Polly Toynbee attacks The TaxPayers’ Alliance’s Annual Non-Job Report 2006 in the Guardian today:
“If tax cuts are a priority, it's necessary to rubbish the entire public sector as politically correct jobsworths. Call every manager a bureaucrat. Never spell out what the services do, simply mock their titles.”
We are not saying that all the jobs listed in Society Guardian should not exist. But we are questioning why they should by provided by the state and hence funded by the taxpayer. In a low-tax society, where people have more spare money to give to good causes (and international evidence does show that lower-tax societies tend to be more philanthropic), if there were a need for these jobs, they would be provided by charities, voluntary groups and other organisations.
“Is £85,000 too much? I don't know in a world where Lord Browne has just left BP with £63m legally purloined from a public company holding all our pension funds.”
The Non-Job Report was also written to highlight the high salaries paid to people in the public sector. Each job in Society Guardian pays almost £37,000, compared with a mean private sector wage of £25,000. Wage rises in the public sector have been far higher than in the private sector in recent years, so much so that the public sector now often pays better than the private sector. But Ms Toynbee makes no mention of the taxpayer-funded inequality here.
“All this goes to the heart of Tory policy, persuading the electorate that tax money is always wasted, public jobs are pointless and the state should shrink …. The Tories claim they can cut waste and pen-pushers.”
Ms Toynbee tends to label everyone and every view she disagrees with as “Tory”. But, as well as being factually incorrect, this doesn’t help the debate. The TaxPayers’ Alliance is not Tory; indeed we constantly criticise the Conservatives, as well as the other main parties, for supporting the current high level of taxation, high level of government spending and high level of state interference. We represent ordinary taxpayers, who have had to endure years of tax rises, in part to pay for the sorts of jobs that the Non-Job Report highlights. And so we will criticise Tory councils as much as councils run by any other parties.
“The danger is that Labour has failed to create warmth and appreciation for its many excellent programmes: they are easy to cut when few know anything about them.”
Ms Toynbee constantly argues in favour of greater government spending to help the poor. But we have not seen her acknowledge that the high burden of tax directly harms those on low incomes. Last autumn, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a respected body that has done a great deal of work on behalf of the poor, published a report which found that at least 2 million households had difficulties paying their council tax bills, and that the majority of these households were working on low incomes and lived in low-value housing. It’s a fact that the doubling of council tax in the last decade has hit the poor hardest. And with many of the jobs surveyed in the Non-Job Report being local government positions, we know where some of the council tax increases have gone.
“Are any of these non-jobs, then? That depends on your priorities and what services you think the state should provide. But most of them are so utterly essential that it is breathtaking to think Tory spokesmen, or even the Tory press, can imagine there should be no directors of children's services and no managers to run social services for old people.”
Ms Toynbee also fails to acknowledge the adverse impact of state-run public services on the poorest in society. The worst primary schools are exclusively in deprived areas, health inequalities continue to widen, and the poor are at greatest risk of crime. If all the jobs listed in Society Guardian were so wonderful, maybe public services would work that little bit better.
“No 5: civil resilience manager, Stockport council, £39,132. Every council by law has to have someone in charge of emergency planning.”
Every council may be required to have a “civil resilience manager”. But that’s not necessarily an argument in favour of the post. Ms Toynbee ought to watch the episode of “Yes Minister”, when it was agreed that only the important council members would be allowed into the bunker. Has anything changed in this respect, we might ask?
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