This post has been a long time cooking and it just boiled over. The public sector in the UK is in crisis, and the politicians don't seem even to notice. Most people who live their lives locally don't realise how damaged their public services are by the professional poverty of new Labour managerialism.
I listen to lots of people in the public sector, particularly teachers, nursery staff, library staff, regeneration workers and social services staff, and various others. In the last six months I've heard many more wretched stories of managerialist stupidity and brainless recruitment processes than could be accounted for under normal conditions.
Why is so much public sector recruitment outsourced to companies that haven't got a clue about the roles in question and manifestly don't care? I hear almost routinely of contradictions in job descriptions, of the removal of professionals from contact with clients, of people with experience being condemned for not following some procedure invented to protect its inventor. Headteachers who don't teach and hospital managers who couldn't handle a nose bleed. I hear of a nurse with 26 years experience not being allowed to carry out an injection until her new manager has seen her do it. This is about those without competence asserting power over people in service.
The stories accumulate to describe a social poisoning. New Labour has presided over a treacherous and insidious campaign against skilled work with people - the contemptuous treatment of teachers providing a notorious example. I'm not saying all public sector workers were always enviably competent: I'm saying the managerialist frameworks within which they're expected to work are disastrous.
Why are so many people of calibre leaving public services, the vacuum being filled by laughably self-important people who have chosen to waste resources accumulating qualifications in management? It makes no sense. I've met intelligent, sensitive and capable people who have felt that in order to progress in their careers, they had to do some management courses. Look at them now, preoccupied with procedures, the creativity and flair processed out of them, busy doing likewise unto others. These people spend a high proportion of their time away from their place of work doing 'continuous professional development.' Ah, right.
Meanwhile of course, the public sector (and the voluntary sector, come to that) is repeatedly reminded of the need to be more businesslike. That would be buinesslike as in, the Northern Rock Building Society, British Airways, or (god help us) Virgin, presumably. Which is how we get slight misjudgements like the London Olympic budget, I suppose.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, invent procedures. Those who can't even invent procedures, it seems, end up in Human Resources. The lives of ordinary people at local level are impoverished as a consequence.
Like a lot of people who thought they belonged on the political left, I'm resigned to the need to see the back of this wretched government, and deeply apprehensive about what follows. But today, we have the welcome news that the Police Federation has voted to seek to assume the right to strike. Won't it be sweet if we see a revival of unionism in the slipstream of this particular response to high-handed management insensitivity?
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