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.