Deep and Permanent

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, has confirmed, for those who didn't know it, that the Government's slice-and-dice programme for the public sector is an ideological crusade and not a response to the economic crisis. Daveybloke noted that "we", which is to say anyone lacking sufficient entrepreneurial spirit to have been born rich, "are going to have to change the way we work" in order to "do things differently and better to give value for money" or, in Standard English, do more for less and, where possible, for free.

Daveybloke was responding to a question about cuts in a local fire brigade which have resulted, mirabile dictu, in more deaths from fire and more deaths among firefighters. Evidently the cuts have not been deep and radical enough to make the positive difference we all know cuts make in the end. Fortunately, the fire brigade to which the questioner was referring is in Birmingham, so the deaths are unlikely to have affected the kind of people who matter. Daveybloke said that "we should be trying to avoid" restoring any cuts which have been made because cuts, rather than services, are what ought to be sustainable. Daveybloke said that "we", which is to say anyone lacking sufficient get-up-and-go to have a private fire brigade at their disposal, should take some sort of interest in whether or not fire services are capable of doing their work, "but let's all open our minds and think how can we work in a different way". Volunteer bucket brigades are fairly cheap, I've heard; and once the Government has freed us of all that health-and-safety claptrap that's been slowing us up all this time we can start lining houses with asbestos.

Daveybloke also noted that "we", which is to say anyone lacking sufficient public spirit to have pocketed a bonus for running the economy into the ground recently, "are living beyond our means"; and trotted out the old Thatcherite lecture on home economics: "Every family knows that as a business you cannot go on living beyond your means indefinitely", since of course every deserving family is run as a profit-making enterprise. "At the end of this parliament we will be paying £17bn in interest just on the interest on debt, (which) is more than we spend on schools", the solution to which is apparently to spend less on schools and hand them over to profiteers or the God squad. This is what Daveybloke calls "being fair on future generations". I wonder what the Liberal Democrats call it.