There are no ‘frontline’ services - only services

Another day, another cuts announcement.  And still, those responsible repeat their tired mantra:  “Don’t worry – ‘frontline’ services won’t be affected!” 

Last week alone, we were told by the Police Minister that there are '“Immense opportunities” to make savings in the police force without hitting the frontline'.  Amid the Arts Council funding announcements last Wednesday, the Hulture Secretary said the government had “Limited cuts to frontline arts organisations”.   

(If anyone can tell me what a back-line arts organisation is, I'd love to hear from you.  I imagine a secret chamber of painters, working away by candle light, occasionally throwing darting glances towards their bolted, oak-studded door, lest an intruder catch sight of their secret labours;  suspiciously covering their work with crooked elbows, like at a primary school spelling test.)

So, what’s a ‘frontline’ service?  And how does it differ from any other service?

First, let’s ask why we have public services.  Is it to provide sufficient office-space to house a national surplus of swivel-chairs?  Is it to create more jobs, like some bizarre Magnus Mills creation?

Or is it to fulfil a specific requirement that society has deemed to be necessary? 

                                                                                     

If the answer is the latter, and public service institutions indeed exist to provide public services, why do they employ staff?  Presumably to do the work which is required to provide that service. 

The reason that the government has to say “ ’Frontline’ services will be unaffected”, is that this bit of wordplay distances the sentence from its ugly cousin, which is simply: “ ’Services’ will be unaffected”.  Which is palpably false – since if you sack anyone, it follows that the service they previously provided will now cease to exist, whether they be telephony services, toilet-cleaning services, or teaching services. 

Most public service organisations are, by nature, huge and complex.  That means that in order to get the whole job of the organisation done, they need to employ a lot of people, doing a variety of different jobs.  The justice system wouldn’t work if it only employed judges.  The NHS wouldn’t work if it only employed nurses. 

So, what are these extraneous services being provided by public service bodies that are not ‘frontline’ services?  Is the NHS due to sack 150 croupiers from its hospital casinos, deemed unnecessary in these times of austerity?  Are the 2’600 military jobs lost today the result of a personnel audit that uncovered a hitherto unknown network of lion-tamers, drawing full-time wages but contributing little to the war-effort?

Or, to put it another way – have you, or anyone you have ever known or met, ever worked anywhere (in the public, private, or any other sector), where you and your colleagues have all gathered round and said,  “You know what?  I don’t know why we employ those extra thousand people downstairs in C division.  If they went tomorrow, we’d never notice the difference.”?

The fact that redundancies are being justified using sneaky word games instead of reasoned discussion should tell us something.  The false dichotomy between ‘frontline’ services, and other – unnamed – services, implied to be so much dead skin, is a rotten trick.  And the joke is on those of us who have need of the services that are being so cavalierly thrown to the wolves. 

Response to David Willetts on feminism

David Willetts claimed yesterday that feminism has put men out of work, essentially making the age-old argument that ‘they’re taking our jobs’. 

When I first heard about the story, although not funny enough to be an April Fool, I did wonder if it had originated in the Daily Mash - because the story relies on precisely the reverse logic that characterises their satire.  

With that in mind, let’s see what we get if we make Willietts’s argument backwards:  “Ongoing social and economic gender inequality are manifestations of centuries of patriarchy, the majority of the ill-effects of which are borne by women.  Despite many years of feminist struggle, this imbalance has yet to be redressed.”  Which, far from being Daily Mash material, seems like a bit of a platitude.

Now, let’s invert the wording of Willetts’ argument and see what we get.  “Men should be helped to get more jobs, at the expense of women, who should be encouraged to stay at home as dependents.”  Which doesn’t sound quite as reasonable as his caveat that “It is delicate territory, because it is not a bad thing that women had these opportunities”.

And even this magnanimous caveat isn’t particularly reasonable, indicating as it does that that Willetts doesn’t see women as part of society, but as an external group trying to encroach on it.  

It is significant that Willetts is the Universities Minister, and his views speak volumes about the ideology behind the government’s education cuts.  They’re not about the economy, but about keeping people in their place.  He specifically associates current male unemployment with feminism’s success in broadening women’s access to education in the 1960s.  

It is clear that the Conservative agenda is to use the cuts, particularly those to education, as a tool to roll back the advances in the rights of women and other marginalised groups, which have been made over the last four decades. 

Meanwhile, Christina “I live at the grungy end of the King’s Road in Chelsea” Odone, while actually disagreeing  with Willetts, uses media coverage of his comments as a somewhat flimsy hook on which to hang a totally unrelated attack on feminism, opting for another old favourite - “feminists hate men”.  It is the tenuousness of the link that belies the motive for her attack. 

For all the rhetoric of being ‘In this together’, conservatives across the land continue to expose the real aims of their policies – and they’re unrelated to any exceptional circumstances implied by the language of financial ‘crisis’.  The goal is to protect the status quo – the same as it’s always been.