THE CHIEF FIRE OFFICER OF MERSYSIDE, Tony McGuirk has had the brothers at the TUC conference spitting Bollinger, after he said the public sector was riddled with ‘bone idle people’. Mr McGuirk takes a justifiable pride in the fact that he has managed to reduced the numbers of firemen (call me old fashioned) on Merseyside by 40 per cent and provided the people of Merseyside with an improved service. He has cut numbers from 1,550 to 850 over the past decade.
It appears that all he has done is what any employer in the private sector would do, and sort the wheat from the chaff for the sake of his business and the continued employment prospects of his or her employees. But the brothers believe that, in the public sector, there is only top quality wheat to be harvested. Bone idleness, it seems is a step too far for their members, an affront comparable to that of being called a queer, paki, or the dreaded ‘N’ word.
Those within the public sector, judging by their union leaders response to Mr McGuirk’s comments, are unique in that they contain the almost saintly, pious and virtuous of dedicated and vocationally committed people, who are driven purely by their almost fanatical pride in public service.
Union anger is merely a piece of theatre that their members expect from them when they are, after all, paying them six figure salaries, a generous pension and munificent expenses. These hypocrites profess outrage at Mr McGuirk’s six figure salary for doing a job that is invaluable to society, and the measure of which is far greater than their own in terms of its value.
The public sector enjoys better wages and pensions than that of the private sector. On average, according to today’s Daily Telegraph some £70 per week better off than in the private sector. Yet it is this very sector whose taxes are being used to distribute such largesse among these ‘dedicated professionals’.
Compare, for instance the numbers of civil servants it took to rule an Empire with the numbers employed today to service the requirements of this nation. I cannot believe, for instance, that it takes anything like the 80,000 civil servants at the Ministry of Defence (a number as big as the army they serve) to facilitate the requirements of our small island nation, let alone once to oversee an Empire.
If the public sector is to survive then it must always be subservient, in terms of size, to that of the private sector. I say this because any nation’s wealth is created by the private sector; and at the moment the public sector has grown to large. The public sector whether inhabited by the ‘bone idle’ or not needs to be reduced in size.
The public sector is a public service industry and not a profit making one – however, it is the profit making sector that keeps the public sector afloat. It does so by employing people whose taxes pay the wages of those in the public sector. If the private sector becomes subservient in terms of size to that of the public sector, then the country will go bust, just as Greece would have done if it were not for the IMF and the EU.
THE PUBLIC SECTOR needs trimming and those gathered at the TUC conference who have found a new successor to Margaret Thatcher in Tony McGuirk, should, if they are capable of it, stop and think before they reduce the membership of their unions even further.
The people of this country know that we have to balance our deficit. They are realists who, through their everyday private lives know what debt is all about.
Our trade union bosses are charlatans, for they lay claim to the same lifestyles of the people that they tell their members are their class enemies. This disreputable bunch are about to play the same card that in the 1970s and 80s eventually led to the halving of trade union membership.
In terms of working class politics, which the union chiefs are all too familiar with; their income puts them among many of those in the city of London whom they profess to despise.
Let every Trade Union leader attending conference disclose every aspect of their financial status on behalf of their membership before attacking their ‘class enemy’. Only in this way will the membership be confident that their leaders truly represent their interests - just as the members of Parliament were also forced to do by that house magazine of conservatism, the Daily Telegraph.
That old fraud Marx got one thing right when he said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. From the unions point of view, the tragedy was their lemming-like behaviour in the 1970s and 1980s that lead to the rise of Thatcherism and the diminishing number of paid up trade unionists.
The farce however is now unfolding with the TUC’s determination once more to resist the inevitable. They cannot win because to do so would mean defeat for the country, and I think and hope, that the British people will realise this and will resist the overtures of the brothers to reduce this nation to a third world country.
The public sector accounts for nearly 40 per cent of our working population, on top of which we have some three million people reliant upon the welfare state. The balance is gradually tipping in favour of the public sector. If we carry on as we are doing, the public sector will be larger than the private; and then we will be, despite our proud history, in the same position as Greece.
We will have fewer and fewer people working in the private sector supporting through their taxes a vastly superior public sector. It is voodoo economics that the TUC are preaching, when they stand fully against the need for the numbers working in the public sector to be reduced.
The Thatcherist cry in the eighties was that the unions were dragging the country down, and she was right. The Labour party then as they are about to do today, appeased the union numbskulls and paid the price, for they were kept from office from 1979 to 1997.
Is there, for instance, a more demonstrably apt successor to Arthur Scargill than Bob Crowe? When will they ever learn?
THIS COUNTRY has been reduced to this appalling state by the previous holder of the office of prime minister, one Gordon Brown. He of course blamed the financial speculators for the events that were to unfold under his premiership. Yet in the good times when the financial markets served his political ambitions, and created, through another form of voodoo economics, the popularity that had sustained successive Labour governments since 1997, he took full credit as Tony Blair’s one and only chancellor.
The chief fire officer of Merseyside has behaved admirably, and I wish there were more within the public sector of his status that shared his courage for financial probity.
He will, I am sure disregard his critics, just as Margaret Thatcher did when she knew she was right. But it will not stop the head-bangers from demanding his removal from office – hang in there Tony.
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