I just cannot believe all I’m hearing and reading concerning the vast changes in so many spheres of government, running concurrently, contrary to public opinion, and all in order to save money. Once again we are finding proof that Civil Servants, and Managers are not the right arbiters of standards in professional fields. Leave the Doctors, the Head Teachers, the Chief Engineers, to run their bailiwick, then we will save money. Every new approach, change in principles, and protocol causes an immense waste of time and money, which is the real problem. The Government is using every ploy possible to cut cost, raise taxation, and shed its load, because it has been budgeting badly for years.
Education.
In my last post I implied that I was certain government tinkering with the whole educational system had reduced the standards to a level, where Further Education suffered to the point where many degrees were not worth the expense they had cost the exchequer and drop-outs were at an excessive level. I was therefore unsurprised when I read in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, that Imperial College were adding a year to degree courses to bring the students up to an acceptable educational level. The philosophy of advanced academic education for all, while a proven fallacy for years, by its very nature unworkable, should have been abandoned and the old system, where the trades, which have also become degraded, could flourish once more so we would not have to use immigrant labour to fill the gap.
Medicine
Due mainly to government policy and harassment, we have lost our free dental care to a great extent. Do you notice they don’t reduce our tax because we are now paying our dentist instead of the Treasury doing so? Now the government wants to do the same with the Family Doctor. Many surgeries have modified their systems to accommodate the unsocial hours of the patients, offering small surgery units on prescribed days and most of the other proposals in this new approach the government is proposing, while still maintaining that personal relationship so vital to many patients. If the government brings in local Super Surgeries, not only will this have all the assembly line traits of hospitals, with no doctor-patient relationship, it will have a Manager, and soon become part of a commercial cartel, with all the cutbacks that will involve.
Lost CDs and Documents.
In my experience top Civil Servants have a soft ride, they pass down the work and consider their job is to manage. Middle management, the engine room of the Civil Service, is where the buck usually stops, where the stress is, and where most of the long hours are to be found. So one can’t say a top Civil Servant, carrying a politically hot potato, is tired, distracted, or confused, enough to forget he has the hot potato in his hot little hand. So I find it extra ordinary that knowing it should never have left the safe, it could be left on a train accidentally, not even in a brief case. Unless of course he had been reading it on the train and it had bored him to distraction.