Life gets grim in the public sector

Following my cheery prediction of 29th May 2009, hard times in the public sector are indeed coming to pass. We've not yet re-entered recession, but I can't help but think it won't be long til we do.

Why do depressing stories make the best news? I've not been excited enough to blog about all the amazing things that I've been up to in the last year - the Blackheath camp, the great climate swoop, Green campaigning in Islington, and the Merthyr to Mayo ride etc.

Instead, what's finally motivated me to log in again is this horrible realisation:

Yesterday, without even noticing it creeping up on me, I found myself fighting for the opportunity to make a number of low paid staff redundant. I am horrified and it goes against all my principles - but it's true. In the current financial climate we need the savings in order to be able to continue to deliver another, more impactful, service. And someone else has another plan for these staff which would take them out of my remit and therefore mean that their budget was no longer available for me to poach for my other service.

I frequently justify the nastier bits of my job with the argument that since cuts need to be made it is better that I, with a social conscience, are shaping them, rather than some gung ho budget slasher... but following this I'm not so sure.

I need to take a bit more of my own advice and start thinking about whether there's a more equitable way to spread the impact of the inevitable cuts. For invitable they surely are.

Today's question

Where do people's ideological instincts come from?

It seems to me that people divide pretty clearly along various faultlines, for reasons which have little do do with rational argument. These divisions come from somewhere deeper, they are gut feelings.

One division which has recently been on my mind is between those who think that nothing can fundamentally change except through authority, and those who think that the involvement of authority prevents fundamental change. I am definitely of the former camp, but I know plenty of people in the latter. We could all give good examples supporting either position, but the evidence isn't enough, since in such a complex issue neither belief can be entirely true. Nevertheless, we persist in our beliefs and will always come down on our preferred side.

I am tempted to believe that these positions stem from our upbringing and early life experiences, and that is why they rarely change even over periods of years. But Adam raised an interesting point: is it possible to strongly believe something, to be deeply committed to it (e.g. the principle of equality) and yet to also believe that your commitment to it comes not from intellectual investigation (bringing one to the conclusion that the position is right or true), but is merely a side effect of one's upbringing?

Reasons to be cheerful I

After the last, rather depressing post, something more cheerful.

In the course of one lucky day last week two young boys (about 8 years old) separately and spontaneously held gates open for me whilst I was wrestling with my bike.

And then I came across this:


Amazing. Alongside the adverts for suspiciously cheap rooms and busty caribbean ladies in the window of a newsagents on the Holloway Road. I wonder if he has had any interest...

Mmm cheery - prediction of another recession

It is not news to people working in the public sector that our fortunes are dependent on spending decisions made in Whitehall. But it is beginning to dawn on us just how vulnerable we are going to be in 2011.

In 2007, the government published the long awaited (and delayed) Comprehensive Spending Review. This set out and guaranteed public spending across a range of services including health, education and local government. But the guarantee runs out in 2011.

The years since 1997 have been fat for the public sector, but this generous period is likely to come to a dramatic end in April 2011. A number of factors will come together to produce a significant cut in public spending:

• The end of the CSR07 guarantee
• The (likely) presence of a Conservative government
• The need by any government to cut public spending in light of the enormous public debt accumulated in trying to tackle the economic downturn

Approximately one fifth of the population is employed in the public sector; in Northern Ireland the figure is 30%. Given a UK workforce of 29m, this means 5.8 million people are employed by the public sector.

I don’t think cuts in public spending in the region of 10% are unrealistic, and assuming these translated into a 10% reduction in the public sector workforce, that would mean 580,000 people losing their jobs. I am not an economist, but I think a cut in spending / rise in unemployment on this scale could trigger a second recession, just as we are recovering from this one.

Jan Palach + my mother

I mentioned my idea that environmental activists should throw themselves under horses to my mother on Tuesday, while we were eating pizza at my cousin's 12th birthday party.

She said she remembered very clearly watching the funeral of Jan Palach, the first non-Vietnamese man to burn himself alive in the 1960s. He was protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She remembered watching the funeral procession, and the impact seeing it had made on her. Then she said she often dreamed of "doing that" - of self-immolation in protest. And I felt shaky and said something flippant and wished that it wasn't true.

Resurrection + Doris Lessing

I want to resurrect this blog, become a tourist again, but this time in my own life. Some new and potentially exciting things are happening - I have a new job and am trying to find some local but collective ways to make the world a better place - and I think writing is a good way to concentrate on them, make sure I pay them the attention they deserve.

My contrast for the day is between my life, my approach to life, and I think my generation's approach to life, and the way in which people tried to make social change happen in the long postwar period. I'm reading The good terrorist by Doris Lessing, which I would recommend highly. Her 1980s activists are filled with a level of anger, even of hatred of society, that I don't recognise in the people I know. They are inwardly focused, living off others whilst despising them. It's a depressing picture of what can happen to people when they become too caught up in a cause and lose their compassion for people who are different or not committed to the same ideals.

But it also reminds me that previous generations were more prepared to make sacrifices for their cause - indeed may not even have seen them as sacrifices. People of my parents' generation left university to live in squats or communes, devoted years of their life to Greenham Common or community projects in distant and thoroughly deprived places like Harlesden. They were not thinking about getting on the property ladder, they ate homemade soup and they hitch-hiked. Is this just a cliche? I don't think so.

It often occurs to me that the environmental movement needs people who are after more than being chased by police and being arrested as a badge of honour. It needs people prepared to throw themselves in front of horses, or go on hunger strike, or camp out for years at a time (and raise children in the campsite!). I'm not sure that it is these actions themselves which change the world, but I have a sense that they can send a powerful message of commitment.

But who will take up the challenge?

At this point I will confess to having both a mortgage and a pension.

Bon Voyage

And now, when I've finished my coffee (an American habit) and had some lunch, I am off. If anything interesting happens on the boat I'll put it on here when I get home. If not, this is goodbye!