What did we think of Martin Durkin's documentary last night?

[hobbgoblin]

I'm pig politically ignorant when it comes to Economics so may well have been brainwashed by this programme, so wanted to see what y'all thought...

I seem to link to this table a lot. Its for 2006, so not quite up-to-date, but things haven't changed drastically. UK public sector spending as a % of GDP is pretty much around the average for Europe - lower than the Scands of course, lower than Austria, Belgium, Spain, Portugal - a bit higher than Germany.

Of course in all countries with a welfare system public sector spending will go up as a percentage of GDP in a recession.

The trouble with simplistic economics, Siasi, is that too often the devil is in the detail.

In the same way it is easy from the left to look at Sweden, for example, and say "Why don't we just copy them"; yet they start from a completely different historical context. Even in the late 18th C (when Britain was substantially industrialised, and Sweden was pretty much a self sufficient peasant economy) literacy rates in Sweden were far higher than in the UK.

I kind of like the simplicty of the notion behind this docu. Is there any way a simple approach can work where the 'tax the rich to provide for the poor' ethos doesn't or are we really gagged and bound by our past and the loss of industries such as mining, etc.

I really wish I understood the context of all this. I am driven mad by what I view as dire policy making by the Tories - driven by middle class views and aspirations in my opinion rather than a drive to create better opportunites for all.

I accept that a utopian vision of life in Britain where everybody has a job to do and does it gladly because it pays is unrealistic in the extreme, but I consider people like myself who have an education and skills and are also driven, to be in the most frustrating postion, peering cliff top over the sea of poverty because no matter which way one turns one is buggered. The Tories seem to be into buggery imvh(and personal unsubstantiated)o.

I wonder if the fact my car has no diesel left in it was playing on my mind in the above post and its over-use of the word driven.

I enjoyed the programme. I thought it was very entertaining and showed a radically different viewpoint than is usually broadcast by the media. Totally simplistic and incredibly biased of course, but very thought provoking.

I am slightly terrified of £4800000000000 isn't that too many zeros?

I agree with what siasi said.

Takver

As I said the programme was far too simplistic but I don't think those numbers you linked disprove the point. Countries with high economic growth and productivity tend to have lower numbers. Particularly, some of fast improving emerging markets.

Europe is definately not a metric for success! With the exception of the export dynamo that is Germany, the rest of Europe is pretty screwed from a debt perspective. Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium all have dreadful debt problems (despite France's problems being well hidden due to some cunning accounting tricks).

I agree some of the Scandis have found a very good balance between high public spending and growth. Perhaps we can learn form them but it seems easier for smaller countries to achieve that balance than larger ones. Hence why I think Hong Kong is not useful as a comparative.

For me the problem with a large public sector is that it creates a huge cost overhead for the UK. Globalization means we have to compete with much cheaper but increasingly well educated economies, who have a much smaller public sector. Take the BRIC economies who average closer to 20%. The public sector creates a much nicer place to live than these countries (I don't want to work in China!) but if the cost drives companies and jobs overseas our standard of living will still fall, unemployment will rise and we will find it impossible to pay for public services we want.

The programme made me stop and think. I was and how many public sector workers there are. What do they all do? Can it be true that there are only 2 million front line staff and 7 million public sector workers. Perhaps we do need those cuts after all.

I found myself agreeing with it far more than I expected. Private sector workers cannot keep paying for the public sector. Simples.

jollydiane - I'm not sure where you (or the programme!) got that figure from. Looking at the Office for National Statistics, in 2010 there were 23.1 million employees in the private sector (80% of all employees) and 6 million in the public sector. Link here (downloadable excel table).

If you think about teachers, dustbin men, firemen, etc etc, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that there are 2 public sector workers out of every 10 employees.

Interesting programme, I'm watching it (recorded) as I type. Don't agree with a lot of it, it's very one-sided, and full of the nastiest stereotypes about fat-arsed, lazy, public sector workers. But there are definitely points I am going to have to go away and think about. The tax thing for instance. But after reading this thread I'll have to do bit of checking on their figures.

the WORSE part of the programme though is that out of all of the silly little actor scenes I have only seen two female characters. A "nanny" in a frilly apron and a "nurse" in a very very short pink outfit. Apparently there are no females worth being interviewed (recording cut off the end). Gross stereotyping of women, anyone? Haven't seen a documentary with so few female "characters" since that ridiculous "great climate change swindle" C4 documentary, which ONLY had women in bikinis on beaches in it.

I think they were trying to appeal to those other than the intelligentsia - that's why it was all a bit Benny Hill. I am so not the intelligentsia I didn't notice these things because I was trying to keep up with the Math!

intelligentsia or no, channel 4 ought to have thought that there were a few women economists or politicians worth interviewing.

And FFS - none the other "characters" were in patronising semi-soft porn outfits, not even the "manual worker" with the dungarees and dirty face (verging on YMCA).

I agree.

Nevertheless, this was a good watch for me as it provided me with half a chance of actually understanding a fraction of what the debt issue is all about, as opposed to close to nothing.

Takver - even 6 million public sector works seems like a lot to me especially when (I think) only 2 million are actually front life staff. What are the other 4 million doing? If my business is inefficent the profits suffer, if the public sector is inefficent they hire more staff and increase my tax bill. I then think twice about exbanding the business and hiring more staff.

Where are you getting your figures that only 2 million are front line staff?

Frankly, while there is definitely waste in the public sector, my experience of larger private sector companies is that they are often extremely efficient. The worst organisation I have known for pointless waste was a large pharmaceutical company.

I don't know where you are getting the idea that the public sector can 'just hire more staff' - they have limited budgets, and have done for many years (if it was ever the case that they didn't).

My personal feeling is that on the average, small businesses are very much the most efficient, as everyone involved in the organisation has a strong incentive to keep things working well.

Large organisations, whether public or private, have far more scope to accumulate inefficiency.

Another interesting example, going back to the 1980s. At that point of course privatisation was the big thing - taking public owned businesses that were stagnant and unprofitable, and privatising them so that they would be revitalised and become profitable.

British Airways is a fascinating case study. If you remember, Sir John King was appointed to prepare the company for privatisation. He turned it around, from a serious loss maker, to one of the most profitable airlines in the world. Note, this was BEFORE it was privatised, while it was still publicly owned. It was then, of course, sold off.

The key lesson from that (and other examples) is that in practice it is not whether an organisation is public or private that is important, but how it is run.

Another unfortunate example, of course, is the contrast between the United States medical system (widely acknowledged to be vastly expensive for what it achieves), and the UK NHS, which has its failings but generally achieves a reasonable outcome with a relatively low cost.

For reference, here is a record from Hansard relevant to the BA privatisation. I thought this was an interesting quote

"Over the last two years, however, decisiveness on the part of management and determined cooperation from the workforce have sharply improved British Airways' productivity"

a rather different story, sadly, to what we see now.

'The key lesson from that (and other examples) is that in practice it is not whether an organisation is public or private that is important, but how it is run.'

yes it is management and investment that count. Good points by Takver. Of course state run industries can succeed if they have good management and adequate investment. Look at the success of France, with its TGV and Arianespace projects.

Privatisation was ideological and did not necessarily benefit the country. The difference between us and Germany and France, is our overreliance on the financial sector. Our brightest students often choose the rewards of finance rather than entering management in our manufacturing sector. It is different in Germany, the education, respect, rewards and priorities are different and that is why they are such an economic powerhouse and one of the top exporters in the world. They also don't have our Anglo-Saxon model of finance, and as Takver said, their Landesbanks invest for the longterm in their industries. They didn't have the merger and acquisition corporate raiding culture that we have.

The French still have partial state ownership for some of their large industries. They believe in protecting their industries and national interest. Whereas we believe in globalisation and free markets, the French have always been more protectionist.

Much of our energy sector is now in foreign hands. Globalists and the EU think that is OK. I wonder if France and Germany would think that was OK.

Why isn't the level of National Debt common household knowledge? If we were updated even once a year on where we stand, this would make us feel we live in a democracy. I don't like having found out recently that I 'owe' £70+thousand pounds, like every other man, woman and child in the UK, and I'd want to know if 'my' share of the debt was coming down or going up further.

Fifty something trillion pounds of debt is such a mindblowingly incomprehensible figure that whittling it down to the actual debt owed per individual makes the situation one I and probably most people can understand.

Regular widespread, loud and clear 'bulletins' about the share of the national debt per person, so that everyone understands the mess we're in, will help people appreciate the need for spending cuts (even if some areas, like tuition fees cuts, just cannot be accepted.)

Sorry, I think maybe it is five trillion? (I told you I find those sort of figures incomprehensible!) :o

I thought it was dangerous and simplistic right-wing propaganda by somebody who already has form for distorting the views of environmental scientists. If I didn't know better, I'd have come away with the impression that public sector employees paid no tax, that private businesses pay 100% of their profits in tax (yet simultaneously manage to reinvest all of their profits - no mention of shareholders) and that income tax is the only source of govt. income, that the industrial revolution didn't depend on child labour and exploitation in the far east and that Hong Kong was heaven on earth, when it's an environmental disaster with higher inequality levels than the US. Oh, and that perpetual growth is somehow sustainable.

I also thought it somewhat ironic that this was broadcast by a channel that's currently dependent on government bail-outs.

I know the public sector is massively inefficient and Something Needs To Be Done. This is not it.

'Haven't seen a documentary with so few female "characters" since that ridiculous "great climate change swindle" C4 documentary, which ONLY had women in bikinis on beaches in it.'

Ziptoes - that documentary was made by the same bloke

Actually, I've just put in my first ever Ofcom complaint about this programme. If anybody else feels like doing so, go here

Do read the broadcasting code first and make sure your complaint relates directly to the rules. Here's what I wrote ...

Failure to preserve due impartiality

This programme was heavily biased in favour of one particular political position. It was not part of a series or cluster of programmes which could have provided a balance of different viewpoints. It dealt with highly controversial matters of current political and industrial policy. The programme was not signalled as a personal or authored view. The simplistic style of this programme's presentation was designed to appeal to a less politically literate audience and it was broadcast in a prime timeslot between River Cottage (general family audience) and True Blood (teen/young adult audience).

Sorry PoP, that comes across as so pompous I laughed out loud.

Admittedly I sort of read it in my head in a high pitched hoity toity voice.

I hope someone at Ofcom takes you seriously.

Claig, I think it is fascinating that despite pretty strong differences of political opinion, we seem have a rather similar view of the economic/industrial landscape.

What would you do to improve matters, given a totally free hand (say you were given a 5 year dictatorship)?

The other question that I would like to know the answer to, is, given that there are lots of sensible intelligent right wing people on here - even though I might disagree with them on political principles - as well as sensible intelligent left wing ones (though I may be predisposed to consider them so ) why do we always get the damned incompetent ones in power, whether from the right or left . . . .

pop - you know even "less politically literate" people can recognised biased polemic. We get so much of the other end of the spectrum broadcast all the time from the bbc that I think it is good for us all to see some raving right wing propaganda. I think its great to see politics in prime time. Even if it's not my politics.

Glad to bring a little joy to the world

It sounds pompous because it's using exactly the same language as the broadcasting code - it helps them if you can point directly to the bits of the code the programme contravenes. It's a bit like legal stuff - you have to use their language.

If somebody complains to Ofcom, they have to take it seriously but it's not the viewer's job to persuade Ofcom that the complaint is valid, it's up to them to investigate.

I doubt very much that mine will be the only complaint. C4 has plenty of form (upheld complaints) about other 'documentaries' this guy has made.