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Guardian: The Thatcherite disdain for public employees lives on

. . . Almost nothing in the public sector now seems to work properly. Think of all those disastrous IT projects in health, passports, criminal records, benefits, defence and so on; of the failure of Gordon Brown's ingenious tax credits scheme to get the right amounts of money to the right people, so that £1 in every £10 goes to somebody who is not entitled to it; of how the ID-card scheme has already run into trouble; of how the health department, implementing a new pay regime, ended up giving doctors more than anyone intended; of the Home Office's blunders on foreign criminals and illegal migrants, which led the home secretary, John Reid, to announce an overhaul of its immigration department yesterday. These are just the most recent examples. . . .

I suspect that, over the past 25 years, public services have been afflicted by a new problem. They have simply not attracted people of dynamism, talent or initiative. Or, if they did, such qualities were quickly suppressed. . . .

It goes back to the Thatcher years. Why should any bright, ambitious young person at that time have joined the civil service, local government, the teaching profession, the NHS or any nationalised industry? . . .

If anything, New Labour has tightened the chains with its targets and performance indicators. The presumption remains that private-sector firms, or people recruited from them, will do most things better. The idea that there is such a thing as a public-service ethic is as unfashionable as ever. It is assumed to be a con, an attempt by entrenched "producers" to protect comfortable, unchallenging jobs. . . .

As any teacher knows, if you tell people often enough that they're no good, they will eventually be no good.  . . . Paradoxically, New Labour has ended up bringing out the worst in the public sector. . . .

by TGeraghty on Wed Jul 26th, 2006 at 04:05:39 AM EST

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