The tablet brought down from Mount Statism

Tim Montgomerie on ConHome's "Left Watch" has this great image:

Defunding the Labourpuke payroll vote: why only now?

Eric 'Humpty Dumpty' Pickles has told a CBI meeting that he intends to scrap the Local Authority Two Tier Code, the second most blatant attempt (after the Equality Act) by the Blair-Brown regime to shackle its successor.

Employers would no longer be required to offer employment to new recruits on terms and conditions "no less favourable" than those of transferred state sector employees. "This is bonkers", said Pickles, "it increases the costs to the taxpayer of providing public services, and it actively discourages the creation of new jobs".

Dave Prentis, boss of the state employee trade union Unison, said: "Eric Pickles is getting rid of vital protection for mainly low-paid, women workers - particularly cleaners, home carers, and catering workers. Private firms taking over public contracts will now be free to start a race to the bottom on pay and terms and conditions, in these already low-wage occupations".

Both these statements are true. The issue is between the interests of Prentis's dues-payers and those of the general public.

The Coalition partners never had anything to lose by defunding the Labour party's disgustingly bloated payroll vote. Why the hell are they only getting serious about doing so a year after taking power?

US Teachers' Unions

See this great article about the swinish teachers' unions in NRO by the very lovely Michelle Malkin, author of Culture of Corruption: [            ] and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (hint: it's not Blair). 

Perhaps the most noteworthy point is that the deeply corrupt US teachers' unions appear to be even more devoted to social engineering than their British equivalents, and even less interested in teaching and learning.

To mount my most sway-backed hobby horse once more, the "left" in Britain has lapped up every "progressive" social engineering fad to emerge across the Atlantic for over a century. Because leftists are by definition ignorant and spiteful, they are blissfully unaware that they are as much as product of the cultural imperialism they denounce as the consumerism they affect to despise. 

Saul Alinsky, who gets a brief panning at the end of the article, was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and a leftist grass-roots organizer who died in 1972. His 1946 book Reveille for Radicals is explicitly old-school communist, yet his Wikipedia entry kicks off with a quote associating him with Tom Paine as "one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left". Go figure.

Alinsky is about as relevant to the 21st century as his contemporaries the Rosenbergs, and it is very strange to see him credited with so much influence over The One and his homies.

Wood for the trees

Faced with losing around 30 percent of its annual £2.9 billion budget by 2015, the woeful, deeply unloved and superfluous Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is to dispose of about half of the 748,000 hectares of woodland overseen by the Forestry Commission.

The Forestry Commission was set up in 1919 because of a perceived need to keep Britain's coal-mines supplied with pit-props. Consequently it planted vast areas with pine trees. It has totally outlived its usefulness and most of the forests it manages are species-poor. 

The National Trust said: "Potentially this is an opportunity. It would depend on which 50 per cent of land they sold off, if it is valuable in terms of nature, conservation and landscape, or of high commercial value in terms of logging." The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said: "We would look very carefully at what was planned. It would be possible to sell 50 per cent if it was done in the right way."

The Forestry Commission trade union said: "We will oppose any land sale. Once we've sold it, it never comes back." With matching stupidity the Telegraph says: "Ministers plan huge sell-off of Britain's forests."

That's the state's forests, you arseholes. The majority of Britain's woodlands are privately managed, including the overwhelming majority of the broadleaf acres that are the most biodiverse and recreationally attractive.

National temperament

Michael White - semi-soothscribe

Assistant Editor White is a 30-year, hard-core Guardianista, a cohort that normally produces the worst kind of locked-into-the-60s lefty bleating, so it is a pleasant surprise to find that he has written a balanced article on John Hutton's interim report on state sector pensions.

Hutton is a heavy-hitter. He was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions 2005-7, and despite having accurately predicted that Brown would be a "fucking disaster" as prime minister, went on to become Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, and finally Secretary of State for Defence from October 2008 until he resigned in mid 2009 and announced he would not stand at the next election. Despite this, he got a peerage in Brown's dissolution honours.

Anyway - back to White's article, which chides the state sector unions for pissing into the wind about the unfunded pension liabilities that have been mounting up ever since Thatcher bought them off back in 1980-81 (that last bit is my view, not White's).

On pensions there is always good news to offset the bad. Yes, most currently struggle to pay their way, but the underlying cause of the problem, alongside breezily over-optimistic promises by companies and governments, is that most of us are living so much longer.

Public sector workers talk of lower pay than the private sector in return for greater job security and state-backed pension. Such arguments fail to impress their private sector colleagues who have seen final salary schemes - in some cases, all pension schemes - modified or close as a combination of factors exposed their financial fragility.

The free market narrative blames chancellor Gordon Brown, whose famous assault on pension fund tax perks (building on Norman Lamont's early raid) did not help. But nor did company pension contribution holidays in the boom years, followed by panic after the stock market tanked. Rarely put in the dock is the change to transparent accounting, which forced private companies to stop pretending all was well.

White's blind spot is to think that a tu quoque about Lamont and the shaky accounting of some private pension plans balances the fact that Brown deliberately set out to destroy the best funded private pensions in Europe, with the intention of privileging the state sector. But he is far from unique in this - everyone seems to forget that Brown's malevolent plan was put into action as soon as he became chancellor, over 13 years ago.

Brown also pushed state salaries up to parity with the wealth-producing sector without reducing the multiple perks that had previously "compensated" the statist drones for their lower pay, while increasing their numbers. He also poured state funding into the state sector unions, with the aim of creating a highly privileged, unsackable mass of Labour party clients in the state apparat - and he succeeded.

So, although White writes sensibly about Young's sensible proposals, by limiting themselves to demographic issues they both avoid discussing the politics of how such a blatant imbalance came about. The state sector union bosses quite clearly intend to deliver on their side of the evil bargain Brown struck with them.

Channel Four

One tends to concentrate on the Bitchy Boys because of their air of smug lefty superiority, but of course Channel Four is just as bad and its news presenter, Jon Snow, learned his trade at the Bitchy Boys - notably during the Bitchy Boys' finest hour, when they broadcast information designed to help the Argentines during the Falklands War - and then went forth to set new standards of supercilious bias at C4.

The C4 press release for tonight's Dispatches reads as follows:

With the spending review edging ever closer, Britain's unions are preparing to take advantage of the public's discontent. They have spent the past few decades on the back foot, while the population often never had it so good. So now that austerity measures are set to bite, do these organisations have the mandate to fight back?

How remarkably revealing. Since it makes clear that the unions are apart from "the population", what "mandate" could there possibly be? And, outside of the state sector, where is this "public discontent" that the trades unions are supposed to exploit?

But finally, "on the back foot" really does not come close to adequately describing what has happened to trade union membership. See ONS graph to 2006. Less than a third of the working population is still unionised, practically all of it in the state sector, with membership declining even as the Labour regime privileged its clientele over those who work for a living whose taxes pay their wages.