Work in progress
This is a long story which is serialised on this site. A new section is added every now and then.
It's a story about a far-off land with a Council that is cutting services, getting rid of Council housing, spending millions of pounds on private consultants and paying senior management huge salaries. Many members of staff are union members, but they get very little support in their local fight from the leaders of their union. That's because the leaders of these unions are desparate for good relationships with the political party that is destroying the country, because so many of those senior union members want to become MPs themselves. Wankers.
Prologue
Once upon a time – probably more often - there was a small, but central, nation that was, alas, ruled by an overblown, conscience-free political party that was entirely made up of takers, lechers, sadists, war-lovers, launderers, braggarts, daylight robbers, cons, felons, nepotists and traitors whose nature it was to join any queue for a raping. This party had sold itself to the people as an all-inclusive, representative Party of the People, and indeed was called the People's Party. Once in power, though, it headed briskly off on a very short journey to war, vice and perversion.
At the time of which we speak, this People's Party had ruled the nation for longer than its public cared to remember. It was also in power in a few local councils, where it had made, and continued to make, a monumental arse of itself.
It had, for instance, washed its hands of the important council job of providing council homes to the needy. It have given the management of many of these low-cost council homes to Arms Length Management Organisations, whose most memorable moves to date included declaring themselves bankrupt and sacking the hard-working frontline staff who helped their vulnerable clients find and maintain their much-required council homes.
At council level too, the People's Party had also closed local rehabilitation homes for troubled youths, refused to pay nursery nurses more than subsistence wages although they kept promising to, and allowed private companies to run homes for the vulnerable and aged for profit. The People's Party at council level had also apparently entered some sort of nationwide contest to sell every playground, berm and civic gathering-point to a massive supermarket enterprise and shonky luxury-apartment developers. It tried to raise its subjects' age for death from their thankless, poorly-paid efforts to keep public services afloat from 60 to 65. It paid private IT companies through the nose for an endless, and freakishly expensive, series of systems, database, web and networking balls-ups. The bigger the IT shambles made by a private company, the more money it received.
The nation's subjects were not wild about any of this. They were very keen to get shot of the People's Party at both the local and national levels. Unfortunately, the only real political alternative for the people of this nation was the Dark Party – a Party that was constituted entirely of congenital and career satanists. Nobody was in a huge rush to stir the scene up at that end, even if the Dark Party had recently choosen a comparatively young and decent-looking psychopath for once from its ranks as leader.
The upshot was that the nation's subjects decided to organise themselves and give the government and local councils a little taste of people-power. At the national level, they started to turn out at anti-war and anti-privatisation marches in long-unseen numbers. On the local level, they decided to join their local trade unions. This was particularly true among people who worked in the public services. The hope was that these local unions - which had, unfortunately, been haemorrhaging members, funds, influence and scruples for longer than was entirely flattering - would be thrilled to see their ranks swelling with honest, right-minded workers and would use their political connections and new-found membership heft to threaten the government and local councils with revolution if they continued to develop brutish policies that imperiled the poor and the employment conditions of the beleaguered public-sector rank and file.
Alas, this hope was built on sand. Far from leaping to the defence of their new and old members, the leaders of these reinvigorated trade unions showed an unfortunate inclination to slam the door in the faces of the poor and of the rank-and-file, and to whore around with People's Party politicians and rock stars and anybody else who was on the make. It was even worse than that, too. The union leaders not only demonstrated that they didn't give a bugger about helping the people that they were supposed to represent and whose membership fees paid their overblown salaries, but they actively launched a witch-hunting programme with a brief to get rid of any rank-and-file union member who tried to say that the People's Party and its love of war and privatisation was destroying people's lives. Suddenly, workplaces were infiltrated by moles from union headquarters who lept upon the slightest movement in the grass roots like randy ferrets.
Everbody knew why this was. Most of these unions paid money to the People's Party, and most union leaders liked the opportunities that these payments purchased. They particularly liked the thought that their toadying to the People's Party might lead to them one day being selected as People's Party candidates themselves. They viewed their union's annual payment to the party as the entry fee to this exclusive club. Many union presidents and well-placed union officials had been selected as People's Party election candidates over the years and many highly-placed union officials were keen for this tradition to continue, at least until their turn came. Any jumped-up serf or shop-floor pinko who looked like threatening this by bad-mouthing the People's Party was removed from the scene on a meathook.
And so it is that we turn now to one old, inner-city borough, where the People's Party had been in power at the local council for many years. This was also one of the boroughs where a lot of people were on the raw end of a two-pronged butt-fuck: the People's Party and their toadying unions were after them.
A local election also loomed at the time of which we speak. The People's party was desperate to win this election, because it felt, rightly, that a further caning in local elections (it had already had several very bad exepriences) would be interpreted as a comment on the extent to which it was loathed.
The council thus decided to instal a vicious senior management team and tell it to get rid of as many staff and services as possible, since they both cost money and caused trouble. The trade union - which was supposed to defend the staff who provided the public services that vulnerable people needed - went one better. It hired a bitter, right-wing, once-blonde, career slapper, and gave her free rein to take out her many life disappointments on any worker, activist, or free-speech proponent who looked even remotely likely cook up a revolution and bugger up the local elections for the People's Party at this particular council.
And so the pressure was on.
Click on the Can't Do heading below for the next section.
Brief snapshot
A typical scene in the borough at this point:
'Look at that guy!' one of the People's Party's female councillors shrieked, pointing a pale and shaking finger across the negotiating table at one of the many union representatives who'd turned up to this meeting to fight with her about the council's plans to cut jobs and funding at an important local welfare and benefits advice centre.
The advice centre was much utilised by a very large number of the borough's underprivileged residents - they needed the centre's help to negotiate the nation's complex welfare systems and they needed the face-to-face service that the centre provided if they were ever to figure out their entitlements. People came to the centre in their thousands. And they weren't all losers, as the People's Party would have the people believe. Many were abused wives, or people from war-torn countries, or people who'd been sick, or injured through no fault of their own and needed help getting back to the point where they could provide for themselves.
The councillor was trying to convince the union reps at the meeting that the best way to save the advice centre from People's Party plans to cut funding to it was to find something else to talk about and let her head down to her favourite local.
'It's the way the world is going,' the councillor told her stunned subjects. 'People can't keep expecting us to fund local services on the scale that we have up until now. We don't even really know if people want these services, anyway. My theory is that if people really want this service, they'll learn how to raise the money for it themselves. We're happy to send them on fundraising courses. You need skills to understand that sector. If they don't want to raise the money, they won't bother.'
A dreadful silence fell. The union reps were appalled. It didn't take a genius to work out that closing the advice centre would be a disaster for the thousands who used it, and the 20 or so people who worked in it. It was almost as though the councillor had forgotten that some of the region's most deprived wards were in her very own borough and that the people in them - the councillor's very own voting subjects, who, at the last election, had bought into the People's Party line about putting the needy first - had no hope of housing or feeding themselves without help.
Where would they live if they didn't have anyone to ask about applying for council housing? How would they buy groceries and eat if they didn't know which benefits they were entitled to, or how to apply for them? There was also the council's very own constitutional responsibilities to think about. Which patsy among them – the staff, that was - would be given the fatal task of making the equalities impact assessment for this horseshit fit? The reps from the Policy, Strategies and Equalities division were already looking at each other, and pointing.
One union rep seemed especially disgusted. He stood up before the councillor, flexed his hand in front of his trousers, and pretended to have a drawn-out wank. A mighty cheer went up in the draughty hall. The councillor was furious. She decided to try to humiliate the rep herself.
'Look!' she yelled over the crowd noise, directing the pale and shaking finger at the man. 'Look at him! Get that negative attitude, everybody! That's exactly the kind of union moron who can't take the idea of change. You crass idiots will get nothing out of life while you follow that kind of idiot around, let me tell you. He's exactly the kind of loser who opposes modernisation for the hell of it. I bet he couldn't even tell you what modernisation is. He just doesn't like it for the hell of it. He's what I call a Can't Do! Yes! Look at him! Look at him. He's a Can't Do Ha ha ha! He's a Can't Do!'
The man didn't blink, even when the councillor waved Security over to humble him. 'A Can't Do, eh? he said, as the Security guys, good men all, pretended to blindfolded him with the mayor's mothballed Twinned with Baghdad sash. 'That is new, man. That is very new. Usually, she just calls me a Can't.'
Click the Chapter One heading for the next bit
Chapter One: The Borough
Let us start our tale proper, and take you to the overpriced plain by the river where our inner-city borough was located. Busy and bustling, but not at all spacious, this borough hosted the usual powderkeg demographics: There was the usual small number of grotesquely rich wankers who lived under the usual highly-coveted seige in heavily-guarded ritzy piles next to the river, the slightly largely number of insanely aspirational people who lived in reasonably well-appointed homes several streets back from the river, where they aspired to the grotesque riches, and the usual extremely large number of poverty-stricken people who rotted away in the cold and crappy flats that constituted the Council's fast-dwindling housing stock, hoping that their big moment was not as far away as it looked.
So, that was the borough. Next, there was the Town Hall - an enormous, piss-soaked, leggy concrete offence from which senior management could see and shoot. Within this appalling building, and focused entirely on their own lives and ambition, were the local councillors and their senior management team. The staff were also there, poor bastards. Life for the staff had become execrable in recent times, to say the very least. They had always been hounded and threatened by their more senior colleagues, because that's the way a Council hierarchy works, but now even the toadies felt oppressed.
Paranoia was the word. All levels of the organisation were afflicted. The problem was, of course, the upcoming local election. This particular borough had been ruled by the People's Party for almost 20 years. Unfortunately, it looked very much like this reign was about to come to a sticky end. Alas, the People's Party was now so unpopular at the national level that the electorate was very likely to make a pointed statement against it at the local elections.
Life wasn't much of a picnic on the local front, either. The People's Party's policies had proved extremely unpopular in the borough - the Arms Length Management of council housing, the privatising of care homes and workers, the buckets of cash pissed away on consultants and external IT advisers, to name just a few. The upshot was that everybody involved in governing the borough – the councillors, little Hitlers, arse-kissers, palm-greasers and pocket-liners that had been running, and screwing, the borough for nearly two decades - was waking up to the fact that the People's Party's core supporters had abandoned it and that the election would be lost.
The councillors in particular were a shambles.
Tired, dated and hated by all, this People's Party administration was devoting the precious months before the election to imploding like a Lada. Half of the councillors were old-style People's Party members who hated the new-style People's Party members and their delight in privatising public services, killing Arabs, and taking freebie holidays. The other half were new-style People's Party members who were dying to climb aboard the privatising, warmongering and payola bandwagons and make their mark on the national political scene.
These last were the councillors who had pursued the privatisation concept in the borough in particular, in the hope that any brilliant results would grab the attention of People's Party bigshots who were looking to elevate local councillors to MP status. These were the councillors who had put contracts for vital council housing repairs and maintenance into incompetent private hands, achieved all-time council spending records on agency staff and failed consultants and projects, devised the concept of saving frontline advice centres by closing them, and nearly tripled the number of senior managers who earned over £50k a year as thanks for the advice on the above.
They were also the councillors who believed that election glory for the People's Party was not only possible, but God's top priority. As blind to the obvious as they were deaf to the truth, they galloped cheerfully towards the pit. At the time of which we speak, they'd embraced (with much encouragement from their dim Government) what they imagined was the ultimate election-winning concept. This concept was Efficiency. Able to neither spell nor define it, the new-style People's Party councillors dropped this word Efficiency into every public speech, reception, press interview and hustings, and waited for the voting masses to abandon themselves to the magic.
And this may have largely been harmless, or at least fatally disorganised, except that the senior management team got in on the act. This team had a model in mind for Efficiency all right - it wanted consultants it knew and a top-heavy management structure, with Efficiency savings gained by terminating services and the staff who provided them.
Specifically, this meant sacking every staff member who had entered public service to help the poor, and sliding a useless call-centre in as a replacement. It also meant automating all services that were used by borough residents who didn't have, and would never have, a computer. And it also meant giving a major management role for the whole circus to a private IT company - the council's new, so-called, strategic partner - whose costs were so high and results so thin that at least five other boroughs had sacked it.
Six months out from the election, the borough was so lost into the fiasco that nobody could imagine a life without panic. By its own admission, the senior management team had spent the millions of pounds in the borough's prized Invest-to-Save fund in pursuit of Efficient initiatives. Million had gone to the useless strategic partner for the Business Analysts, Branding Consultants, Business Process Re-Engineerers, Change Managers and – here's a beaut - Thought Leaders that were not only paid to identify services that might be made more Efficieny, but to provide outrageously expensive technology and consultants to replace the staff they'd identified as surplus to requirements.
The councillors definitely smelt a rat. The problem was that none of them wanted to catch up with it. If one of them tried, the rest of them turned, so councillor-level challenges to the Efficiencies programme were not as regular as they should have been.
'What is a fucking Thought Leader?' the Cabinet Member for Procurement, an old-style People's Party member, sneered at one Cabinet meeting as the entire Cabinet sat in a briefing-room, dry-mouthed and panicking after another impenetrable presentation on Business process re-engineering from the strategic partner and management.
The Cabinet Member for Procurement put her question again. The brains of the rest of the members curdled.
'Shut it, Gran,' the hot and horribly thirsty Deputy Leader snapped. 'You haven't spoken on a single fucking question except lunch since I've known you. Why wind us all up with yourself now?'
The Cabinet Member for Procurement lifted her lip and sneered. 'I'm worried, not excited, Turd,' she said.
The Deputy Leader snarled back. 'It was all in that presentation,' he said, pointing to the flipchart at the top of the room. 'If you didn't understand that short presentation, you'll never get your head round the whole process.'
Things shambled on in this tenor for a while. Any member of the public who wanted schooling, social services, a council house, or anything other than an unspecified place in a queue on a call-centre line was staring down a couple of very dark barrels. Ditto for those staff members who fantasised about finding themselves in a world where their work and hopes for relative financial security meant even half as much as a failed IT consultant's.
And so we continue our tale a far-off (kind of) land, where a hopeless People's (some might say New Labour) Party Council is cutting services, getting rid of Council housing, spending millions of pounds on private consultants and paying senior management huge salaries for achieving bugger-all at great cost.
You can read the Prologue to this article here.
You can read Chapter One here .
Chapter Two: The Councillors try to sell reform and the idea of a call-centre to the staff
For the local branch secretary, it all began one Monday morning when she looked up from her newspaper in the staff cafe, and saw the Mayor standing in front of her. He had one hand in his pocket, and a big smile on his face.
The branch secretary sighed. She could barely stand it. For most of his career, the Mayor had been an old-style People's Party politician - a balding, often unshaven, large, committed working man who believed in community (even if he quietly preferred white ones), and was rarely seen in anything other than jeans, a Chelsea scarf, and an elderly vinyl jacket. Unfortunately, he had caught the modernisation bug, somehow, and had recently refashioned himself into a new-style People's Party politician, complete with banker's suit, manbag, earpiece, and a wispy little Hoxton fin on top of his head, where a mighty comb-over had once reigned.
The branch secretary stared at the Mayor. She felt about as depressed as she expected to. She'd known the Mayor for more than 20 years and had rarely seen him in anything other than the jacket and the driver's seat of his lorry. The view now was largely unreal: there were points of slight upgrade, but he mostly put the branch secretary in mind of a hosed-down Les Patterson. Leaving would be a bit pointed, though: she'd have to shove her table into the Mayor's knees to get out and get past him. She'd left her run too late, as well. He was stroking his fin and preparing to sit down.
'Hey, babe,' he grinned as he slithered into the chair next to the branch secretary. He ran his knobbly little hand down her back.
The branch secretary couldn't take it. She grabbed her bag and started to fold her paper. 'For Christ's sake, Tony,' she said, as she started to rise. 'Take a look at yourself and sort it out. You're starting to remind people of John Prescott.'
The Mayor was not concerned. He held the branch secretary's hand, and pressed her back into her chair. 'It's really lucky, me finding you here,' he grinned, winking at her. The branch secretary put her head in her hands. 'Everybody in the Cabinet was very keen for me to come and see you. They want us all to get together for a meeting - you, us, and all your members. We need to talk about the best way for the staff and your members to get the most out of making the Efficiency programme happen. This one is really important to us. We need the Efficiency programme to work if we're going to win this local election. We can't afford for your members not to like what we want to do here.'
The branch secretary looked at the Mayor. 'Well, you're right about that,' she said. 'I've got three thousand members at this branch, and most of them live and vote in this borough. I would say that if you want to win the next election, your best bet is to try not to piss them off by replacing them with bloody consultants.'
The Mayor kept grinning, although he started to chew his lip as he did it. 'Um, all right,' he said. 'You might have a point. We might have to think about the words we use.' He brightened. 'We'd definitely listen to any suggestions you wanted to make on that front,' he told the branch secretary. 'It's important that we get the message across properly. I've got a great idea - how about you and I sit down and write a statement for the staff about the Efficiency programme together?'
The branch secretary couldn't stand it anymore. She picked up her newspaper, lifted her handbag to the table, and began to feel around in inside it for her fags. 'I've got a great idea, too,' she said. 'How about you and the Cabinet call a staff meeting about all this and we'll just attend it? I'll bring the branch officers, but we'll leave the script up to you.' She got up, lit a cigarette, and left.
The Mayor stood up in a big hurry. 'Oh,' he said as the branch secretary disappeared. 'All right.'
True to his word, the Mayor arranged the meeting.
He was also the one who decided that the meeting should be held in the cavernous Assembly Hall in the Town Hall – an enormous, crumbling, echoing chamber that was usually used as emergency accommodation for the many residents in the many suburbs that were regularly evacuated when the borough's shoddy gas and/or water mains crapped out. Indeed, the Mayor found about ten of the most recent evacuees wandering around the Assembly Hall in their pyjamas on the morning of the meeting. He made the Chief Executive drive them home in the Mayoral people-carrier. 'Get them out!' the Mayor kept hissing. 'They want to get home, anyway. Just get them out!'
The Mayor was very, very nervous. He had decided that the huge Assembly Hall was the smart choice for the meeting, because he felt that the big space would help make staff interest look small. Almost every Council employee would have to attend the meeting if the Hall was to be filled.
Unfortunately for the Mayor, paranoia and concern at all levels of the organisation was such by this point that nobody – even the people who were planning it – wanted to miss a meeting about the Council's future. Frontline officers, administrators, social workers, teaching staff, benefits staff, policy staff, committee clerks, IT staff, agency staff and every single manager in the place – everybody started to file into the Hall a good 20 minutes before the meeting was due to start.
(The only person who wasn't in evidence was the Chief Executive, as it happened. He was not, alas, much of a presence generally. The Councillors, true to tremulous form, had appointed him three years ago on the strength of his extraordinary ability to excite passion in absolutely nobody. He'd been everything they'd hoped on this front - he'd signed his contract, met his PA, chose his furniture, and then never made another decision. Indeed, there were those who'd started to wonder if he was still alive. He hadn't been sighted by a staff member since senior management's most recent awayday. The Councillors seemed to understand that their sinking ship was also rudderless, but they glossed over it whenever anyone asked. They wouldn't discuss the CE at all).
But anyway - the huge Hall was filled to bursting. Hundreds of people were present. At 2pm, the meeting began.
The Deputy Mayor hit the ground running.
'You lot better bloody listen to me,' spat the Deputy Mayor by way of introduction. He slapped a tanned hand down on the table behind which he stood, and stabbed a finger at the wall-to-wall staff members, managers, union reps and union branch officers, many of whom had only just been able to find standing room down the back. 'You people need to start listening to me, or we're all bloody history. Got it? Have you got that? You need to bloody listen to me.'
Everyone sat up at this, including the Deputy Mayor's fellow Councillors.
'You don't say swear when you're talking to staff, for God's sake,' the Cabinet Member for Community Services said quite audibly to her advisor from her seat just two down from the Deputy Mayor's. 'What's he trying to do? God, that man is a fool. Does he seriously think that's the way to get people on board?'
The Mayor also looked concerned. The Deputy Mayor had talked the Mayor into letting him front this event. The Deputy Mayor reportedly ran some sort of PR business during the day, and the Mayor had decided that at the very least, having the Deputy Mayor on the job beat paying for PR finesse. Plus, the Deputy Mayor relied on the £30,000-odd a year he pulled for his various civic and Cabinet posts. He'd assured the Mayor that he had a real incentive to make sure that the staff bought his line.
Now, the Mayor wasn't so sure. He wondered why he kept buying into the Deputy Mayor's sales pitches. It occurred to him that the Deputy Mayor's ability and delivery record had been points of concern for some time. The Mayor found himself suddenly wondering if the Deputy Mayor had really achieved anything at all in his 20 years at the Council, apart from tieless Fridays and – when he was Cabinet Member for Housing - the end of Council housing as a humane accommodation option when he handed the management of it to a now-imploding Arms Length Management Organisation. The ALMO had just celebrated its first anniversary by announcing it couldn't afford to continue and would close at least five of the borough's ten area housing offices and replace them with a cheap and useless call-centre. That was the Deputy Mayor's only legacy.
'Fuck,' the Mayor exhaled, too lost in the hellish pictures in his head to realise he'd spoke out loud. The hundreds of staff in front of him looked on, thrilled.
Warmed up and undaunted, the Deputy Mayor powered on. 'It's about progress,' he announced to the crowded hall. 'It's about this Council in the millennium It's about taking the great skills that you people have and shaping them to the needs of today's Council customers. That's why we want you to think very seriously about the oppportunities that putting as many of you as we can into a frontline call-centre will offer you as Council officers. We don't need all of you as benefits officers and social workers and committee staff. We want you up front, where you can use your people-skills.'
The staff looked at each other in horror. The Cabinet members looked at each other in terror.
'Shut him up, for God's sake,' the Cabinet Member for Procurement hissed at the Mayor. 'They'll all get up and come after us.'
'Redundancy will be an option for many of you, of course,' the Deputy Mayor continued, apparently failing to notice that most of his audience was now on its feet and gesticulating. 'We don't believe that this Efficiency drive needs to mean a cut in service, though. People today want call-centres. They want Efficiency. They want to be able to contact the Council at any hour that they want. They want to be able to sit in front of their computers and pay their Council Tax and choose a library and bury their grandparents and all that kind of thing...'
In fact, this was only partly true. The Council had indeed surveyed borough residents about service delivery, and had found that more than 50% of respondents did want electronic government. The problem was that they wanted electronic government in addition to face-to-face, frontline services. The other problem was that comparatively few residents had been surveyed, or responded to questionnaires. Thousands of questionnaires went out, but only a few hundred came back. Rumour had it that most of the respondents were senior managers, too. Certainly, this was a rumour that everybody enjoyed spreading.
'The IT side of it and the management side of this part of our whole modernisation programme will be handled by our Strategic Partner,' the Deputy Mayor went on. 'Could you put your hands together for...'
People began to scream.
'What do you mean we're going to be working in a call-centre? I'm not working in a call-centre. I hate call-centres. I didn't go to university just to work in a call-centre.'
'You crazy bastard. The public hate call-centres. They don't work. You can never get through.'
'How are we supposed to work through a whole housing application over the phone with someone who doesn't speak English?'
'Are we going to have to take a pay cut? People get paid shit in call-centres. Are we going to take a pay cut? I bet management won't take a bloody pay cut...'
'What about teachers? What about the schools? Are you going to cut the smaller schools? Are you going to cut us all out?'
The hall was in chaos. A couple of shop-stewards from Housing Benefits stood up, pointed at the Deputy Mayor, and lauched a rousing chant of 'Out! Out! Out!.'
The Mayor and the Cabinet were looking a bit strung-out. What hope had they of selling their call-centre and Efficiencies notions to a skeptical voting public if the idea was terminally mauled this early in the game? Another problem was that many of the people screaming bloody murder in the hall at the moment WERE the voting public. Most of the Council's staff lived in the borough, and took a keen interest in local politics, not least because their livelihoods depended on it. Some of the borough's marginal wards were only held by five or ten votes. Pissing off a small division of ten staff could be fatal. Upsetting thousands would be unfortunate indeed.
The Mayor and the Cabinet stared at the Deputy Mayor in distress. The Deputy Mayor didn't see this, but he did seem to have finally picked up on the vibe.
'What you all need to understand,' he screamed over his shrieking audience, 'is that we need to get a call-centre underway and working properly if we're going to win the election. You people better listen to me,' the Deputy Mayor said again. His hand wander up to his neck – feeling, the Mayor presumed, for the missing tie. 'Are you listening? You need to listen to this. If we don't work together, the Dark Party will win the next election. That bloody dreadful Dark Party will get in here and they'll take over the government and none of us will bloody well like that.' The Deputy Mayor took a deep breath.
'We need to find a way of getting the message about this Council to everybody who votes,' he said. 'I want you people and you union members and the public you serve to know that we're friendly. We're local People's Party. We're not national People's Party. We're local People's Party. It's not like the national People's Party, and that's the point. It's local People's Party. It's different. Yes, what do you want?' he snapped, looking at the front row of audience. The branch secretary's hand was in the air.
The branch secretary stood up. 'I have to say that I think you're wrong,' she told the Deputy Mayor. 'I personally don't think you could make people see the difference between the local and national versions of yourself at gunpoint. They think that your People's Party Party is as nasty and anti-worker as the Dark Party. You've made our members redundant, closed our offices and cut services and paid these crazy consultants millions. Our members would stone us if we tried to tell them to support you lot. That's why we haven't really tried it.'
'Bloody right!' the crowd cheered.
'Siddown!' the Deputy Mayor shrieked, slamming his hand on the table with such force that everybody in the the first couple of rows in the Hall winced when he did. 'Your unions are affiliated to our Party - the People's Party. You will do what we tell you to do!'
The Out! Out! Out! chant started up again. Mayor placed a hand over his eyes.
'Jesus Christ,' he hissed at the Deputy Mayor. He tugged on the Deputy Mayor's suit tail. 'Don't wind them up any more. We'll have to find another way to do this. Come on. Let's end this for now.'
The Deputy Mayor looked down at the Mayor. 'We can't just walk out now,' he said to the Mayor, frowning. 'We'll be jeered out of the room. We'd have to run for it. That'll look even worse.'
'You think?' the Mayor asked, looking out at the baying crowd.
The Deputy Mayor turned to face the crowd again. He turned to the branch secretary and pointed at her.
'You need to remember that your union is affiliated to the People's Party,' he said coldly. 'We're asking for your support with this programme and we expect to get it. I'm sure your bosses at union headquarters would agree with me. As for the rest of you,' the Deputy Mayor continued, 'we need this call-centre and you need to get away from the idea that we've got the kind of money to spend that we used to. We don't have it any more. It's all got to end, and it will.'
This was the part of the modernisation spiel that drove everybody insane: the 'we have to cut services because we're out of money' line.
Au contraire, the people cried.
The people were right, too. The council's line about being too short of money to keep providing public services was total balls.
On the very same day that the above-described calamitous Town Hall meeting took place, a small group of helpful moles stole over to the union with a lorryload of purloined reports that show exactly the huge sums of money that the Council a) had at its disposal and b) was prepared to piss away in its attempt to woo voters with ill-defined and completely unproven Efficiency projects.
Examples included cheques for several hundred thousand pounds for the council's private IT company partner to 'change manage' the council's shift to a standardised electronic procurement system (the money wasn't to develop the software for this online-buying system – it was merely for telling staff and vendors that the new system was in place), some $60,000 for two months' work on a new content management system for the council's website, nearly £200,000 for a new team of IT personnel that would identify IT projects that sounded Efficient (for example, new networks, customer relationship management systems, and joint council-private sector, profit-making venture companies) and that the private IT company could then offer to deliver at further astronomical cost, and several hundred thousand pounds to the private IT company for a few months' project management work on a corporate electronic document management system.
Those were a few examples of the small stuff.
The larger stuff featured several million pound-plus projects that largely centred on the council's new and much-vaunted Clients' First strategy.
Grasping the concept of Clients' First was a bigger challenge that the union imagined it would be when first presented with it. This was largely because nobody – even the ones who'd done a turn at university - could understand what the hell the council's CF report authors were talking about. It was difficult to imagine a larger and less-penetrable pile of shit. For example: Clients' First, according to these reports, was about identifying the council's 'customer clusters', and 'developing a profile of the council's customer base and its current and desired interaction with the council,' and 'using the council's strategic goals to challenge and test existing patterns of consumption by customer clusters…' There was plenty more, but the branch secretary banned people from reading it, especially when they were alone.
According to these reports, this Clients' First concept would enjoy a close relationship with Efficiency - ie, that customer cluster research would prove that borough residents wanted fewer staff at the council.
The union suspected that the council wanted the Customer Cluster research to prove that council customers wanted a call-centre. That sort of research would justify cutting the number of front-line staff – the staff that vulnerable (ie not rich or bureaucracy-savvy) service users relied on to help them negotiate complex council procedures and applications for much-needed housing, benefits and care support. It would also justify encouraging the surviving staff to move into the call-centre, man the phones, become less and less skilled, and take a cut in pay after a couple of months.
Research indeed demonstrated that some residents wanted a central council number to call for inquiries, and to be able to contact the council by email, and online. What it did not demonstrate was that residents wanted to pay through the nose for that technology, or for the trade-off for it to be the closing of welfare-advice centres and schools, the sacking of much-needed and much-utilised frontline housing staff, and private companies taking over care and supported-housing services.
Plenty of research pointed to the fact that vulnerable service users were disadvantaged by the switch to call-centres. Disabled service users and people who did not speak the local language fluently suffered when they only had a call-centre to use when they needed help.
Another interesting point was that the council had actually been asking the borough constituents what they wanted for years. Why, in that case, did it need to pay new private companies even more money to survey people again? No group had been more extensively surveyed in the history of man as the people of this borough had. Formal surveys, citizens' panels and forums, consultation exercises, public questionnaires and census data had been used extensively to work out who council customers were and what they wanted. Suddenly, though, the council had decided it was necessary to pay a private company millions to investigate and report back on notions like the borough's Customer Clusters.
The union didn't feel that the council needed to change the methods it used to work out who its customers were and what they wanted. Council customers wanted decent housing, schools and social services, to complain about their neighbours and to be able to contact the council easily with planning, council tax, rubbish collection and noise nuisance queries. Nobody had ever – ever – filled in a response questionnaire saying that they wanted their council tax to be spent on consultants.
Nor had anybody ever told the council that they wanted the thought leaders, branding consultants, business analysts and client index analysts that the council's Clients' First reports claimed were necessary to developing the Clients' First strategy. There wasn't a piece of paper in the whole council that said anybody had ever asked for those. Sure, residents wanted their council tax kept down, but it was the union's view that this could be done by ditching agency staff and consultants and the number of senior managers who earned more than £50,000 a year (the number of managers in this category, ironically enough, had doubled in the two or three years that the council had been pursuing Efficiency concepts). The council spent many millions each quarter on agency staff, and an equally impressive amount on consultants. That was more than enough to finance even a half-assed socialist Utopia - one that delivered the improved schools, better council housing and a much-needed frontline staff that would help people who weren't born to it get something out of life.
There was another extraordinary proposition buried in the pile of reports and paper – a proposition that the council had been extremely quiet about to date. The proposition was for the council to go into the IT business with the private IT company that was about to make millions out of the Clients' First free-for-all (the company that would provide the IT for the call-centre, 'change-manage' the council's move to e-procurement and deliver whatever other IT projects that the council found for it).
The council's idea was that it could set up a joint company with this private IT company and sell IT services to other councils and public-sector organisations in the area. In other words, this joint council-private company company would tell other councils and public-sector organisations to abandon their current IT services and contracts (some of which were years long and couldn't be abandoned), sack any staff they still had in-house, and buy IT services from the new joint council-private company company.
The really amazing thing about this idea was that it had already proved a spectacular failure elsewhere - not only across the nation, but across the world. The self-same week that the union read the report about the proposed joint company, a council just up the road had paid millions to get out of a contract for a similar joint company. The contract had failed because the joint company had simply not been able to generate the business that its creators had promised it would. It had not been able to convince other public-sector organisations to abandon their existing IT services, and buy them from the new joint company. Which was very sad. In the end, that council's reports on the progress of its joint public-private company simply stopped mentioning that the idea of joint companies had ever been floated.
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