The Obscurer

Month: July, 2010

Wednesday 14th July 2010

Getting Shirty

I read a couple of versions of this story the other weekend and I was going to dash off a quick post in response; but time was tight and I wasn’t sure of my facts, so I decided to wait until both those issues were remedied before commenting. There’s a moral in there, somewhere, for somebody.

West Midlands police “wastes money” on new shirts

ran the BBC headline, but the Telegraph, Mail and Mirror also covered the story. The fury is over the discovery that West Midlands police have spent a whopping £100,000 on changing the shirts of non-station based staff from white to black. “It’s absurd to spend money on cosmetic changes at a time when police forces are feeling the pinch,” suggests the inevitable TaxPayers’ Alliance spokesman, Mark Wallace. But what’s this? Did I use the definite article erroneously? Over at the Telegraph, Matthew Elliot of the TaxPayers’ Alliance chips in “Now is not the time for police to make a cosmetic change, like switching the colour of their shirts”.

Now, you may wonder why the TaxPayers’ Alliance feels the need to employ two people to say essentially the same thing – if they’re looking for efficiency savings, then they can have that one for free – but instead lets look at that £100,000 figure. It is a large sum of money indeed; certainly, were I to spend that much on shirts then I would be unable to dodge the accusation of profligacy. Then again, last time I checked I wasn’t a police force serving “nearly 2.6 million inhabitants” (source: Wikipedia). If I trust my maths (and I don’t, and neither should you; grab a calculator before you take this as fact) then that £100,000 works out at around 4p per resident of the West Midlands area. Of course, not all residents are taxpayers; I reckon some people will be paying upwards of 10p towards those shirts. But all those 10 pences add up; specifically they add up to the suspiciously round figure of £100,000, which is a big number, with lots of noughts. Is it money well spent? Well, we simply don’t know. Because the journalists employed here are useless. Evidently. Allow me to explain.

I read these articles, and a whopping yet oddly unasked question kept occurring to me; namely, is this £100,000 on top of the money the police would have been spending on white shirts anyway, or instead of it? It seems so blindingly obvious a question that I find it amazing that no one saw fit to ask, or to clarify the matter in their article, but apparently no one did. But it’s pretty pertinent; on the assumption that West Midlands police would be buying shirts for their staff anyway, what does this £100,000 actually relate to? And once you’ve asked that question, why stop there? Why not go on and try to find out other relevant information (the technical term for this is “journalism”); we can probably assume that some of that £100,000 is down to having to replace everyone’s white uniform shirts in one fell swoop, but what is the unit cost of each black shirt compared to a white one? Are they more, or less, expensive? Are they more, or less, hard-wearing? Apologies for getting all “1066 and all that” on your ass (as I believe the hepcats say), but depending on the answers to such questions we could range from one extreme, where the police are spending £100,000 over and above what they would have spent on white shirts in order to procure more expensive and flimsier shirts – this is a bad thing – to the other extreme where they would be spending £100,000 minus what they would otherwise have spent on white shirts in order to kit their officers in less expensive yet more rugged, longer-lasting gear; that is potentially a good thing. But rather than ask the questions that need to be asked to prevent their stories from being cobblers, instead the media collectively seem to have just sellotaped together a Press Association story with some added quotes from the TaxPayers’ Alliance and considered it job done. Now, I don’t expect the ideological twits at the TPA to want to go looking for the actual facts of the matter, but how not one journalist seems to have had his or her curiosity slightly prickled and thought to get the answers to the bleeding obvious questions without which their articles are meaningless, I do not know.

Now, journalists do far worse things than this, I know. This seems at face value to be down to laziness, albeit a laziness that allows a story to be put about that fits in with a popular media agenda; and we know that journalists also deliberately lie, twist facts and quote out of context in order to try to mislead their readers into drawing nasty conclusions. That I don’t generally tackle such stories is because people like Anton, 5CC, MacGuffin, uponothing and Jonathan do it so much better than I do; that and, while I often read a tabloid story and think “that’s bollocks”, I don’t usually have the time or inclination to look further into it, especially when I reckon that one of the above named is usually already on the case and doing the leg work. I also rarely have a background knowledge to give me a head start in taking the media to task; but I do know about shirts (I possess several, in varying colours and fabrics), I can follow the logic of what it must be like to have to procure staff shirts, and I can spot a gaping big hole in a newspaper article. This is part of the reason why I have written about such a trifling matter as police shirts, rather than, say, a more important matter such as this repulsive bit of journalisting.

But in fact the main reason I have written this post is not to criticise journalists; they’re just collateral damage. No, I’ve actually mentioned my key point already, and I’m writing this here because a realisation hit me as I was mulling things over. Do you know what it is? Any ideas? No?

It’s my earlier line about the TaxPayers’ Alliance, and my belief that

I don’t expect the ideological twits at the TPA to want to go looking for the facts of the matter

Because we know that the TaxPayers’ Alliance are just a bunch of rentaquote oafs there to pad out stories such as these. We know that they aren’t a serious think tank dedicated to the efficient running of government; but they claim to be, and they damn well should be. When a paper comes calling, asking them for their opinion on wasteful spending, they shouldn’t just dash off a quick spleen vent; they should investigate it, and then come back with a proper analysis. But they don’t appear to have done that, quelle surprise; this waste of server space is all I can find on their website, while both of those underemployed TPA spokesmen’s dismiss West Midlands police’s action as a merely a “cosmetic change” without apparently even being aware of the police’s justification that officers find the new shirts less restrictive and more comfortable. On the assumption that even the TPA believe that the police should both exist and wear a uniform, why didn’t they at least think to ask those obvious questions I raised above, even while deadline-bound journalists couldn’t be bothered? Why did they seemingly just respond “wah!”to that headline £100,000 figure, rather than investigate the long run costs or savings of this decision, as one would expect of an organisation genuinely interested in value for taxpayers’ money? Why do they only ever seem to call for more and more cuts in public spending, when they should be at least as concerned about blind, stupid cuts; for as public borrowing is just taxation deferred, can’t rash cuts just be public spending deferred? And why am I not in the least bit surprised by the way they have acted, and why do I expect so little of them?

Well, we know the answers, don’t we, and with luck I’m signing off here and you can consider this my last post on the TPA. Thing is, a proper taxpayers’ organisation genuinely holding government to account and actually doing what the TPA claims it does would be a good thing indeed. Shame the TaxPayers’ Alliance we have is broken.

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Thursday 8th July 2010

The First Sign Of Madness

Re-reading the final section of my previous post, I imagine a reasonable person could make an obvious riposte to my comments on public sector pensions. This person would work in the private sector, he doesn’t have an occupational pension scheme, and the personal private pension he is paying into each month is building a pension pot that, at current rates, will pay him an annuity on retirement which will just about cover the daily costs of a cup-a-soup and a small bottle of supermarket own-brand cola. He has little time for my whining, and with fair cause. After all…

“Why should my taxes rise to help pay for your gilt-edged pension, when I can’t afford to pay for a decent pension for myself?”

It’s a good point, I say, and I don’t think your taxes should rise for that reason. If there is a shortfall in public sector pensions then that should be met by the employees, or by employers within existing budgets, but it would certainly be unfair for you or others to pay more to ensure I have a good pension. As it is, whether or not public sector pensions are unaffordable is, I think, more arguable than the media often allows. That is when they aren’t just complaining that public sector pensions should be cut for the sake of it, because they are usually better than most private sector pensions.

“Ah, right,” he says, seeing me on the back foot, “but they are usually better than private sector pensions aren’t they, and that isn’t fair, is it? Why should I pay into your pension at all, when you don’t pay into mine?”

Well, it’s true that my pension may well be better than yours and you may not consider that fair. On the other hand, your pay may well be better than mine; is that also unfair? Perhaps you get a company car; why can’t I have one? We both have our pay and benefits and a good pension is one of my benefits; it doesn’t seem reasonable to me to cherry pick one area where my benefits may be better than yours and decide to reduce it for reasons of fairness, while leaving untouched other areas where your benefits may be superior to mine.

“But I don’t care if your pay or benefits are better than mine. I care that I’m paying for them. And not just me; millions of people in the private sector are paying a premium in taxes so that those in the public sector can have better pensions than we can ourselves afford.”

And millions of public sector workers pay for goods and services in the private sector, and so we pay into your wages and benefits, including into your pensions, or into the wages that you then invest in pension funds. Have a word with your employer if they choose not to provide as good a pension as my employer does. But if you must reduce things to this simplistic public sector versus private sector argument, as if both are just opposing homogeneous blocks, then whilst it’s true that you pay my wages, it’s truer to say that we all pay each other’s wages. And while your taxes do help pay for my pension, your consumption spending is also going to help pay for the occupational pension schemes of private sector workers whose pensions may similarly be better than the one you are able to afford. What’s the difference?

“Oh come on! The difference is that they are private companies and can do what they like with their revenue. That’s completely different to what government agencies do with public money. Our money.”

But it’s your money that private companies receive, just by a different method, through your discretionary spending rather than through taxation; it’s different, yes, but not, I think, completely different. Put it another way; you complain that public sector pensions are better than yours, and you are paying a premium on your taxes in order to pay for them. But many private sector occupational pensions schemes are also better than yours, because the employer pays into the pension scheme. In effect aren’t you therefore paying a premium when you buy their goods, paying a premium for their workers to have a better pension than you can have? And that premium is your money too, your money that you have had to pay on top of the price of the goods to pay for someone else’s pension. Should private sector companies also cut their occupational pension schemes in some great levelling down, simply because the benefits of such schemes are better than your own?

“No. But. That really is different. I can’t choose whether or not to pay taxes; I have to. I don’t just decide to pay my council tax, I am forced to by law, and some of that money gets paid into pensions whether I like it or not. With private sector companies I can choose who I give my money too, and so I’m not forced to pay into someone else’s pension if I don’t want to. I can always take my custom elsewhere.”

But would you?

“Eh?”

Would you?

“Would I what?”

Would you take your custom elsewhere in order to avoid paying into a private company’s staff pension scheme? It seems to me that we have reached a point where your main objection to public sector pensions being more generous than your own is because you have to pay for their services and so pay into their pensions schemes regardless; but you don’t seem to mind some private sector schemes being more generous than your own because you can simply avoid paying into such schemes by avoiding using their goods and services. So the question is, would you? Would you avoid using a private sector company solely because it means paying into a decent pension scheme? Would you ever consider not shopping at Tesco if you were to discover that some of their turnover goes into paying for a staff pension scheme that is better than your own? Would your hunt for an alternative supermarket be in any way influenced by whether or not another supermarket pays into an occupational pension scheme for their staff? Would you really object if they did? If not, and so the provision or otherwise of a staff pension scheme by a private employer plays no part in how you choose to spend your money, then surely the fact that you are able to take your custom elsewhere is not relevant to this discussion, and so should have no bearing on the provision or otherwise of a staff pensions scheme by a public sector employer to whom you have to pay your taxes. And indeed you could extrapolate this concept further; whenever you hear of something that occurs in the public sector that you think is outrageous and yet you have to pay for, consider what you would think if you heard of the same thing happening at a private sector firm you patronise, and whether you would still object to the extent that you would exercise your freedom to choose not to pay for it by taking your custom elsewhere. And if you wouldn’t, and if you would still cheerily pay for a private firm to do the self same thing that you find so objectionable in the public sector, consider that perhaps you’re not really viewing these things equally.

“”

I realise, then, that somewhere during my last paragraph, my conversation partner had disappeared. Perhaps I had flummoxed him with logic and reason? Perhaps he had tired of feeding me prepared lines to which I could deliver my prepared responses. Perhaps my mention of Tesco reminded him that he needs to pop out for some milk. Perhaps he’ll return in a few minutes with a crew to make me shut the fuck up. But perhaps, just perhaps…he didn’t exist at all, and was just a compliant FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION!

That would mean that I’ve been talking to myself, all this time. “What’s new, on this blog,” you may very well think; that is if, indeed, you exist. But this feels different. I’m tired, so very, very tired. Time to splash myself with cold water and go out for some fresh air.

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