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Public Sector Workers - Reality Check
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stray
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Edited Aug 04, 2010, 11:06
Re: Public Sector Workers - Reality Check
Aug 04, 2010, 11:05
geoffrey_prime wrote:
Are you a taxpayer? Think about it. Look in your paypacket..at your Council Tax bill etc.. Contrast with the "services" you receive... from central and local government...does it "add up"?
If you are of voting age, I would hope this kind of consideration is absolutely at the front of your cranium..
If you are a "voter"..what have you been voting on thus far?


I think, for a lot of us here, there is more to take into consideration when voting than our own personal interest. Some of us are capable of looking beyond ourselves and seeing how benefiting the many will directly benefit ourselves.

All that aside, you have failed to answer Kurtspanks question, in fact what you've said here doesn't even come close to addressing the question. Being a taxpayer doesn't mean you understand or appreciate any of the following; the real price of a service, or the real benefits and importance of a service. The idea of does it "add up" is always going to be a construct based on personal bias. Also in order to answer the questions 'What is the real price of a service' and 'what are it's benefits and importance' well.. these are questions we can only answer by asking people who know and are responsible for each service. In every case these people have their own agendas which skew the answers. These feed your own personal bias in coming to a decision over those two basic questions. I'm not even going to begin to start about how us taxpayers haven't the first fucking clue as to how we could identify that a lower cost service isn't being run by corner cutting profit driven cowboys. What I will say is it seems the government (local and national) has traditionally also been incapable of identifying such, and seems to allocate tenders purely on a lowest cost basis, irrespective of the fact that it would be impossible to run the service at the cost being tendered.

Since massive privatisation, in a lot of case, the people who set the budgets for and run the services are people who are not directly democratically elected by us. So therefore being a 'voter' is irrelevant, as we no longer have any direct influence on these two key decisions relating to our services anyway. Now yeah, yeah, the current government seems to be suggesting giving us democratic control back here, but the reality is it isn't. It's bollocks. It's window dressing. 'Small government' actually means less democratic control and less accountability in general, it always has done.
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