Whatever we may think about the execrable Daily Mail and its moronic readership, there's no denying that several of their columnists often talk a good deal of sense. This recent article by Richard Littlejohn will ring familiarly in the ears of many regular grumpy old sods ...
Thirteen years of New Labour rule have made our lives a misery where it matters most to us - on our unswept streets and in our own bin-cluttered backyards. We all depend on the services provided by local councils, yet these days they are run for the benefit of those who work there, not for the people who pay for them.
When I started out in journalism in Peterborough many years ago, the leader of the local council was an engine driver called Charlie Swift, who ran the city in his spare time and didn't receive a penny from the ratepayers in either salary or expenses. He wasn't universally popular. Round town he was known as 'That Bugger Swift'. But the streets were clean, the parks immaculate, the corporation buses ran on time, the roads were in good repair, the schools had a pretty decent record, the car parks were free and the dustbins were emptied twice a week.
That was all anyone wanted from their local authority.
But where once the council chamber contained butchers, bakers and builders, we now have a generation of full-time councillors who have never held down a proper job in their lives. They get lavish expenses and allowances, while the old breed of town clerk with a sense of duty has been replaced by 'chief executives' who pretend they are employed to run major commercial organisations and expect to be paid accordingly.
Out went frugal 'ways and means' departments, devoted to keeping costs down. The parks committee became the 'leisure and amenities' directorate. The sanitation department morphed into 'environmental health'. There was a recruitment and spending spree which would do justice to a sailor on shore leave. And so we arrived where we find ourselves today - with grandiose council 'cabinets', vast PR departments, local authorities with foreign policies and anti-nuclear zones,'diversity' directorates and 'carbon footprint' committees.
Over the years, I've made a good living pillorying this never-ending carnival of politically motivated profligacy. I've had enormous fun with the insane jobs - lesbian self-defence instructors, transgender policy co-ordinators, nuclear-free zone inspectors - invented by councils to expand their empires and devour our taxes. These days I tend towards rage. Now more than ever, with the economy going to hell in a handcart, we simply can't afford this circus of taxpayer-funded excess.
Skilled craftsmen, chartered accountants, chemists, bank staff, estate agents and investment analysts have all made the long trek to the job centre. But there's one lucky group of people who have no such worries about losing their livelihoods. While private companies are either contracting or going to the wall, Britain's five-a-day co-ordinators, diversity managers, equality officers, elf 'n' safety enforcers and carbon-footprint campaigners can all sleep easily in their beds. The public sector continues to party like it's 1999. There's been no shake-out in the town halls, no Christmas parties cancelled in quangoland.
This is what Gordon Brown really means when he boasts about 'investment'. It's his reckless spending, putting 800,000 more people on the public payroll, which has left Britain the worst equipped of all industrialised countries to deal with the downturn.
We are now two nations. While millions of people in the competitive sector of the economy stare down the barrel of redundancy, the feather-bedded inhabitants of Brown's bloated client state are insulated from the realities of his economic mismanagement.
Newly invented non-jobs include a £41,000-a-year 'promoting healthy weight' adviser in Lewisham and a £19,000-a-year 'temporary mass participation' worker in Bromsgrove. Mid-Suffolk has recruited a development officer to teach juggling to youngsters. Fife has a cheerleader and a 'teen funk' instructor.
When the Government announced plans to encourage people to abandon their cars and walk to work, I predicted that it would spawn a whole new job creation scheme. Within weeks, the Guardian was running adverts for 'community walking coordinators'.
This non-stop recruitment drive at our expense has gone through a number of different phases. There was the great AIDS scare, when no self-respecting council could bear to be without an army of HIV prevention workers. At one stage, I worked out there were more people in Britain earning a good living from AIDS than were actually dying from it.
That was followed by the multiculturalism obsession, which could be satisfied only by hiring thousands of equality and diversity commissars. In between, we've had every lunacy from real nappy coordinators to condom commandos and advisers to address the very special needs of gay alcoholics.
Today's driving force is the great global warming scam, entailing the hiring of legions of eco-warriors and enviro-crime fighters, on salaries commensurate with their self-righteousness. More than 5,000 new jobs - and counting - have been created by local authorities to cash in on the 'global warming' hysteria and £30k seems to be about the going rate. Town halls across Britain are estimated to have spent more than £100million recruiting an army of green warriors.
In the People's Republic of Islington, the council advertised for a 'carbon reduction adviser' on thirty grand a year. The advert read: 'Islington Council is leading the way in tackling climate change.' You could have fooled me. Islington may be leading the way in vindictive parking enforcement, stabbing, street crime, graffiti and child molestation in council care homes. But saving the planet?
Meanwhile, in Tower Hamlets, the poorest borough in London and arguably the most deprived in Britain, 58 employees have job titles which contain the words 'climate change' or 'global warming'. When Bedford Borough Council advertised for a climate change officer the perks included, wait for it, an 'essential car user allowance'. You couldn't make it up.
Town halls across Britain are estimated to have spent more than £100million recruiting an army of green warriors. Yet when floods swept many parts of the country a couple of summers ago, all these climate champions proved to be utterly, hopelessly, bloody useless. When the heavens opened, it was the same old story, just as it is when it snows in the winter. No evacuation plans, no flood defences, simply the usual headless-chicken incompetence. While we're worrying ourselves sick about 'global warming', we still haven't got a clue what to do about the weather.
None of the horde of new public servants is providing anything most people would remotely consider to be a public service. Take the council threatening to close down burger vans which don't offer 'healthy options'. What gives them the right to do that? It's none of their business what people eat, especially when they can't do the jobs they are paid for, namely keeping the streets clean and emptying the dustbins?
The 'services' we pay for and depend on are appalling. Town halls employ legions of jobsworths to find out what we want to do and then stop us. These days, they'd rather employ inspectors to rifle through your bin for the 'wrong kind' of rubbish than take it away. In many areas the dustman comes round about as often as Father Christmas. When I was a boy we lived in a bungalow in Essex and every week the dustmen would empty our two metal bins: one for household waste, the other for the ashes from our boiler. They'd walk round the back of the house, hoist the bins onto their shoulders and, having emptied them onto their cart, would bring them back to where they belonged, behind the coal bunker.
Strong men, doing men's work. They were admired, stock characters in popular culture.
So, how on earth did we get from there to a situation where, in Britain in 2008, there were a record 228 assaults on dustmen? It's simple really. Recycling rules and the Stalinist zeal with which they are now enforced have the capacity to unleash the inner Basil Fawlty in us all. In Hertfordshire, an angry resident attacked a dustcart with a broom. In Southampton, armed police were called out after a greengrocer held a dustman hostage at gunpoint.
A wheelie bin that remained unemptied for three weeks turned out to contain a corpse. Refuse crews would turn up at the house in Cobham, Surrey, but it was halfway up the drive and council rules state that it must be placed on the pavement, otherwise the rubbish won't be collected. They deemed it too heavy to move to their cart. Only when the bin was knocked over, probably by scavenging urban foxes, was the body of a 30-year-old woman revealed.
You can only begin to imagine the bovine stupidity which contributed to the delay in finding the body. A corpse does tend to get a bit ripe after a few days, particularly if not wrapped securely in a regulation black plastic bin liner.
'Oi, Sid, have a butcher's at this. Looks like a dead body.'
'Why are you telling me? I'm a dustman, not a bloomin' undertaker. But we can't just leave it here. It don't half pen and ink.'
'That's a good enough reason for leaving it be. You dunno where it's been.'
But it's unfair to lay all the blame on the dustmen. They were only obeying orders. I'm surprised the killer wasn't fined for putting the body out in the wrong container on the wrong day.
It's a crying shame the town halls aren't still run part-time by engine drivers, not by self-regarding, pious Guardianistas. Where's 'That Bugger Swift' when you need him? For a start, I doubt Charlie would have had any truck with today's elf 'n' safety racket.
Hundreds of people from Kendal, in the Lake District, turned out for a Freddie Mercury tribute concert at a local leisure centre. As the band reached its finale, the singer urged everyone to get up and dance, whereupon the venue's manager pulled the plug on the sound system mid-song. Dancing is apparently in breach of regulations. A spokesman for the local council said: 'We hope this did not take away the enjoyment of the event.' And another one bites the dust.
This was just one example of the tyranny which has grown up under Labour and from which no aspect of human activity, however harmless, however innocent, is immune. In Afghanistan, the Taliban banned dancing because it was anti-Islamic. In Britain, the elf 'n' safety nazis are banning dancing because it's dangerous.
Nowhere is sacred. A reader told me how at a wedding in a lovely little 14-century church in a tiny village in the back of beyond, before the ceremony began, the vicar said he was obliged to tell the congregation that in the event of an emergency there were two ways of escape, through the vestry and through the main door. How long before vicars conducting funeral services have to advise the dear departed to make sure they take all their belongings with them?
St Peter's Church, Derby, had to remove hassocks on the orders of elf 'n' safety in case someone at prayer fell off one. It won't be long before they're insisting that all members of the congregation have to wear skateboard-style knee pads before taking communion.
And a Catholic church in Shropshire was threatened with closure after a safety report, which claimed that after 100 years, a build-up of incense smoke may have caused the air in the church to become toxic and possibly carcinogenic. Ye gods.
A crematorium in Nottinghamshire was told to remove all its memorial benches because they are three inches too low and do not comply with the Disability Discrimination Act 2005. They all had to be replaced, at a cost of £200,000. Who decides what is, or what isn't, an optimum height for a park bench? People come in all shapes and sizes. What kind of job is it crawling around a cemetery measuring benches and then ordering them to be removed?
One which pays £30k-plus and comes with a motor and an index-linked pension for life.
The cost of home repairs is soaring because elf 'n' safety is forcing contractors to hire scaffolding instead of using ladders for even the most minor job. I can only think of one good reason for erecting a scaffold. And that's to string up whoever comes up with these absurd laws.
A hospital banned knitting needles just in case someone pokes their eye out. Which, of course, they never have. Another one installed dispensers of alcohol-based, anti-bacterial handwash to stop the spread of diseases and superbugs, then removed them in case alcoholics ripped them off the wall, drank the contents and poisoned themselves. Talk about foaming at the mouth.
Elf 'n' safety turned out in force at the 2009 London Marathon. As the competitors negotiated roads littered with traffic- calming measures, officials held up signs reading 'Beware, Hump' and an arrow pointing downwards. Now that the Government has given the go-ahead for 20mph limits in all residential areas, don't be surprised if this year's marathon doesn't feature speed traps and random breath tests round every corner.
There's no end to the idiocy, especially when it concerns children. Everything from playing conkers to swimming with snorkels has been outlawed in the name of keeping our kids safe. After I wrote about schools banning sack races and three-legged races on safety grounds, I added that 'it'll be egg-and-spoon races next'. Cue a barrage of letters from readers informing me that their local schools had beaten me to it.
Real eggs had been replaced with rubber eggs because of - you guessed - salmonella scares. A grandmother went to her grandson's sports day to discover him taking part in a jelly-and-spoon race. When it comes to elf 'n' safety, even I can't make it up. Then again, I don't have to. In Fleetwood, Lancashire, the council banned hopscotch and the 'Streetscene Manager' sent cleaners out to scrub away a chalk grid on the pavement.
I thought ministers had repented when it was announced that councils were being encouraged to hire 'street football coordinators' but I was wrong. Turns out the real purpose of these new jobsworths was not to encourage kids to play football, but to ban it. The Communities Department sent out a 53-page memo, which included a warning that 'if not planned properly, football can be divisive and trigger conflict. Passions can get high and physical contact can easily lead to confrontations'.
That's the whole point of street football. It is to encourage boys to burn off excess energy. And if it descends into a punch-up, so what? Some of the worst fights I've ever seen have been on Sunday morning football fields. No harm done. Except in the eyes of those meddlesome Guardianistas who want to eliminate all risk and spontaneity from every aspect of our lives. How long before they legislate on the use of jumpers for goalposts? You won't be able to use jumpers from budget retailers because they're made by slave labour in the Third World.
Next, they will be insisting that teams reflect the gender, ethnic origin and sexuality of the surrounding area. And no one will be allowed to win, because it could traumatise the losers.
Already some seaside councils have scrapped donkey rides on the grounds of animal cruelty and Punch and Judy because it glorifies domestic violence. How long before they get round to banning paddling and sunbathing? Building sandcastles will require a visit from the building inspectors.
Picture the scene as the members of a joint task force from Elf 'n' Safety and Child Protection are briefed for a raid on an unauthorised woodland gathering ...
'Listen up, team. You had better go in disguise.'
'Why's that, guv?'
'For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain because today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.'
'But they don't have a catering licence or a safety certificate. If anything goes wrong we could have carnage on our hands. Food poisoning, sprained ankles, it doesn't bear thinking about. I want the tactical support unit beneath the trees where nobody sees them. They'll hide and seek as long as they please, cause that's the way the teddy bears have their picnic. And I don't want any heroics, either. If you go down to the woods today, you better not go alone. It's lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home.'
'What do you want us to do, guv?'
'Watch them, catch them unaware. See them gaily gad about, they love to play and shout, they never have any care. At six o'clock their mummies and daddies will take them home to bed, because they're tired little teddy bears. That's when we move in.'
'Why wait until six o'clock, guv?'
'We suspect a major paedophile ring is operating in the area. After all, we've only got their word for it that they are mummies and daddies. Social services are providing armed back-up and the helicopter is on standby ...'
The GOS says: Well said, that man. As we've worked in a local authority ourselves, we'd just like to point out (again) the two over-riding obsessions of all local government managers. The first is to guard their backs. When I worked for the county council I estimate that up to 40% of our office time was spent discussing things, reviewing and revising procedures and paperwork in order to ensure that no one could ever find the tiniest little thing to criticise. That meant, of course, that 40% of out time was not spent providing the services to the public for which we were being paid.
And the second compulsion is to get a bigger desk. The more you "talk up" the difficulty of your job, its importance to society, and above all that if anything goes wrong it'll be your superiors who are criticised, the more people they'll give you to work under you. The more people you are supervising, the more you get paid.
The more you're paid, the bigger desk you get. The bigger your desk, the bigger the office needed to put it in. The bigger the office, the more you deserve a secretary all your own. She will then do almost all your work for you, giving you the time to stand in the corridor chatting with the other managers, going down to the council workers' social club at lunchtimes to drink, laugh and swear a lot which is what, among senior county council managers, passes for "team building".
And when you reach the pinnacle of your local authority career aged 50 or so, you can resign, pimp yourself out as a "consulant" to all your former colleagues at exorbitant fees, collect your bloated index-linked pension when you're 60, and still pimp yourself out as a "consultant" and etc. etc.
That's what drives local authority managers. Trust me, I've been there.
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