This week is a public sector special. Having been in a cocoon the past week the main focus is the public sector agenda from the fascist Tory led regime.
Public Sector cuts
The very core of the public sector is being attacked via the ideology of privatisation that is being led by this Tory regime. Max Keiser is calling it a 'controlled demolition' and the ideology is driven and supported by the media.
The NHS is under a constant attack; nurses, beautiful people that work wonders for us, are being singled out for blame by the BBC and other media outlets, A&E is being told it faces change or collapse, the ambulance service are under pressure on attendance times but everyone sits back and watch as they get slashed to bits. Jeremy Hunt is on the news and all they can talk to him about is the EU. He is a criminal who is selling off the NHS for spare parts to the private profiteers, but no one in the media wants to challenge him about it! They would rather talk about the EU and a referendum and continue to frame the battle ground for the next general election. It is criminal and the media are doing the public a disservice.
Schools. Michael Gove was taken to bits by head teachers as he said he was trying to improve school standards. Why then are the government promoting private academies, supported by Gove, places that are driven by results not because it serves to benefit and better our children but because it serves to benefit their pockets and subsidies. They no longer teach our children how to think, they are teaching them what to think and spoon feeding them to ensure that they make the grade in their exams and with the debate barely even begun with a balanced argument, the news has called it a closed case.
Another
The Fire service has just been kicked in the balls by Sir Ken Knight who released his Fire Service Efficiencies Review, facing the future, this week which can be found here. He outlined savings of £130m if the fire service increased 'on call' or retained firefighter establishment by just 10%. He said that fire calls were down but resources had remained the same over the past decade. He said the service had contributed to the reduction in calls but had not adapted to this change in demand versus risk. He said fire deaths were down.
He told us a lot but then there was also a lot he did not tell us.
Ken Knight did not say that despite the the reduction in fire calls and unwanted alarms due to the work of the current operational workforce on the ground, that the fire service nationally was saving, on average, 19 people a day and even as this was being written, the fire service in Nottinghamshire were conducting a search and rescue for people involved in a potential gas explosion.
There was no mention of the fact that despite the reduction in fire calls if you were unfortunate enough to have one today you are more likely to die. He did not say that they have changed the way fire deaths are recorded over the years. If you died as a result of an infection in the hospital following a house fire it would not be recorded as a fire death and so these subtle differences in data gathering are having an affect on the true story.
There was no mention in his report about the unacceptable and uncharacteristic upward trend of firefighter fatalities over the past ten years. Several very high profile cases have left families devastated with the loss of loved ones. Rule 43 letters, a provision for coroners to make reports on the circumstances surrounding fatalities and actions that could be taken to prevent further occurrences, have been issued and seemingly not being dealt with by services across the country. Some of these recommendations occurred several years before the most recent events but even to this day, some of the recommendations are still slow in being implemented.
There was no mention of the more recent risk of flooding, something that firefighters are expected to respond to but without the statutory duty to do so. There is no statutory duty to do so because that would mean someone would have to pay for it and the government would rather dip there hand in their pocket for a drone army than provide first class equipment to their front line domestic services.
Ken Knight worked in some big metropolitan brigades that is true, but the amount of hands on experience he has ever had with running a brigade predominately made up of retained is limited. He claimed it was good value for money but did not explain any of the issues surrounding the recruitment and retention of retained staff, he did not mention anything about the issue of attendance times increasing and he certainly did not say anything about the training issues surrounding retained with the lack of time available for training.
The report covered some areas around senior management restructures, such as sharing the top roles between brigades but I hazard a guess they shall not be fighting each other for the scraps just yet and would be instead concentrating on slashing the firefighters delivering the service on the ground before they turn on each other. Take a look at London Fire Brigade, facing cuts of epic proportions, some 500 jobs and a number of stations to boot. This coming not much more than 12 months after darling David Cameron shook the hands of firefighters who fought bravely to control the fires set during the London riots of 2011. He then announced that they would be stealing their pensions.
These are troubling times for the public sector indeed, perpetually demonised by the agenda setting media as being the drain on the country and part of the reason why we are suffering the depression but these are just lies used to frame the debate. It is about the corrupt lining the pockets of their corrupt mates in faceless corporations and it is time that the advocates against this agenda spoke up and named and shamed them. What of the rest of us? At the very least the rest of us have to offer a resistance.
When will they stop chasing us? When we stop running
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