councils

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.

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.

This is a long story which is serialised on this site. A new section is added every couple of days.

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.