YOU wouldn’t know it, given a certain lack of media interest, but the biggest civil service union, PCS, will next week open a strike ballot over a five per cent pay claim. I have a funny feeling that this could turn into an industrial dispute that takes everyone by surprise (other than readers of The Mail on Sunday – we’ve reported the issue).
Easy enough to say the union is behaving selfishly at a time of national austerity. But that rather supposes that austerity means the same thing as scarcity, a word Nick Clegg has used in relation to the times we live in. As I point out in my column today – and have mentioned here on a number of occasions – if you look at Austerity Britain in from one angle, it is not actually that…austere.
True, some dis-favoured areas of public spending (the police, for example, or the armed forces) are having a tough time of it. Others aren’t. Just look at High Speed 2, that £30 billion-plus welfare handout for the Coalition’s friends in the civil engineering industry. Then there’s space exploration, obviously a key priority at a time of national emergency.
And all those other desiderata of a certain type of plausible young-ish Britisher of the Cameron/Clegg/Miliband variety: green energy, childcare subsidies, Government-backed mortgages.
I can’t help thinking PCS is acting quite rationally. Currently its members are in the dis-favoured category. It wants to move them to the ‘favoured’ part. That is what professional trade union officials are paid to do.
If that means less for someone else, too bad.
1) Oddball heroes evermore
I was on LBC radio yesterday morning, discussing the prospect of a treble-dip recession with David Mellor and Ken Livingstone. Comments earlier in the week from Olivier Blanchard, chief economist with the International Monetary Fund, to the effect that George Osborne ought to rethink his policies, went down very well with Ken, whom I reminded that, back in the day, the initials ‘IMF’ were as repugnant to people on the left as ‘CIA’.
He agreed.
But then, this crisis is making some strange allegiances. I said on air that Neville Chamberlain is gaining new admirers on the right for his spell as Chancellor in the Thirties when – so they claimed – he cut public spending ruthlessly and reaped the rewards in terms of an economic pick-up. Time was when Chamberlain was considered by robust Tory types as having been little better than a British Quisling.
I suspect there are more such funny-peculiar alliances to come
2) Groupthink: a spotter’s guide
HOW do you spot when something has become a piece of conventional wisdom and thus almost certainly wrong? The obvious answer is to say that ‘everybody’ believes it, or certainly the elite, those whom Hugh Gaitskell described scathingly as ‘the people who really understand it…the top people’.
But that is not quite good enough. Doubtless all the top people believe the slave trade was (a) a bad thing and (b) gone for good, but no sensible person would thus rush to invest in the ‘Africa trade’, to use one of the euphemisms of the time.
The true piece of conventional wisdom displays one or more of a number of features.
One is to be described as an idea or development ‘whose time has come’ or for which ‘people are now ready’.
Another, similar, although slightly different, is to be said to be ‘in keeping with ‘the spirit of the times’ or ‘on the right side of history’.
A third is to be described as ‘unstoppable’ or ‘inevitable’.
A fourth is to be presented as being based on evidence that is now so overwhelming that ‘the case is made’.
And a fifth is the claim that the idea or development in question has achieved that ultimate accolade of the British establishment – it is ‘sound and balanced’. Oh and, of course, ‘broadly acceptable’.
Prime examples of conventional wisdom include returning to the gold standard after the First World War, appeasing Hitler (see above), joining the European Exchange-rate Mechanism, the inevitability of the trade union closed shop, ditto the continued existence of the Soviet Empire and the inevitability of Britain joining the euro.
The annual Davos get-together of the world’s business and political elite in Switzerland, which concluded this weekend, is a positive Detroit for the mass manufacture of conventional wisdom. I wonder what they dreamed up at this year’s gathering?
3) Female warriors: a full house?
THE desirability of putting women soldiers in front-line combat roles has all the hallmarks of a rapidly-emerging piece of conventional wisdom. Last week, the United States said it intended to lift the ban on women in such roles, and any exceptions to a general opening-up of fighting positions will need to be individually approved by the defence secretary.
Speculation that Britain may follow suit generated public discussion that displayed a number of the tell-tale signs listed above. Time has come? Yep. Inevitable? Uh-huh. Evidence has been made? Well, this is one of those many areas of public policy where the ‘evidence’ can tell you whatever you want to know.
Speaking as one of nature’s civilians, I wouldn’t be crazy about this development even if it were, as many have claimed, simply a case of letting any woman who makes the grade head off to the front. The general view is that the numbers would be small.
But that is the whole point. The low proportion of female fighters would rapidly become a ‘problem’ and evidence of ‘indirect discrimination’. Cue ‘outreach programmes’, ‘cultural changes’ and the watering down of physical and other standards.
Before you know it, the front-line Army will have joined the wonderful world of quotas and ‘quality childcare’.
4) We have got the Maxim gun and they have…too?
IN the sweltering summer of 1995 I was sitting in a car in Roseberry Avenue, waiting for my driving instructor and listening to a report on Radio 4 about the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. A conversation between the presenter and an excellent journalist whose name I have managed to forget led to the latter making the point that the modern world was unimaginably different from that of the mid-century in terms of the willingness of whole societies to go to war.
Said journalist added that our own western society was far more civilised but added that the problem would arise when one or more western countries found themselves in conflict with a non-western society whose attitude to war and death was closer to that of our Forties predecessors.
Prophetic stuff, although for a while it seemed as though we in the west still had the right stuff – or at least, our professional military types did. Just look at our successes in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and (to start with at least) Afghanistan and Iraq.
But was this all based on technical supremacy and, if so, what would happen were the more warlike societies to get the same kit as us?
Thanks again for reading and enjoy the rest of the weekend.
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy by 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan