TUC National Demonstration Against Cuts

[OrangeBernard]

Who's going? I've just booked my train tickets. Its my first protest, any advice or tips? Bit worried about kettling.

Let me tell yo a little, true story Jogon

A person I know well worked in a Children's hospital. He would, once a month or so, have a child with multiple, complex, unexplained illnesses. After many, mnay tests the child would turn out to be HIV positive. So how does a child become HIV positive? From the mother obviously. The mother wiould be called in and tested and lo and behold the mother would, inevitable be HIV positive as well. She would have no idea how this happened. Most commonly these would be women from a cultural group that puts a high value on women's purity and many of them would have been married and gotten pregnant overseas. Their husbands, however, were British. The husbands would then be tested. They would turn out to be HIV positive as well. How did the husbands become HIV positive? They would be having sex with men but refusing to admit to it as homosexuality is (fatally in some cases) frowned upon in their communities.

"Men who have sex with men Outreach Workers" are the ones who, often at no small personal risk, work within these communities to bring the safe sex message. These are the people who, at a small cost to the taxpayer, save the NHS millions in both treatment costs and saved lives. Hardly a non-job

I just did a quick scan of local government jobs in the Guardian. At a rough reckoning, for every advert for a frontline worker (social worker, teacher, police officer etc) there are five or so for bureaucrats, restructuring managers and other desk jockeys of various kinds.

But the tricky thing, as BoJo pointed out in the Torygraph a while back , is that it's not straightforward to reduce bureaucracy. Lots of it is created by bad legislation imposing new statutory obligations/rights/etc which causes public sector function creep (is it more important to have social workers or eco-awareness officers?). Then once a job is there it's hard to get rid of it without consultations, risk of employment tribunals etc etc. This is part of the reason people are losing libraries and SALT services while huge ecosystems of public sector middle managers continue unabated.

Manatee... interesting that.
DD has lost her portage from the end of this academic year, despite it being hugely beneficial for her to have it up til school. That's not going to happen.

Reason for this is that within County there used to be five Portage Co ordinators, responsible for training and supervision of the Portage Volunteers (yes that's right, unpaid). Now there are only four, the volunteers are inadequately supervised so they've had to cut clients.

Portage Co ordinators are pretty essential to the provision of the frontline service, yet the step above there has not been cut.... for some reason it's not the done thing to have co ordinators directly answerable to County.... why not? There's a middle layer involved which isn't strictly necessary.

You know my stance. I believe cuts should be made, but they should be a damned sight more strategic and as I've said before slow so that the private sector can absorb redundancies as the economy recovers.

There IS dead wood in the public sector, but as the cuts are so generalised front line services will suffer....

It is the threat to frontline services and to those in society that cannot help themselves that I have an issue with. Not cuts in general.

This is what's so tricky about the debate. It gets reduced to 'So you want to cut the public sector? You really want fewer nurses, police officers and teachers? You heartless bastard!'. But I don't know a single person who's in favour of reducing the deficit and seriously believes this should be achieved by firing nurses or coppers.

In reality frontline jobs are far fewer, in proportion, than many kinds of administrator. But while it's easy to say 'Well then let's get rid of the administrators', to do so you need to get rid of a lot of the procedures, regulations, rules and paperwork they're employed to comply with, which i in turn means scrapping the laws that require them. And that in turn is bound to be interpreted as 'So you don't care about hygiene in hospitals/proper documentation for social services/whatever? You heartless bastard!' Then add to that the fact that bureaucracies tend to protect their own interests over the purpose they're supposed to serve, and you have a pretty intractable situation.

I find it frustrating that it seems politically easier to cut (for example) DLA than desk jockeys. But faced with the choice between having to get repeal bills or amendments through Parliament on umpteen different laws, PLUS paying someone to to through the civil service with a fine-toothed comb looking for possible redundancies in middle management (that the people in question will fight tooth and nail) PLUS being under pressure to show results quickly I can see how it ends up that way. It's shit. It makes me angry. But that's the reality, far more than some supposedly deliberate attempt by the Tory party to make the lives of already struggling people still more difficult.

I would believe you Manatee, I would believe it was all about face and doing things the easy way if it weren't for things like this:

the proposed removal of disabled children's right to education, this roughly explains how it's supposed to work

Now, I can believe front line workers get cut because the decisions about who to cut are largely bumped down to local government and local government has some pretty odd priorities - but what they're doing here is pretty complicated legally.

DC had a disabled child himself, I do believe that he honestly thinks this is the best way for parents of disabled children, but if you're a poor, or not well educated or supported parent of a disabled child, and without your respite which is also tipped to go, you're actually just going to be totally fucked, and really struggle to find a way to educate your child if the local state schools refuse to accomodate them (which atm, they are legally oblidged to try and do even if it costs them money) He's taping into the idea that parents of disabled children know best and can provide best for their kids, given a bit of money and the opportunity. Which I believe he genuinely agrees with.

And it is true, at some levels. But certianly at the early stages, parents don't know what to do, normally they aren't sure what is wrong or why or how to help their child, and they need the structured government funds and help and all of those support staff and outreach workers whose jobs look useless and they won't be there to guide them through that first bit.

It's utterly tragic.

And this certainly, amongst other cuts which have borderline motivations is all about changing our society to fit a conservative model, with individual control. Without any thought for the consequences for ordinary people.

"Men who have sex with men Outreach Workers" are the ones who, often at no small personal risk, work within these communities to bring the safe sex message. These are the people who, at a small cost to the taxpayer, save the NHS millions in both treatment costs and saved lives. Hardly a non-job

How so Slug??
Where is the evidence that the existence of such a job is of nay worth?

Moondog - Hmmm. HIV treatment costs the NHS up to £30k a year per person www.aidsmap.com/Cost-of-treatment-and-care-becoming-sensitive-issue-for-UK-as-NHS-faces-spending-slow-down/page/1423541/

A patient with HIV can survive at least 15 years so that's £450,000.

So to be cost effective an Outreach worker would need to prevent at least one infection a year and cost less than £450,000.

Or if they cost, say £30,000, then if they prevented one infection in 15 years they would still be cost effective.

I don't have any actual figures on this though.

We'll need Outreach Workers telling people how to wipe their own arses next.

Ye gads, if people don't know by now to stick a bag on it if you don't want it to rot and fall off then there really is no hope for them.

Jogon - That's may be, but that doesn't mean they are not cost effective. In general we spend far too little on prevention in both health and social care. It is a lot cheaper to stop someone getting sick than to make them well. It's cheaper to stop someone offending than to lock them up for two years (never mind the poicing and court costs).

LaWeasel "And this certainly, amongst other cuts which have borderline motivations is all about changing our society to fit a conservative model, with individual control. Without any thought for the consequences for ordinary people."

I think you're right in the sense that the Tories are more likely to believe in a greater role for individual choice and responsibility, while Labour believe in more uniform, state-provided approach. Which one you think is correct comes down to your basic assumptions about human nature.

I guess the problem is that both approaches have their own pitfalls. If you believe in individual choice/responsibility, then the minority who really can't/won't sort themselves out may suffer. On the other hand, if you believe in uniform state provision, you risk entrenching a basic culture of dependency and actually reducing people's ability to sort themselves out. Again, which one you think is the greater evil depends on your basic assumptions.

Jogon, in some communities there is a mantra "There is no such thing as a gay "

If you are a man in this community it's unlikely that you think you are gay. Partly because of the belief that being gay is wrong, partly because you belong to that community and therefore can't be gay because "there's no such thing as a gay..." and partly because if you did admit to being gay the consequences could be quite dangerous for you. Consequently the messages the rest of us get about safe sex simply don't penetrate. If you think "I'm not gay" then what you are doing isn't gay sex, it's something compartmentalised and internaly justified in other ways. Getting the safe sex message out to people who don't consider what they are doing is either gay or, even, sex, is very very difficult.

Quite frankly your comments are at best naieve and at worst quite offensive.

Manatee - which, is why, if I personally was allowed to run free with my morals - I would want as much social freedom as possible, but with a net to catch the vulnerable.

They're taking away the net because they want to, and leaving the most vulnerable people screwed.

For me that goes past what people would like as an ideal and into denying people their human rights because it's difficult for them to fight for them themselves.

This case could easily by considered a breach of the UN declaration of human rights, and I hope there are politicians out there with enough brains and common sense to realise that.

Gay is an identity, sex is a behaviour - but that's not really relevant to the point of if it is cost effective or not.

Jogon I have to say that if you want to pillory non-jobs you'll have a stronger case if you start with council-employed press officers, not HIV prevention workers.

Personally I'd definitely rather pay someone £30K a year to help prevent the spread of HIV than to spam me with self-satisfied 'newspapers' full of spin about the latest pork-barrel local politics.

Aye, Outreach workers are a particularly poor choice for an example of jobs that we would be better off without.

I hold my hands up.

You lot have opened my eyes and yes, it makes absolute sense to keep an outreach worker and yes, the pen pushers should go.

Coalition, re this and 'outreach workers'

A patient with HIV can survive at least 15 years so that's £450,000.

So to be cost effective an Outreach worker would need to prevent at least one infection a year and cost less than £450,000.

Or if they cost, say £30,000, then if they prevented one infection in 15 years they would still be cost effective.

I don't have any actual figures on this though.

That's just it though isn't it? No figures and nothing but an unshakeable belief that patronising do gooders actually do anything useful.

Every outreach worker/art therapist/story teller/reiki healer considers thier services to be essential. That's the problem, not the solution.

Moondog - the point with the aids outreach work is that the benefits are so high in purely monetary terms that even a very low success rate would be cost effective. it seems so likely that a worker would not have ONE success in fifteen years that I didn't bother to look for any figures.

Considering that there are large sections of the population who believe thata HIV has been cured and isn't anything to worry about any more, there seems to be plenty of room for Outreach workers to find some low hanging fruit.

"Three decades on since the beginning of the HIV epidemic in the UK, knowledge about HIV is still worryingly low among the general public. Research into public knowledge and attitudes to HIV, commissioned in 2010, reveals serious gaps in knowledge of HIV.

The survey, conducted on our behalf by Ipsos MORI found:

One in five adults do not realise HIV is transmitted through sex without a condom between men and women
Only 30% of adults can correctly identify, from a list of all possible routes, all the ways HIV can and cannot be transmitted
An increasing proportion of adults incorrectly believe HIV can be transmitted by impossible routes such as kissing and spitting"

www.nat.org.uk/Our-thinking/Public-understanding/Public-attitudes.aspx

AFAIK Reiki isn't available on the NHS so I would have thought the only place it's paid for out of public funds is where there are no medical treatments, where it's as good a placebo as anything else. It might not make anyone better, but it makes some people fell better - that may or may not be a good use of funds depending on what you are using it for - it's certainly harder to argue that it provides a RoI in the same way as outreach work.

And that's the problem really - not that art therapist/story teller/reiki healer considers their services to be essential (though I am sure they do) but that users of their services consider them to be essential. If they didn't cuts would be easy.

Not surprised that people are mis-informed re HIV and Aids. I can remember in the 1980's, the ridiculous public information making out that we were all going to catch it.

We might have done if we hadn't changed our behaviours. In countries where people haven't AIDS rates are much higher.

Not much in life is really essential, as Moondog said, the world would not stop turning without many of the services and jobs we have now. But some services and some workers make just an enormous amount of difference to people's lives, and it's what we believe is important above air, food, shelter that sets the tone for the society.

A silly example, some of you will maybe say, but I know of at least one school where drama and/or music have just ceased to exist as subjects due to finance issues/prioritising. I just think that's really sad, because properly good drama teaching can just give so much to children and the school, and the same for music. But of course, the confidence and skills given to students in theses subjects don't immediately translate into any kind of financial benefit to anyone and they don't show up in league tables.

We were told that the risk factors were sharing drinking vessels and the like, at the time.