“Last month we wrote to public sector workers asking for your help to identify savings we can make as part of our nationwide spending challenge. Some cynics said that people wouldn’t bother to take part. Others said that even if ideas came forward, the government would ignore them. On both fronts they’ve been proved wrong.”
This is indeed a cynical public relations exercise, manipulated from the Treasury, to give the impression of consultation when the emergency budget of 22 June imposed arbitrary massive cuts on all areas of public services.
In equal measure it is a patronising exercise presenting a false importance and urgency:
“All suggestions are being looked at seriously. Right now, officials in our departments are working through your ideas, finding the best ones to be taken forward to the Spending Review when it is completed in October. When we say we’re all in this together we mean it. This spending challenge just shows there is so much we can achieve when we work together. So to everyone who got involved and sent in ideas – thank you.”
This is a bogus consultation. Phonier even than New Labour’s Big Conversation and a deeply cynical manipulation of public service workers - over 500,000 of whom face redundancy over the next 4 years.
When a death row prisoner is offered a choice of execution - lethal injection, electric chair or hanging – it is no more than a shallow consolation prize. So too the Con Dem Spending Challenge sham consultation with those workers they have condemned to pay cuts, pension detriment and for many unemployment.
Bob Oram