Tory Ministers blame “diversity” on declining civil service standards

Ex-MP Paul Goodman wrote an interesting piece on ConservativeHome today about his concerns over the civil service at Westminster and the alleged growing problems the government are having in dealing with them.

On the whole it’s pretty well-balanced, but one section in particular stuck out to me.

As Goodman outlines his three areas of concern and experience in dealing with the civil service, he comments on something that Conservative Ministers with experience of government allegedly all continually claim, namely the declining standards of the civil service.

This, it is claimed, can be blamed on,

Labour’s “diversity agenda” for the civil service…background or gender or ethnicity came to count for more than ability

So let’s get this straight, the reason there have been declining standards in the civil service is because Labour insisted that the civil service hire more working class people, more women and more black and asian or other ethnic minority people?

Because obviously there are no working class people, women or ethnic minorities who can possibly write letters in clear English, which is what Paul Goodman uses as an example of declining standards.

Are Tory Ministers really claiming that standards have declined because more women work in the civil service?

Do they look at a woman or someone with a regional accent and automatically believe they must have gotten there because of their gender or class and not on account of their own talents?

Have they taken a note of every poorly drafted letter and noted who wrote it, and checked to see if it was a woman, a black person, or something from the North of England?

How many Tory Ministers actually have previous experience of government? There can’t be many – Ken Clarke springs to mind. Who else has these ridiculous views?

The funny thing is these Ministers would never have the guts to say this publicly because they know the public would excoriate them, so instead they whisper it anonymously to journalists so they can drip feed their poison into the media without ever having to be held accountable for their views.

At Bradford Council we’ve announced we’re looking at ways we can tackle under-representation of ethnic minorities at a senior Council level. I’m confident we can do so without declining standards, even if anonymous Conservative Ministers would appear to disagree.

The article is about issues concerning the civil service, but it shows up the issues many people have with politicians too.

IDS and universal credit. “They lied to him.” Trouble with the civil service The Tory Diary.

Wage Concern – Sign our petition to stop the government cutting the Minimum Wage

So the government have announced they’re looking to amend the Terms of Reference for the Low Pay Commission to force them to recommend freezing or even cutting the National Minimum Wage for the first time since it was introduced in 1999.

Its a slightly confusing message when a couple of weeks later they announce a 1.9% rise, although note how the briefing on a potential cut came directly from No.10, i.e. the Tories, while the rise was left solely to Lib Dem minister, Vince Cable.

Nonetheless the Lib Dems were silent when the government were briefing about the potential cut and would be just as culpable in any freeze or cut the government introduced. In announcing the wage rise the government also notably failed to track back on their previous briefings about a future cut, raising the prospect of freezes or cuts in the coming years, particularly if economic growth maintains the sluggish rate it has done under all of George Osborne’s reign as Chancellor.

Wage Concern – 2009 vintage

In light of this we’ve resurrected the Wage Concern campaign that we started back in 2009 when a group of backbench Tory MPs brought forward a Private Member’s Bill that proposed to allow opt_outs of the Minimum Wage, something that would have fatally undermined it.

The Tory leadership were silent on the issue at the time with David Cameron failing to show leadership by standing up to his backbenchers, not for the first (or last) time.

Thankfully we succeeded in pressuring them to drop the Bill but there were always questions over Cameron’s commitment to the Minimum Wage. When it was first introduced he campaigned against it and claimed it would cost a million jobs. As Leader of the Opposition he ‘accepted’ he got it wrong but meanwhile anonymous ‘Senior Tories’ were briefing that a Tory government wouldn’t scrap the Minimum Wage, rather, like George W Bush’s administration in the USA, they’d simply let it ‘wither on the vine’.

Wage Concern – today

Since being in power, in fairness to Cameron and the Tories, they have raised the Minimum Wage twice including this new announcement, but the briefings a couple of weeks ago on potentially cutting it have raised enough alarm bells to justify dusting off the trusty ol’ Wage Concern flag and start the campaign again.

We’ve got a new twitter account and Facebook page, so please follow both of them for the latest news on the campaign, while we’ve also raised a petition on the Number 10 e-petitions website.

The aim of the petition is to get 100,000 signatures, which in all likelihood mean it will get debated in the House of Commons, where we would hope to flush out those MPs who would happily see it abolished and simultaneously force the government to back down and reaffirm their commitment to the Minimum Wage by pledging not to freeze or cut it. We’re also calling for further measures to punish unscrupulous employers who break the law and do not pay their staff the Minimum Wage.

Recently two firms had to pay £100,000 in back pay to staff they had not paid the proper Minimum Wage levels too, but the fines for breaking the law were only £5,000 each. It should be much higher and the penalties far more severe.

You can sign the e-petition here, and please do share it around to anyone you think might be interested in helping protect the Minimum Wage from being cut by the government.

Why we need a Minimum Wage

For millions of people, the only pay rise they ever got was when the government announced a rise in the Minimum Wage, and while many right-wing politicians like William Hague, now Foreign Secretary and David Cameron, now Prime Minister, called it reckless and predicted it would cost millions of jobs the fact is there is no evidence to suggest this has happened.

Now more than ever people need the protection that a Minimum Wage provides them, giving them and those above a floor beneath which they cannot get dragged. Scrap or cut the Minimum Wage and you remove or lower that floor, not just dragging those directly above it down, but also those higher up who face an increased downward pressure on their wages.

People’s living standards are being crushed by multiple factors, many global in origin and many coming as a consequence of the Tory and Lib Dem government. Whatever the questions are on how to return economic growth to this country, the answer simply can’t be cutting the wages for the very poorest workers in the country.

The government have spent the last few weeks defending their welfare reforms by insisting that they want to make work pay, if we let them cut the Minimum Wage then it will be a huge backwards step for the very people the government claim to be on the side of.

Follow us on Twitter here, on Facebook here and sign the petition here.

Exclusive pictures from inside the Bradford Odeon building

One of the few perks I could name since being a Councillor has been getting to go on a trip round the Bradford Odeon site as part of our work on the Regen Scrutiny Committee.

It was particularly useful as in the space of a couple of weeks previously a couple of batches of photos had come out, one from a broadly ‘anti’ position on the Odeon, showing the decay, and the other from a positive position, showing some of the intact architectural murals and so on.

As we wandered around I was obsessively taking photos on my trust phone and I’ve been sat on them ever since (October!) meaning to put them on this blog so people could see for themselves what we saw wandering around inside the Odeon.

It was interesting because you could see both aspects of what the pro and anti camps could see – some bits are indeed truly dilapidated, others show some parts where things seem pretty intact.

You can see the pictures below but my own opinion is that, really, showing significant water damage or fully intact plasterwork doesn’t confirm or disprove that the building can easily be saved. The structural issues obviously go much deeper and unless you saw some iron girders ripped from the ground and sticking up through the floor you probably couldn’t tell either way.

Nonetheless it was an interesting experience and it certainly helped seeing things first hand instead of through the photos of others, which now of course you are having to do through my photos! I should warn you there are around 100 of them. I uploaded them in the order I took them, which was roughly from start to finish of the trip, but WordPress helpfully mixed them up for some reason, so it flits around a bit. The quality isn’t always the best given the dim light we were in, but hopefully they should give you some idea of what it is like inside the building.

If you want to ask me a question on what it was like inside, let me know in the comments below.

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