Sunday 15 November 2009

Where All That Tax Goes.....

...... and why a Conservative victory at the next election won't make a whole heap of difference.

Being no longer idle, I fall behind on my discretionary reading, so it was only last night in the bath that I read Rod Liddle's piece on Jeanie Lynch from last week's Speccie. Jeanie is ‘Lead Officer for Equality in Children and Young People’s Services for Devon County Council’.

I can't think of any other example which illustrates quite so clearly why we have a national debt of £1.3 trillion, unfunded liabilities of another £2 trillion on top of that, and a government that consumes 50% of GDP.

Jeanie's week: Monday - Value the Difference course; Tuesday - "Building resilience for our Gypsy, Roma Traveller Achievement Services"; Wednesday - Day Off; Thursday - "Children and Sex" speech; Friday - "pulling together diversity data".

Liddle: "‘Building resilience for our Gypsy, Roma Traveller Achievement Services’. What does that mean? God knows, but she concludes, in her diary, that gypsies and Roma and travellers need to improve their ‘resilience skills’. You wonder for a moment if this cheerful middle-aged woman is teaching gypsies how to fight. ‘Grandmother’ and ‘sucking eggs’ is the first response which comes to mind. You wonder also if the people of Devon wished that their local council was instead teaching gypsies to be a bit less resilient, all things considered, or perhaps to have the requisite resilience to pack up their caravans and move to Cornwall or Somerset or Dorset. But Jeanie has only contempt for the people who pay her salary (let’s be honest — the gypsies don’t, do they?): she says the travellers face horrible discrimination from ordinary people in the wider world. Those awful people in the wider world."

Liddle discovers that there is a veritable platoon of Acts of Parliament (that would be Westminster AND the European one, natch) that makes all this worthless guff a requirement. It is not so much a matter of choice as the Law of the Land. Jeanie probably pulls in around £30,000 for this stunt. But Devon is a big old area, so she'll need a car. Call it another £3,000 on autolease. There will be expenses of course, and petrol, and oodles of stationery costs as Jeanie publishes all those glossy handouts on anal sex for 8 year olds and pamphlets telling the policemen of Tavistock not to be beastly to pikeys. And, when Jeanie finally retires to her cottage by the sea, aged 60, there will be her pension. For ever. And it's unfunded. The children she teaches anal sex to next week will be paying Devon County Council's taxes in ten years' time, partly to fund Jeanie's final salary, index-linked pension scheme. Come to think of it, a good few of them will be employed by the Council, too. Outreach Co-ordinators, probably. Or Clotted-Cream Safety Standards Invigilators.

Devon County Council is run by the Conservatives. Liddle concludes that even if they wanted to, they are buggered:

"And so, if you’re the newly elected ruling group of Devon County Council you may well be tempted just to sigh and let Jeanie go about her work.

This stuff, this ludicrous nonsense, has become unavoidable. We cannot get rid of it. And my guess is there’s a Jeanie doing her business for every county and borough council up and down the land and a Gypsy, Roma, Traveller Achievement Service in every relevant council up and down the land and a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans (sic) History Month coming to a school near you very soon. They want kids, incidentally, to celebrate the life of a famous LGBT person from history and suggest computer science would be a good place to start. Poor Alan Turing, once known as a brilliant mathematician. Now known as an unhappy homosexual."

Read the whole thing. You'll laugh and cry.

8 comments:

Philipa said...

It seems the only thing left to do is move abroad. There are so many of these non-jobs. I'm amazed the people have the front to do them and so little self-awareness and intellect to realise what they are in fact doing. What is worse - people like this or those that actually know they are robbing the tax payer blind?

apricotfox said...

Moving abroad, sadly, is not an option. If you think our bureaucracy and political correctness is bad, just live in Europe for a while..espec France. The only places where you might seem free to do as you please are probably not places you would ever, ever want to live. We have to stay and fight!

Electro-Kevin said...

Have you heard of the Nottingham Declaration ?

Binds all signatory councils to a green agenda - including those elected after it was signed.

(H/T to E-K Snr who found it.)

Anonymous said...

"Lead Officer for Equality in Children and Young People’s Services for Devon County Council"

That answer to "and what do you do for a living?" is 14 words long.

I have a theory about this.

It is:

"the value to society of the job you do is in inverse proportion to the number of words in your job title."

The longer the title, the more it sounds like someone trying to justify their existence.

Sen. C.R.O'Blene said...

Perhaps Jeannie can tell me what happened to the pikeys who nicked our holly last year about now...

Oooops, sorry, pricks just don't chase other prick nickers, it's just not an outreach subject for working on. We just shouldn't be growing such a dangerous tree, 'elfun soifty' will be down on us like a ton of bricks - that's if they realise I'm not wearing steel toecaps and wearing a hard hat, but it will be a yellow one, (not many Chinese here so far), but there may be, so I'll paint it black, that way I might get a discount on my poll tax - don't say 'poll' it rhymes with 'boll' which is what cotton looks like before it's picked, but I can't talk about that either, so all the wasters in Tunbridge Wells BC can sit and piddle around on their new computers, reading emails from their mates while they while away the hours until 4.30 pm, and have to stop ordering Argos bling...

'Nuff said...

Philipa said...

Not many chinese, Scrobs? I can't make a joke of paying Pikeys to leave after I heard of the case of Agnes Wong. I heard (on the wireless) that money was being made available by the government to resettle offenders in their home country, it was to pay for training and accomodation and £4500 was mentioned. Anyway, I came across this conversation but please be warned: These LINKS CONTAIN UPSETTING DETAIL.

Thud said...

Moving abroad does not as apricotfox has already stated make a bit of a difference...I just get to live with two different sets of insane social tinkerers.

Tuscan Tony said...

Well said. I dream of the day when we are all accepting of each others difference to the extent that no funding is require=d of any particular group. But that'll never happen, because that is not the purpose of the exercise. Managed failure keeps Jeannie in work. Success is an anathema to her, and to the wider world of socialism.