key things needing changing is the element of patronage in the current system. He wouldn’t want people who ‘feel like they’ve been elected’ – the upper chamber’s role is one of scrutiny, not to vote against the lower house. He would favour some form of pr election, plus some form of appointment by a commission for say five years.

JD: would we have a second chamber at all if we were building a system starting from scratch? Since we’re not, he thinks it should be entirely elected and is opposed to patronage and what it has led to. Any system which continues to have nomination by political parties is prone to corruption. The House of Commons should remain supreme and not be challenged.

JB: agrees wth the others; sings the praises of the approx 200 cross-benchers who are independent of any party – an elected second chamber should not lose this. The coallition agreement to make the House of Lords look like the House of Commons in terms of representation is a mistake.

From the floor: as well as bishops, shouldn’t there be other representitives of ‘organisations’ eg trade unions in there?

Who benefits from the Alternative Vote as proposed in May?

DF: voters will benefit the most – you get to vote with your head and your heart, without needing to vote tactically. He also agrees with the idea of the referendum to decide this, because voters should choose the method of voting, not MPs. He does expect to see more extremes at both ends of both main parties under AV.

PT: not a fan of AV, but that was the best that could be done in the negotiations leading to the coallition agreement; at least every vote would count, which is a start.

JB: voters will benefit. He notes that the BNP and other extreme minority parties oppose AV because they wouldn’t stand a chance under it, whereas with FPTP they do stand a vague chance in some constituencies.

JD: agrees with PT about AV being a poor step; he also thinks the current bill to enable the referendum stinks because of the link with the government’s MP reduction plans. He thinks MPs will have to work harder and not able to take anything for granted, and it will add to the legitimacy of MPs since they’ll be able to say they have the support of 50% of their electorate.

From the floor: is marginalising the minorities actually fair?

Is an elected mayor for Birmingham a good or bad thing for democracy?

PT: one of the problems an independent candidate – even a famous one – would have in standing is being able to mobilise people to shove leaflets through doors, so they don’t stand a chance. He thinks a mayor would be a total disaster for democracy to vest all the power in one person. Stoke-on-Trent is a perfect example of the disaster, as are Doncaster & Hartlepool. The London model of a strategic leader of a regional assembly is totally different from Birmingham and other local authorities. The Birmingham Mail’s failed campaign demonstrated that the people of Birmingham really don’t have an appetite for an elected mayor.

DF: agrees the public has no appetite, but he comments that business is apparently in favour. The test is, does it bring power from Whitehall to the region, or does it actually transfer power from neighbourhoods to the Council House? He thinks the latter, and doesn’t agree with his party on the issue.

JD: thinks it’s particularly silly that the Localism Bill proposes appointing the current council leader as the caretaker mayor until a mayor is properly elected. Again, he thinks it worked in London, but wouldn’t work in Birmingham – but does think we need to have the debate on it. He does think if there was a referendum tomorrow Birmingham would probably vote for a mayor on the basis of a perception that Birmingham doesn’t punch its weight, and predicts that the public might think a mayor would solve that.

From the floor: thinks it would lead to corruption in Birmingham – which is why business is in support, because they’d be able to do dodgy deals…

How representative is Parliament, and what could be done to fix it?

JB: most MPs were opposed by two thirds of their constituents; AV would at least address that. It’s not representitive because it doesn’t represent peoples’ concerns – he thinks AV would broaden that. The last election campaign was a sham, because it focussed on one thing which was not actually relevant anyway. A third of parliamentary seats haven’t changed hands since the Second World war – the whole election is won and lost on a few thousand votes in a few marginal seats, so that’s what the campaign is focussed on.

DF: MPs aren’t representitive on anything – how many creative industries people are in there? The fault of this is not the voting system, but the way parties choose their candidates. He likes Caroline Lucas’ proposals to modernise the way Parliament works, eg electronic voting, to make Parliament more ‘family friendly’.

JD: thinks things have moved in the right direction in terms of the powers of backbenchers, but Select Committees are still nowhere near as powerful as eg Congressional Committees in the USA. He thinks it’s wrong that parliament has become dominated by the professional middle classes and the professional political classes, and wants to see more car workers and care workers in Parliament.

Should we make more use of referendums for important issues?

DF: we’ve never had that tradition. He thinks it’s wrong, and capital punishment is the classic example – predictions are a majority of the public would vote for it, and that would lead to so many disastrous miscarriages of justice.

PT: thinks capital punishment is a red-herring – ‘personally i’m a fan of democracy’. Switzerland demonstrates the increased political engagement of the people there, where they have a referendum culture.

JD: thinks democracy needs reinvigorating by making representatives more accountable to people, rather than moving to a referendum culture. He notes some of the ugly xenophobic outcomes of the Swiss referendum culture.

JB: agrees with a greater use of referendums. He notes that a referendum on Iraq would have said no. (Does he like referendums so long as they come out with the right result?!). He thinks there’s a big problem with the way that elections are run on manifestos that most people probably don’t agree with most of the contents of, and thinks increased referendums would introduce more honesty to political campaigning.

From the floor: Swiss referendums are polarised yes / no questions – what about multichoice? Who and how would it be decided what becomes a referendum issue? How many people voting in a referendum have properly studied the issues anyway?

Amazingly it seemed that all four members of the panel agreed with each on about 80% of the issues during the evening!

Picture credit: BBC News

Of course, it’s still too early to say right now at the time of writing how this will pan out, but so far the signs are at least positive; the caretaker military administration have promised open elections as soon as practicable, they’ve promised to abide by all the existing treaties which are in effect (which is hopefully a good sign for the Israel-Palestine process), they after all chose not to suppress the protests in the first place, and, following Tunisia’s starting of what might prove to be a Middle East domino effect, protests are now starting in Algeria.

But what can we learn ourselves from the events of the last three weeks?

Most of all, we learn perhaps the most important thing, that (broadly) peaceful protest, even in the face of a 30-year oppressive regime, can work – that ultimately, even when the regime is backed up by tanks, helicopter gunships, and fighter jets, the people really do reign supreme; if the people can be arsed. When a million people turned up to march on parliament in 2003 intent on stopping our government from going to war in Iraq, we turned up, we shouted at the bricks and waved our banners, and we went home. Subsequent protests about various issues in Britain have had similar effects – a lot of people have turned up, shouted, waved flags, thrown bricks, and buggered off home. In contrast, in Egypt a million people turned up in Tahrir Square and stayed there. They stayed there and refused to go home until their demands were met – and they knew that their demands were righteous, and those who could have stopped the protests in a stroke, the army, also knew their demands were righteous. Rather than act as agents of the oppressive state, the army remembered what their first and overriding priority is – to defend the nation. The People held their nerve, and The People ultimately won.

We also learn that effective protests are ones which are owned by The People, not by professional agitators. The message for us in the UK is clear – Socialist Worker, you’re not welcome. Whenever you and your crowd turn up to a protest, all you do is poison it. You have no interest in creating a fair and just society, your sole interest is in replacing one unfair and unjust system with another unfair and unjust system. Whenever you and your ilk turn up to a protest, you’re there with violence and mayhem as the goal, not the means of last resort. It’s because of the likes of you that modern protests are accompanied by an equally obnoxious response by those tasked to police them. So go home, and don’t come back until you’re prepared to camp out in the cold for three weeks.

What can our government (and by that I do not restrict myself to those who happen to be living in Downing Street this week) learn from the Egyptian protest?

How might they respond to a three week occupation of Trafalgar Square by a million people?

Photo credit - Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

So whilst Labour peers have spent the last couple of weeks filibustering^Wcarefully scrutinising (including asking searching questions about why the proposed number of MPs in the new Commons of 600 does not correspond to any product of prime numbers – that’s important for democracy, I’m sure you’ll agree), what is the difference between what they are doing now and what the Tory peers did during the debates on the fox-hunting ban legislation?

The government, irritated at the possibility that the Labour peers might actually talk the legislation out of time rather than back down at the last minute – as is traditional – is talking about introducing a guillotine, for the first time in Parliament’s history, much to the outrage of the Labour side. But again, what might the difference be between that and, from the same fox-hunting bill, the Labour government’s invoking of the Parliament Acts to achieve the exact same result?

And politicians wonder why the public continues in its spiral of disengagement with party politics; when party politics too often is reduced to petty politics.

One of the reasons why is summed up neatly by Laurie Penny in her article ‘Inside the Whitehall Kettle‘:

I didn’t understand quite how bad things had become in this country until I saw armed cops being deployed against schoolchildren in the middle of Whitehall. [my emphasis] These young people joined the protest to defend their right to learn, but in the kettle they are quickly coming to realise that their civil liberties are of less consequence to this government than they had ever imagined. The term ‘kettle’ is rather apt, given that penning already-outraged people into a small space tends to make tempers boil and give the police an excuse to turn up the heat, and it doesn’t take long for that to happen. When they understand that are being prevented from marching to parliament by three lines of cops and a wall of riot vans, the kids at the front of the protest begin to moan. “It’s ridiculous that they won’t let us march,” says Melissa, 15, who has never been in trouble before. “We can’t even vote yet, we should be allowed to have our say.”

When talking about democracy, it’s usually understood to be basically just about the vote we have every year / every four or five years, in which we select our politicians to run our cities and our country, and the lucky few actually get the politician of their choice representing them.

Democracy is about more than just voting in elections, though – democracy is about participating fully (or at least to the best of one’s ability and interest) in civic life; jury service is an essential act of democracy, as is serving on the bench as a magistrate. It’s a common complaint of younger people that the magistrates are all a bunch of posh old duffers – but actually, the pool of magistrates in any given city is supposed to be representative of the population of that city, be it young, gay, black, single parent, whatever. So why not give an application a go?

But I digress. The other important pillar of a fully democratic society is the right to protest. In a democratic society, the Government is not the master of The People, it’s the servant of The People. And – vis the magistrate point – the Law is also not the master, but the servant. Where the Government and the Law are out of step with the will of the People, the People have a duty to make their views known through the medium of protest.

Cuddly liberal types generally tend to baulk at the idea of protest (except when the topic of protest is something they have a personal interest in), preferring instead to advise people to write strongly worded letters to their MPs, being horrified at the idea of other people breaking the law. But actually, important as writing a strongly worded letter to one’s MP is, no bad law ever got repealed by the power of green ink. That law which Henry VIII instigated mandating every adult male to do an hour’s archery practice every Sunday morning? It was people breaking it which eventually got it repealed. More pertinently, that law which made every adult pay a flat fee in order to have the right to even exist in this country (aka the Poll Tax) – it wasn’t people writing letters to their MPs which got it repealed – it was people, in mass numbers, in the first instance refusing to pay it, and ultimately the People turning up to a mass protest in Trafalgar Square to make their views unavoidably heard.

Over the last 25 years, there have been a number of laws – and amendments to laws – introduced which have further and further curtailed the right to protest; in fact, those laws in their letter are actually so restricting that the Public Order Act 1986 technically makes it a criminal offence for a group of more than six people to walk down the street together. It’s a testament to the high ethical standards our police forces (much maligned, with good reason, in the 1980s) have maintained that, by and large, they’ve wilfully refused to make use of powers they’ve had at their disposal.

But in the last couple of years there has been a much uglier undercurrent around protests developed where police and mindless anarchists alike have each upped the ante, with the result being that reasonable protests are emasculated at birth by the appearance of the riot squad, and what should have been a reasonable protest has been needlessly turned into a riot because that’s the only way the protesters have been left as the way to get their voices heard.

And as Laurie Penny says, when the same policing techniques that are used against a bunch of anarchist G8 rioters are used against a bunch of schoolchildren, you know there’s something gone badly wrong. And something needs to be done.

Whereas I agree with the headline of what the students are protesting about, I believe essentially they are protesting against the wrong policy – it’s not the new policy which is flawed, but the policies which were instigated some 20 years ago which have led us to where we are today.

With current numbers of 18 year olds pushed into attending ‘university’ being in excess of 50%, the taxpayer frankly can’t afford the £20,000 per student cost. So rather than making students pay themselves – by whatever means successive governments have dreamed up – the policy of sending all and sundry to do four year degree courses in all and sundry should be reversed. There should only be one barrier to higher education – talent; that barrier should be set sufficiently high that only those who will most benefit from that education get to have it, for if everybody gets to go, then there is no barrier of talent, only a barrier of finance.

When I first went to college – Birmingham Conservatoire, the music college faculty of the City of Birmingham Polytechnic, in 1988 the entire number of students throughout all four years in my department – the composition department – was 10. By the time I left the Conservatoire in 1997 (by which time I’d become a part time lecturer), the entire first year intake of student composers numbered 45. Some of them were talented, but a significant number of them, frankly, I’m surprised they managed to pass their GSCE music. One of those whose work was particularly awful I noted nine years later hadn’t improved.

Also when I first went to college, there was a clear distinction between different kinds of higher education institutions and what purpose they served – universities were where the best went to spend three or four years intensively learning from an academic perspective, polytechnics were where the best spent three or four years learning from a vocational perspective, and colleges of further and higher education were where everybody else – with no slight intended upon them – spent one or two years learning how to do specific jobs, and then went and did those jobs.

But the then Prime Minister John Major had the idea that to create a classless society, he’d make everybody pay a contribution towards their higher education, and abolish the distinction between university and polytechnic. So at a stroke, hundreds of institutions across the land, previously known as prime destinations for specific courses, instantly became saddled with the stigma of being ‘new universities’, many of them having to make up silly names (and in the City of Birmingham Polytechnic / Birmingham Polytechnic / University of Central England in Birmingham / University of Central England / Birmingham City University’s case, keep making up silly names) in order to differentiate themselves from the other institutions in the same cities. That policy was extended further even now so that any old college gets to call itself a university, meaning the highly respected in its own field Birmingham College of Food, Tourism, and Creative Studies (a college of higher education) renamed itself to be University College Birmingham, clearly setting itself alongside such as University College Dublin, University College London, and University College Wales. And in the meanwhile some original universities have become less seats of learning and more seats of commerce, with education taking a firm back seat against getting in the conference business and ripping off international students.

Of course, in order to have more students in higher education (and thus not signing on the dole), you need to have more courses. And so, Golf Course Management became a university degree, as did Hair Studies. ‘Hair Studies’ is my usual example when I talk about this – I don’t mean to diminish the artform of a catwalk hair stylist who is at the top of their profession commanding in excess of £500 just to tidy somebody’s split ends, but for most people going in to hairdressing, saddling themselves with a £20k debt to get a hairdressing degree to get a £15k/year job in Chlo’sKutz  is not ‘an investment in their future’.

Society really isn’t improved by 70% of its young people going away to do degrees solely motivated by how much money they’ll be able to earn at the other end – heck, it was people being solely motivated by how much money they’ll earn at the other end which has got us into the current global financial mess in the first place! Society is improved by 70% of its young people not ‘accepting their lot in life’, but going and spending a short amount of time learning how to do something they’ll enjoy, and then going and getting paid for doing it (and thus becoming taxpayers by the age of 20), and the other 30%, the cream of the bunch, going away and getting paid – by us – to learn how to be nuclear physicists, doctors, concert pianists, mathematicians, jewellery designers, actors, and historians etc.

And those 30% who have that talent should have the opportunity to do that whatever their financial circumstances.

Well, in a completely unexpected turn of events, it appears they are:

“Plans for £8bn of investment in Britain’s railways have been announced by the government.

It is buying about 2,000 new carriages to tackle overcrowding, electrifying some lines and pressing ahead with the Thameslink programme”.

Credit where credit’s due. Let’s see if they deliver.

It’s good that MPs have finally realised there’s a problem with train overcrowding – a problem which is, of course, Britain’s Best Kept Secret(TM).

Previous reports about train overcrowding you might think you have seen are actually figments of your imagination.

Inside Out South reporting on it in January 2009 didn’t really happen, as didn’t the University of Nottingham in January 2003. The report from the Strategic Rail Authority in July 2001 was just hot air, as was the Commons Transport Select Committee‘s findings in November 2003. As for the Department of Transport‘s research published in July 2007, and the General Consumer Council‘s study of September 1999 – well you can take that with a pinch of salt. Just like another report from the Department of Transport in August 2008.

Good news is at hand, though – because according to David Cameron in April 2007:

“Tackling overcrowding on commuter trains will be an ‘urgent priority’ for a Tory government as part of its focus on green issues, said David Cameron.

The Tory leader said more cash was needed to boost capacity on the busiest routes, although it would have to come from existing transport budgets.

Mr Cameron was warned in a leaked memo to avoid tax rises for better trains”.

It’s very easy to release Yet Another Report about train overcrowding. When is somebody going to actually do something about those reports?

The announcements today are of course just the headline figures for each broad public sector area – it will be down to individual chief executives in each individual public sector organisation to decide the details of whose jobs are to go.

In the lead-up to the review over the last several months, politicians of all sides have made reference to the ‘back-office paper-pushing make-workers’ who should almost certainly be the first against the wall in order to ‘protect the valuable front-line services’.

So who are these back-room drains on the hard-pressed taxpayer, then? Let’s make a list:

Admin / filing clerks

Admin staff are perhaps the very definition of the back-office. But do you really want your highly paid professional staff having to spend their time doing their own photocopying or raising purchase orders for their own stationery? Admittedly, there is still something rather 1950s about the idea of a secretary printing out the email for their boss to read, scribble comments on, for the secretary to then type the reply to, but PAs do also fulfil a less obvious and more essential role – as gatekeeper, shielding the senior manager from having to deal with pointless sales calls from pesky private sector photocopier suppliers who are paid on commission, or fielding queries in the direction of the senior manager’s more junior officers who are actually doing the work and thus better placed to give a sensible answer to the question.

And, of course, even with modern computerisation of records, records still need to be filed, and require somebody with knowledge and experience to file them correctly – do you really want your doctor, surgeon, or dentist in charge of filing your medical records rather than the person who actually understands how the filing system works? Do you want your social workers to be spending their time looking into protecting and helping vulnerable individuals and families, or do you want them trying to decide (and changing their minds from week to week) whether the family with multiple surnames has its records filed under ‘b’, ‘f’, or ‘m’?

I.T. Support staff

If you’re reading this, you’re probably reasonably experienced at using computers, and like me cringe whenever you see somebody typing a URL into the Google search box (being their default browser home page) rather than in the actual browser address bar. But believe it or not, most people really are that thick! I once, some years ago, saw an occasion where an assistant director’s PA – of many, many years experience, predating the introduction of computers in the workplace – was having difficulty in opening a file off a CD. As I was helping her, it became apparent to me that she’d clearly never actually seen her computer’s desktop, didn’t understand the concept of the c: drive and the d: drive (so /dev/sda1 & /dev/sda2 would be a total non-starter), and thought you had to open a file of any given type from the file -> open dialogue of the relevant program, rather than just double-clicking on the file icon from the file manager.

Of course, those are particularly dumb extremes, but still the majority of people aren’t that further advanced in their computer knowledge. And annoying as it is for people like us, that’s why your computer at work is locked down preventing you from fiddling with it yourself, because you might know what you’re doing, but most peoples’ fiddling would almost certainly completely stuff it up. And that’s why you need I.T. support staff – to do the work of maintaining the I.T., because most people aren’t capable of doing it for themselves.

Middle-managers

I know I’m not the only person who has worked in teams where the favourite topic of lunchtime-down-the-pub conversation has been to moan about the management. It’s almost enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights! So of course they should be the first against the wall, since all they do all day is look at graphs and get on your case? Right?

In all the teams I’ve worked in where we’ve spent a lot of time bitching about managers, it’s not been about the concept of managers, but about how rubbish they’ve been – or at least how rubbish we’ve perceived them to be. Like it or not, managers are necessary. We complain about the rubbish managers because we need them to set targets for the team, build the framework in which we operate, and performance-manage our co-workers who are not pulling their weight (or indeed offer extra training and guidance to the co-workers who are neither lazy nor incompetent but just a bit inexperienced for their role). A well managed team is an effective team – a badly- or un-managed team more often than not flounders about; if it manages to perform well then that is testament to their particular and unique dedication and skill rather than evidence that managers are pointless.

Finance people

I’m not afraid of numbers – I understand that budgets, no matter how many noughts are involved, are simply a matter of sums and guesswork; I understand that when a budget or a financial forecast is put together, it represents the ‘best guess at the time with the information to hand’, which is a goal for people with budgetary responsibility in the organisation to work towards – but where overspends on any given heading occur, it’s not the end of the world, but almost certainly an underspend will have occurred on another line to balance it out. I’m also very good at noticing where a supplier is frankly taking the piss with their quote. Finance is not just about numbers, though – it’s about personal administration, which I’m utterly lousy at. So lousy at it am I that in my now-behind-me freelance life it’s been months before I’ve got around to sending an invoice, or claiming back the overpayment on a loan which actually was paid off six months ago.

Most people are rubbish at numbers, and although better than me at personal administration, still not hot at it. Finance people, however, love the lot – they love creating, adjusting, and balancing budgets. They love finding and logging the receipts for every last Mars bar, and tracking down every last pound owed to the organisation. Who do you want looking after the budgets – somebody who absolutely hates the very notion of numbers, somebody who is happy with them but has more interesting things to occupy their day than phoning up to chase the outstanding invoice, or somebody who has as their raison d’etre the job of accounting for all of your hard-earned taxpayer’s money?

Press and communications staff

OK, I’ll fess up – if you’ve come to this article via a search engine you won’t know that my job is in press and communications, or rather that favourite bête-noire of the local newspaper, the ‘town hall spin doctor’. My job has always been less dealing with the words you read and more the media you read them on, but I have had more responsibility in the past for the words than I have now. You wouldn’t believe the rubbish text I’ve been given to put on websites over the years – text that has gone beyond lacking what we in the bizniss call ‘Plain English’, and barely resembling what we call English-as-we-know-it entirely – sad fact is, most people who are even reasonably educated and with whom you can have sensible conversations can’t write English if their lives depended on it. When I was in a job with more direct control of the content of the part of the website I was responsible for, I’d got my content providers well trained to accept that they just needed to provide me with the facts, and I’d take it from there.

Where you do see rubbish communications coming from your favourite public sector organisation, more often than not it will have been because the service area has bypassed their communications team, rather than because the communications team is unnecessary. Get rid of your communications staff, and you’ll see a lot more blue-sky thinking run up the flagpole of integrated performance targets.

So, do you still think you need to get rid of the pointless paper-pushing back-office staff who suck the life from the front-line services?