A desperate situation (the economy)

But surely you'd agree that the amount of secondary wealth they generate for the economy is almost certainly vastly greater than the amount of primary wealth that they generate for themselves? And you certainly can't claim that of benefit cheats!

Speaking as a conservative, it's embarassing. You're right that GB can't be blamed for the wider global banking crisis, but he has made some shocking (and deviously executed) f*ck ups, handing Call me Dave countless open goals to exploit, and all CMD has managed to do is send the ball flying over the crossbar every time. ?

come on though, these people generate tens if not hundreds of millions for our economy anyway, of which a huge proportion goes to the treasury. put it this way, they geneate far more in secondary income to the country than if they were taxed here as individuals. oh, and benefit cheats - i d put them all on a big boat and float it out into the atlantic. mind you, i d cut most benefits anyway, so i m probably not thinking rationally about that subject.

I temped for a firm of chartered surveyors in 1999, and was given the job of mailing out personalised letters to all 500-odd clients explaining how the rateable values of their property had changed in the previous half-decade. Five years ago, this took two people a fortnight, but I did the job single-handed in four days.

Not because I was a miracle worker, but because all the figures I needed had just come online and the firm had the relevant password, so instead of making umpteen phone calls I could just pull them off the interwebnet. (I also didn't know any better - I was given minimal training, and just did the job the way that seemed most efficient).

My boss was gobsmacked - he assumed I'd cut corners, but a random spot check passed me with 100% flying colours.

This is a slightly different issue, of course - where management is unaware of the efficiency improvements that new technology can bring, and so carries on operating the same outdated systems.

Oh I agree about the secondary wealth aspect, but that'd be happening anyway, regardless if they were paying "primary" tax or not, yes? I mean, if you're the sort of cnut who buys a Phil Collins record, it's not going to matter if he's living most of the time in Switzerland or LOndon, is it? ?

And of course Mr JK, by having this view I'm not saying cheating the benefit system is a good thing, but the discrepancy in how we think of the two is interesting to me.

<Avocado> Nick, if there really was a "free market" that you speak of, would/should we not have left the banks to go under? By intrefering and artificially buoying the market, surely we're not too far away from price fixing anyway.

I've worked in both the Civil Service and the NHS.

Re the Civil Service - I'd agree with the general consensus, by and large. There are exceptions, of course, notably the DWP frontline.

As for the NHS, can I request no cuts whatsoever in clinical staff in almost all areas? I've never been short of work in the NHS in the last eight years. Not for more than 20 minutes on an odd day, and that's usually due to an emergency slot (miraculously) not being filled. In Maternity in particular, going without breaks on a reasonably regular basis has been, and no doubt still is, endemic. It's impressed upon you that if you don't get a break, it's because of your own poor time management, but that's rot. There are simply insufficient posts to cover the workload.

Yes MA, i agree with the banks comment. the problem is that if the majority of the high st banks went under (and this is what would have happened) the economic instability that would have come from it would have been epic. firms would have fallen like dominoes, people wouldnt be able to eat, our whole country would have gone in to financial, economic and social meltdown. clearly this couldnt be allowed to happen.

however, i do think that northern rock should have been allowed to fail. its whole debt book was so toxic it made what happened at chernobyl look like an eggy fart.

the issue of lloyds taking over hbos however, i dont agree with that either. there was nothing wrong with HBOS, but people shoritng the market pushed the share price down. llloyds will have a HUGE market share assuming it goes through, and other options should have been pursued by the hbos board - and now thats what theyre doing, but its too late i think.

And of course sometimes it doesn't suit people/companies to be more efficent.

A friend of my H's was given a generous severance pay by an accountancy firm because he'd developed a computer program that enabled him to cut his client billing hours significantly. He refused to do things "long hand" just to keep up his hours so they got rid of him.

there is a word for people like that, and what word is...idiot ?

Why do people have interesting discussions like this when I'm on a 3 day training course .

I think what we need to do is move away from a gold based economy to something we have an abundance of, but that is still highly valued globally, I'm thinking maybe a BBC based economy?.

There's a brilliant French film called Human Resources that has a very similar plot to what you've just described - bright-eyed and nauseatingly keen early twentysomething business graduate gets hired by local factory as a trainee, spends his spare time showing off by drawing up a plan to implement the notorious French 35-hour week with maximum efficiency. The bosses of course think he's wonderful, and...

...well, if I told you that his elderly father was also a factory employee, you can probably work out the rest! ?

Erm, a gold based economy? que?

I thought brown had flogged our gold?

L
xx

I think he considered it immoral to charge a client 10 times more than necessary when the charges are already extortionate - damn these socialists ?

he did. most of it anyway. undertaken despite the contrary advice of every consultant and market advisor. silly twat. this article http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1655001.ece is pretty telling about it.

I read an interesting article last year about instead of taxing income tax at high rates (which discourages entreprenurship) the government should tax land ownership instead.

So for example, a 2 bed terrace or 2 bed flat would hardly pay any tax at all. A 8 bed mansion with loads of land around it would pay significantly more. It would be charged at such a way to ease housing resources, would free up all those barely used holiday properties and empty properties.

Commercial usage would have much higher rates than domestic use. Obviously not worked out all the details here, there would have to be subsidies for farming and probably some other industries. Those that didn't want to own land could sell it to the government.

It won't ever happen, but it is an interesting thought.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/28/trythisrecipeforequality (writen in 2007 so before all these shenanigans)

She makes me pay her in jewellery. ?

Pre-budget report will be released on 24th November. <tremble>

Yes, yes, but surely the REALLY important question is why have I never managed to blag one of the public sector jobs where you don't have anything to do? ?

in my experience of public servants, i ve found that the majortiy do sod all. and when they do, they seem to make a half day task last for 2 months.

I don't know how their self-esteem survives, I really don't. On the (very odd) occasion that I feel under-utilised at work, it always make me feel really glum and a bit of a waste of space. I really think some people must be wired completely differently to the rest of us.

I think my BIL found that, when he worked for the council for about 2 days. He was employed as a consultant (to get them working more efficiently) but no one found him anything to do, so he buggered off back to a proper job ?

Like JK says, it's not the case with every public sector job. But I know it is with a lot of the admin/management type things.

Oh yes, with a few, very notable exceptions - 15 months I've lasted, and am getting sick of "I'm so busy", when clearly they aren't - I work at 50% capacity at best here (and hate myself for it, but there's no other work to do), and my output is substantially higher than most others. You're also not recognise properly for good work - payrises are on length of service most of the time not work achieved, so why would you?

That said we're measured on outcome targets, rather than output targets. We've hit them without fail every year since they were put in!

I think most people are like you and me. My experience at the DTI was that a lot of people there did feel glum and like a waste of space (it was certainly how I felt, which was why I left). The problem is that, if you stay there long enough, you lose the self confidence to go and do anything else. Rates of depression and long term sick leave in the public sector are madly high.

But the thing is KN, it strikes me that even with high sickness rates, councils etc do not operate in the same way the private sector does, ie not tolerating slackers, pushing targets etc the times i ve had to deal with them are so so so frustrating. plus, they all seem to piss off at 4 o clock as well. every last lazy one of them

I completely agree, Nick- my experience is the same. I'm just responding to Lou's point about people being "wired differently"- I don't think most people are. People who push off early, do a bad job, waste time etc are almost certainly having an utterly miserable time while they do it, weirdly. Working hard and well is much more enjoyable. Shitness breeds shitness, unfortunately.

I heard somewhere that the things which are most likely to promote happiness and productivity at work are knowing that your work has a point and being able to organise your own workload - two things which often don't happen in public sector jobs. One of the things the public sector often does really badly is take on new ideas from the private sector.

An example of this was when the tax office somewhere decided to slim down the work by getting everyone to do just one thing, like a production line. So someone who had gone into a graduate job did nothing all day but check box 2a (or whatever) then pass the forms onto someone else. All forms of personal stuff at work was banned, so you couldn't even look at a photo of your kids to remind you why you were checking box 2a for 7 hours a day. In circumstances like that, is it surprising that depression hits? I'd hang myself from the office partition by 11am on the first day.