Blue-eyed boys

A recent proposal that teachers should be subjected to performance-related pay has been widely welcomed. Surely it will reward the conscientious and dedicated while weeding out the incompetent and the timeservers.

However, in reality, performance-related pay doesn’t work like that at all. Rather it tends to reward those who commit themselves to corporate objectives, who are good at ticking boxes, who toe the line and don’t rock the boat. In other words, crawlers and arselickers. It is what has been described as “blue-eyed boy syndrome”.

Many years ago, I saw someone spectacularly promoted far beyond his abilities because he was adept at saying what the top management wanted him to, and enthusiastically adopting every latest fad and buzzword, while being able to maintain the image of being a bit of a hard-talking rough diamond. He eventually crashed and burned, but for many that is the route to the absolute pinnacle of corporate life.

How can a system in which pay increases are determined by the capricious whim and prejudice of management be in any way regarded as fair? People should be paid the rate for the job, dependent on how much it takes to recruit suitably-qualified candidates, and bonuses should be handed out to everyone determined by overall corporate performance.

In my experience, the most effective workers in any organisation are those who are dedicated to their job, but plough their own furrow and have a healthy disrespect for management bullshit. Consequently they are often dismissed as “difficult” or “mavericks”. But slavish, toadying conformity never produced any business breakthrough, nor inspired any school pupil.

The Secret People

This is a classic poem by G. K. Chesterton describing how the English people have, over the centuries, succumbed to various forms of alien rule. Some of it makes rather uneasy reading nowadays, particularly the reference to “a cringing Jew”, but it still contains a profound truth about our country.

The penultimate stanza is especially relevant today:

They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evenings; and they know no songs.

“They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies” very precisely spears the attitude of the Cameron/Clegg/Miliband ruling class.

Over the years, I’ve heard various comments along the lines of “people will only take this for so long”. But, so far, they always have. The only glimmer of anything changing was during the 2000 fuel protest, which for a moment had Bliar really shitting himself. That was a short-lived genuine upsurge of popular feeling.

But more and more people are becoming alienated, whether by the foxhunting ban, the smoking ban, the punitive fuel duties, the constant war against the car, the alcohol duty escalator, gay marriage, metrication, open-door immigration or whatever. They may not form any particularly coherent feelings, but they will reach the conclusion that no politicians are to be trusted or will ever deliver what ordinary people want.

It will come, one day, but the timing and the reason will be unpredictable and probably, of themselves, irrational. But it will come. It will come. And our wrath will be the worst, because it has been pent up so long.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God's scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

Your duty is to keep it down

Well done to George Osborne in last week’s Autumn Statement to not only postpone the planned increase in fuel duty, but to scrap it entirely.

I suspect it has now got to the stage where fuel costs are such a critical component of the typical household budget that any further rise is politically impossible before the next general election.

In general quite a deft performance by Osborne in the face of the generally appalling economic situation. The pratfalls of the 2012 Budget were conspicuously avoided.

Outdoing Moscow and Peking

Tory MP Aidan Burley has found himself in hot water for daring to suggest that yesterday’s Olympic event was “the most leftie opening ceremony” he had ever seen. But, as Chris Snowdon points out here, surely that’s just a statement of fact. Can anyone think of one that was more so, even going back to Moscow in 1980?

The glorification of the NHS was utterly disagraceful. It seems to have become a national shibboleth and yet, if it’s so wonderful, why has no other country, even the supposedly lefty Scandinavian countries, adopted the same inefficient, monolithic, bureaucratic model?

Chris’ more general musings about the whole Olympic hysteria are also well worth reading.

Escalator scrapped!

Great news that Osborne has scrapped the 3p/litre increase in fuel duty planned for 1 August - which would have become 4p/litre at the pump once VAT was taken into account. Let us hope that this heralds the end of any duty increases so long as the pump price remains above 100p.

As pointed out by Tom Stevenson, the fall in the international oil price will hopefully presage a general economic recovery.

An Olympic-scale waste of money

He’s only saying what we knew already, but Dominic Lawson is quite right to point out here what a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money the 2012 London Olympics are going to be. Not to mention the fact that, overall, they will have a negative effect on tourism.

Some years ago, the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) produced a study which concluded: "There appears to be little evidence of any benefit to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games and considerable evidence of damage." It added that predictions to the contrary by the politicians attempting to justify the outlay of their taxpayers' money "form part of a tradition".

There’s no evidence either that they will lead to any increase in participation in sport (as if that was government’s business anyway). And if you dare to complain about the whole gravy train you risk being branded as a killjoy:

But the best of all news is for the politicians and sports bureaucrats who committed us to spending £10bn on facilities for two weeks of running and jumping: they will have the grandest seats in the stadium entirely free, and will be chauffeured there in special lanes while the rest of the capital's inhabitants are snarled up in Olympic traffic jams.

Anyone who begrudges them that is clearly a killjoy, and not participating in the Olympic spirit.