When British papers are out of my reach, I prefer Sky News to the BBC – partly because the Beeb makes Al Jazeera sound objective (even on the subject of the Middle East) and partly because of Eamonn Holmes.
These days one is neither enlightened nor even informed by TV, but occasionally one can expect to be entertained, an expectation Holmes seldom frustrates. A jolly, rotund chappy with a pleasant Irish burr and a nice sense of humour, he exudes homespun common sense. Even better, he never pretends to have much more than that, which sets him apart from his robotic colleagues with all-knowing smiles permanently pasted on.
Admittedly, some of his female colleagues look much better than Eamonn, but most of them have problems reading the teleprompter. Eamonn, on the other hand, has excellent reading skills. Moreover, he often delivers off-the-cuff remarks that teeter just on the edge of political correctness. One can tell that over a pint or two Eamonn can be oodles of fun.
This preface has been necessary because I’m now going to criticise Mr Holmes, and I wish to pre-empt any suspicion that there’s personal animosity behind the criticism. So, all disclaimers firmly in place, here it comes.
Yesterday Holmes was exchanging good-natured, mildly amusing remarks with a man and a woman who were reviewing the papers. One story dealt with the Chancellor’s intention of cutting quite a few public-sector jobs. George had claimed, not unreasonably, that this would relieve pressure on the Exchequer, put some pow into the economy and create many jobs in the private sector.
‘I don’t understand,’ commented Eamonn, for once dead serious. ‘They’re going to cut some jobs to create others. What’s the benefit of that?’
The commentator was stunned, and so was I. As I said, old Eamonn has never pretended to possess a far-reaching, academically honed intellect. But he has bags of common sense, and surely that rare faculty should have been sufficient for him to answer his own question, or indeed not to have asked it in the first place.
Now in case he really doesn’t understand – and feigning such economic illiteracy just may be an ideological stance, either his own or his network’s – the answer is so elementary that one is almost embarrassed to have to provide it.
Most of the 6,000,000 public jobs are unnecessary, starting with about 900,000 of them created by Tony’s government as the groundwork for future Labour victories. Even before Labour began to pay for their votes with our money, the public sector had been bloated to bursting point. The bubble has since burst, even though not everybody realises it.
Those paid out of our taxes or by the printing press make up about 20 percent of all those in employment, who in turn add up to just under half the population. To put it so that Eamonn can understand, half of us work to support the other half, with HMG acting as a middleman with megalomania. But in fact one in five of the working half are themselves paid by the Exchequer, handsomely, and that makes the situation far worse.
The Chancellor is widely, and rightly, castigated for failing to meet his targets on public borrowing and debt reduction. Yet there is one compelling reason why neither he nor any of his successors will ever be able to hit such targets.
The reason is people like Eamonn Holmes who don’t understand, or pretend not to understand, the difference between jobs in the public sector and the private one. The difference is clear-cut: the former deplete the economy, the latter keep it going.
Thus cutting public jobs to create private ones is absolutely essential, and it’s not the zero-sum game Eamonn thinks it is. Getting rid, as a minimum, of the spongers whose jobs hadn’t existed before Dave’s role model Tony went on a rampage would be a good start. But it shouldn’t end there.
Just look at one department, that of the Navy. The Royal Navy has dwindled away to almost nothing, with only about 34,000 sailors currently serving to fly the British flag at sea. That means that Britain no longer has the wherewithal to launch, say, another South Atlantic operation, never mind to fight a major war.
Yet the Department of the Navy boasts almost as many employees as there are sailors, about 30,000. In the nineteenth century, when Britannia ruled the waves, exactly the same job was done by 3,000 and they didn’t even have computers to help them along.
Would it be out of order to suggest that the staff of this department could easily be cut by 90 percent without in any way reducing its effectiveness? Could we then extrapolate to the other departments and suggest that they too could easily be lightened up by at least half?
Putting all those sacked onto the Jobseekers’ Allowance would be considerably cheaper than paying their salaries, pensions and expenses, even assuming – and that’s an unrealistic assumption – that they’ll stop cheating on those. The arithmetic is quite simple there, easy even for Eamonn to grasp.
So what is it that he doesn’t understand? Once again, we’re talking about a clever man there, one with an IQ probably way above average. The problem is that the good British public, of which Eamonn Holmes is a mouthpiece, has been trained, or rather corrupted, not to understand such elementary maths.
Public jobs to them are as good as any other. They are no longer capable of seeing the bloated public sector for what it really is, a millstone around the economy’s neck. If this situation doesn’t change quickly, and I’m not holding my breath, we’ll all drown.
There, Eamonn, do you understand now?