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April 06, 2004
Crisis? What crisis? Tone�s in charge!
Well, we can all relax! Our illustrious leader has taken personal charge of the immigration debacle. That will screw it up permanently, if nothing else. After all, it’s his wife’s biggest earner after “human rights”. There are two problems with the immigration system in this country, Blair’s incompetents and their insistence on “targets” and “performance indicators” is one. The other is the fact that as soon as you attempt to have a reasonable debate about asylum and asylum seekers, you are branded racist, fascist, or worse, and the usual liberal refuge in any indefensible argument – it’s a Human Right!
The incompetent civil service management, whose only contribution is to “manage” the finances, usually wastefully, of course, compounds it. How these people can call themselves “managers” beats me, since most of them know nothing at all about the functions they are supposed to manage, and usually ignore anything that gets in the way of their “vision”, even if it is the cause of the problem. It beggars belief that the frontline troops in this – the guy who checks your passport at a point of entry actually has a “target” of numbers of people to refuse entry to each shift. This is based, it seems, on some Whitehall Walla’s analysis of statistics that show that “x” number of would be visitors are here to work, settle or apply for benefits illegally. The predictable result is that visiting youngsters are singled out as soft targets – usually from countries such as Australia or South Africa, and almost exclusively of Anglo-Saxon descent. They won’t attract the attention of the “anti-racist” lobby and are unlikely to attempt to apply for asylum. Meanwhile, the real problems are not picked up at all, yet the “targets” are met. What a mess – but don’t hold your breath – Tone’s conferences have never yet produced anything other than more useless targets and some good sounding sound bites.
Even more annoying is the revelation today that the NHS now employs more paper shufflers and managers than it does medical staff. No wonder it can’t deliver a decent service, there are now roughly two “managers” to every Consultant and GP. What the h*ll do they do?
The National Health Service (an oxymoron if ever there was one!) currently employs 1.8 million people in the UK directly, yet only 800,000 of these are medical staff and that includes Consultants, GP’s, Interns, Nursing Staff, and Ambulance personnel. Some of the rest are, I will admit, essential personnel and include Porters, Receptionists, and technicians, but the vast majority are simply clerical and “management” – and it doesn’t actually include all the other “non-executive” directors serving on Health Boards in every area! All of them on nice little earners, thank you. Competent management? You have to be joking!
Recently in my own area, the Board came up with a proposal which was supposed to save them £1.2 million and “improve” health services in our town. The scheme involved the closure of a suite of operating theatres and a modern ward, which would be “mothballed” and all the work done there would then be transferred to another hospital 12 miles away. Apart from the fact that the second hospital is already badly over stretched, the proposals simply don’t add up. The proposed saving would, in fact, be heavily offset by the cost of maintaining an empty suite of theatres (you can’t stop cleaning and disinfecting them otherwise the bugs breed unchecked) and an empty ward (same problem) nor can you stop heating them. In the end, the only saving would be wages – and that only came to a two hundred thousand. Not enough to offset the rest of the £1.2 million they were looking for.
This is the major problem we face today. Our companies are hardly better, the top management rarely understands what is made, sold, or done within the firm and have no experience or understanding of how it is done either. This is compounded by the stuffing of boardrooms with has-been politicians and civil servants and graduates from MBA courses. With no understanding of the coalface, they have no option but to try and measure everything in terms of financial “outcomes”. They know the cost of every paperclip, but have no understanding of “value”. Thus, by the targets set, everything is rosy in the garden, and some managers openly admit that they rely on the dedication of the workforce to actually make things work no matter how tough it gets.
As you will have guessed, I am of the school of managers that says, if you don’t understand it – you can’t manage it! Take a look at the most successful and growing companies in the UK or Europe today. Most, if not all, have someone at the helm who is a “hands on” and “dirty fingernails” type who does understand exactly what his company does, can do it better than his people, and knows the value of everything in it. This is what is completely lacking in the civil service – there is no-one at the top who knows what it is like at the bottom facing the customer and trying to explain why the “rules” say what they do. You may get away with this as long as their political masters do know something of what they are supposed to be responsible for, but, as we have seen over and over again in recent years, this is no longer the case. To often the Minister or Secretary of State is even more ignorant of what he or she is supposedly responsible for than the clowns in the civil service who manage it for them.
Well, now that we have Mr Blair in personal control of immigration all this will become academic. As the Romans would have said “ad utrumque paratus”. It is only a matter of time before our illustrious leader and his coterie of cretins declare that there is nothing wrong with the immigration policy, it is all the fault of the native Britons who simply won’t emigrate to make room for all these lovely new Labour voters.
And now back to my packing!
Posted by The Gray Monk at April 6, 2004 11:39 AM