Britain’s worst idlers – the MPs who wrote Britannia Unchained

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I have been saddened to learn of two events that will take place in the near future: The death of The Dandy, and the publication of Britannia Unchained.

The first needs little introduction to British readers; it’s the UK’s longest-running children’s humour comic, which will cease publication (in print form) towards the end of this year, on its 75th anniversary. The second appears to be an odious political tract scribbled by a cabal of ambitious right-wing Tory MPs, desperate to make a name for themselves by tarring British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world”.

The connection? Even at the end of its life, there is better and more useful information in The Dandy than there will be in Britannia Unchained.

The book’s authors, Priti Patel, Elizabeth Truss, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, and Kwasi Kwarteng, all members of the Free Enterprise Group of Tory MPs, argue that British workers are “among the worst idlers in the world”, that the UK “rewards laziness” and “too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work”.

They say the UK needs to reward a culture of “graft, risk and effort” and “stop bailing out the reckless, avoiding all risk and rewarding laziness”.

Strong words – undermined completely by the authors’ own record of attendance at their place of work.

Chris Skidmore’s Parliamentary attendance record is just 88.1 per cent – and he’s the most diligent of the five. Kwasi Kwarteng weighs in at 87.6 per cent; Elizabeth Truss at 85.3 per cent; and Priti Patel at 81.8 per cent. Dominic Raab is the laziest of the lot, with Parliamentary attendance of just 79.1 per cent.

To put that in perspective, if I took more than a week’s sick leave per year from my last workplace, I would have been hauled up before the boss and serious questions asked about my future at the company. That’s a 97.9 per cent minimum requirement. Who are these slackers to tell me, or anyone else who does real work, that we are lazy?

Some have already suggested that these evil-minded hypocrites are just taking cheap shots at others, to make themselves look good for promotion in an autumn reshuffle. Maybe this is true, although David Cameron would be very unwise to do anything but distance himself from them and their dangerous ideas.

I think this is an attempt to deflect attention away from the way the Tory-led government has mismanaged the economy, and from its murderous treatment of the sick and disabled. As one commentator put it: “They get a token Asian, a token African, a token Jew, mix in the middle class/grammar school rubbish propaganda, and suddenly they are just ordinary people? No they are not; they are stooges for the ruling elite.”

Britain doesn’t reward laziness among its working class. What it rewards is failure by managers, directors of industry, financiers. These people continually increase their salaries and other remuneration while their share prices fall, their dividend payments are lacklustre and shareholder value is destroyed. What have they given shareholders over the past 10 years? How many industrial or commercial leaders have walked off with millions, leaving behind companies that were struggling, if not collapsing? Does the criticism in Britannia Unchained apply to senior executives and bankers?

Our MPs are as much to blame as big business. They vote themselves generous pay, pensions and extended vacations (five months per year). They never start work before 11am, never work weekends (or most Fridays, when they are supposed to be in their constituencies, if I recall correctly). They enjoy fringe benefits including subsidised bars, restaurants and gyms. They take part-time directorships in large companies which take up time they should be using to serve the public. Only a few years ago we discovered that large numbers of them were cheating on their expense claims. They take more than £32,000 in “Resettlement Grant” if we kick them out after one term – which, in my opinion, means all five authors of Britannia Unchained should be applying for it in 2015.

These are the people who most strongly represent the ‘something-for-nothing’ sense of entitlement the book decries.

Have any of them ever worked in a factory or carried out manual labour? I’ll answer that for you: With the exception of Elizabeth Truss, who did a few years as a management accountant at Shell/Cable and Wireless, none of them have ever done anything that could be called real work.

In fact, the people they accuse work very long hours – especially the self-employed. When I ran my own news website, I was busy for 12-14 hours a day (much to the distress of my girlfriend). Employees also work long hours, get less annual leave, earn less and pay more – in prices for consumer goods, taxes and hidden taxes – than most of Europe. Average monthly pay rates have now dropped so low that they are failing to cover workers’ costs, leading to borrowing and debt.

Are British workers really among the laziest in the world? Accurate information is hard to find but it seems likely we’re around 24th on the world league table. On a planet with more than 200 sovereign nations (204 attended the London Olympics), that’s not too shabby at all.

Interestingly, the European workers clocking on for the fewest hours are German. Those lazy Teutons! How dare they work so little and still have the powerhouse economy of the continent?

If so many are reluctant to get up in the morning, why are the morning commuter trains standing room only? Or have the Britannia Unchained crowd never used this form of travel?

It seems to me that Britannia Unchained is just another attempt by the Tory right to make us work harder for less pay. The Coalition is currently cutting the public sector and benefits to the bone, while failing to introduce policies that create useful employment, and trying to boost private sector jobs. The private sector has cut wages and pensions. The result is higher unemployment and benefits that cannot sustain living costs, creating a working-age population desperate for any kind of employment at all (even at the too-low wages already discussed).

And let’s remember that Conservatives want to remove employment laws to make it easier to dismiss employees. In other words, they want a workforce that will toil for a pittance, under threat of swift dismissal and the loss of what little they have.

Why do they think this will improve the UK’s performance?

We already work longer hours and have less protective legislation than in Europe (such as the European Time Directive). But we are less productive in terms of GDP than their French and German counterparts, who work fewer hours and are protected by the likes of the ETD.

France is more unionised than we are, yet its production per employee is higher.

The problem is poor management and bad leadership. Poor productivity is almost always due to poor investment and poor training. Workers are abused when they should be treated as an investment. They lose motivation and when managers get their decisions wrong, they blame the workers.

Working class people are sick of grafting for low pay and in poor working conditions, to be exploited by the types of people represented by the authors of Britannia Unchained.

Is it any wonder we feel de-motivated?

I started this article by linking The Dandy to Britannia Unchained, noting that one was coming to the end of its life in print while the other was about to be published for the first time. I’ll end by pointing out a quality they have in common.

The Dandy is closing because it represents ideas that are now tired and out-of-date. Britannia Unchained should never see publication – for the same reason.

Whatever happened to free speech?

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Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, Albert Einstein, Andrew Lansley, Christopher Graham, Coalition, Conservative, Department of Health, government, health, Health and Social Care Bill, Health Bill, Health Minister, Information Commissioner, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, National Health Service, NHS, Parliament, people, politics, propoganda, risk report, Secretary of State for Health, Tories, Tory

The Tory propoganda machine has been at it again – hushing up dissent to the, by now, pretty much universally-hated Health and Social Care Bill.

It seems Health Minister Andrew Lansley and his departmental colleagues have been on the blower to members of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. One presumes from the outcome that this was to assure them that releasing a statement opposing the Bill in its current form would be bad for their health.

The statement read as follows: “The medical royal colleges and faculties of the academy continue to have significant concerns over a number of aspects of the health bill and are disappointed that more progress has not been made in directly addressing the issues we have raised.

“The academy and medical royal colleges are not able to support the bill as it currently stands.

“Unless the proposals are modified the academy believes the bill may widen rather than lessen health inequalities and that unnecessary competition will undermine the provision of high quality integrated care to patients.”

The provisional plan had been to publish the statement late on Wednesday morning, ahead of Prime Minister’s questions.

But ministers led by Mr Lansley, along with senior officials, telephoned the presidents of the colleges ahead of its release, asking them to reconsider. We’re told the statement could have had a potentially devastating effect on the government’s plans.

Now it lies unused – another example of the methods Mr Lansley uses to stifle opposition to his unreasonable plan to privatise parts of the National Health Service and put taxpayers’ money into private operators’ offshore tax-haven bank accounts (as has been previously proved).

Remember the ‘risk report’ on the potential harm that would be caused to the health service if the Health and Social Care Bill becomes law? No? That’s because Mr Lansley still hasn’t published it, months after he was ordered to do so by the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham.

The Commissioner found the department twice broke the law by refusing to accede to two separate requests under the Freedom of Information Act to see the assessment. The Department of Health has appealed against these rulings; if the appeal falls, then its officials, and Mr Lansley, are criminals.

The BBC reported this story yesterday and the ‘comment’ column it provided instantly threw up a series of intriguing tangents.

One person, claiming to be a member of one of the colleges, stated that they voted on Wednesday, at an extraordinary general meeting, to come out in direct opposition to the Bill. The colleges’ leaders, by preventing them from doing so and not accepting that vote, were playing political games, in that person’s opinion.

Another commenter told us a decision against the Bill could still be made. It seems their daughter, a trainee public health consultant, was unable to attend the meeting at which the statement was discussed. She has been informed that her faculty is balloting all its members by post, according to its constitution and, if this is true, the results of the vote will not be known for another fortnight.

A third stated that the royal colleges had been intending to speak up to protect patients, from a position of specialist knowledge and understanding, but had been swayed from protecting patients and the NHS to protecting the government after Mr Lansley and/or his colleagues contacted them.

Back we go to the famous comment by Albert Einstein: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”

Like many others, I think the public needs to know what was said in those last-minute phone calls.

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