Priti Va-cant

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• Our "Rolls Royce" civil service is just as big a myth as our "World Class" NHS.

  • It is a Rolls Royce civil service - oversized, overpriced, living off past reputation gained in very different times, replaceable by a more efficient, cheaper to run machine far better suited to current conditions.

    • That's arguably true for Rolls Royce cars, but not so much the aero engine division which literally is world class.

      • I totally agree about the aerospace RR. However, I've always considered the expression "Rolls Royce of X" to be a reference to the cars. When I was a kid most people had seen a RR car being driven, but very few had seen an aerospace engine working.

• I suspect Priti has bigger balls than Amber Rudd. Probably bigger than Baron Reid of Cardowan too.

• I used to work for an agency of the Department of the Environment called Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Pollution. It was at that time a new agency, but populated with the usual cast offs and reprobates from other ministries.

  We were brought in as contractors to do the job of delivering their IT system simply because their own staff couldn't do it. They had actually tried to do it and failed abysmally.

  I have never met such a bunch of lazy, entitled incompetents in my entire life. From the entire staff there was one senior manager who knew what they were doing and she had been recruited from a private consultancy organisation.

  You could literally sack >75% of the civil service without any impact. We should do this ASAP.

  • Aye, but which 75%? You'd end up with a higher concentration of the useless ****ers. It's the same when I get people saying: why do we have three councillors per ward, get rid of two of them. Which two? You'd lose the useful ones and be left with the self-preserving dregs.

• Aye. Some of my best bosses have shouted and sworn. Though never at me, because I never waited until a dep't meeting to say I wouldn't be delivering on my task and it wasn't my fault. Instead, I went to him privately, showed how our assumptions had changed, and made a recommendation.

  In the US, bullying extends to telling off-color jokes (see the confirmation of Clarence Thomas), using a pronoun other than the referent prefers and, after Biden reinstates those workshops, evidencing toxic caucasity.

  • Yeah, I have had bosses shout and swear at me, because I did that. They also sat me down afterwards and had a chat about it. I learned that these people really would rather know if there's a problem so they can get it sorted.

    I do wonder if the problem here is that Priti is from Ugandan-Asian shopkeeper family and raised differently from a lot of middle class people like May and Rudd. People from business often have a different perspective on failure to people who've worked in lumbering bureaucracies. Those places are about clocking in your hours and "doing your best", where business is about keeping your promises.

• If I was given Priti's job (please, God, no) and had to deal with the Blairite empty suits and over-promoted Common Purpose drones that constitute the upper ranks of our 'elite' Civil Service, a bit of swearing would be the least of their problems.

• If it is "bullying" to ask people to do their job ...
  My wife keeps accusing me of "shouting" if I try to be heard over the smartphone - should I be sacked?

• "manifested itself in forceful expression, including some occasions of shouting and swearing”, adding that this “can be described as bullying in terms of the impact felt by individuals.”
  That's interesting because I've been on an admittedly short course on bullying and that doesn't meet the criteria, unless it was done in front of others with the intention to belittle them.
  So these poor individuals were bollocked in private presumably, but it felt like bullying to them, so therefore bullying. No, I'm not buying that schit.

• private sector and public service managers comparison ?
  may old Oz was different because in the bigger private company bureaucracies the private managers were considerably incompetent. It was not common on the pre 2000 Oz federal public service in most of the departments. Now that KPIs and Jacintas in HR rule the roosts it has probably gone bad, given the number of fleeing senior public serpents of my my acquaintance.

  • I do like the 'serpent' bit. Maybe I should try and hiss occasionally.

• As we used to say, TOIL to a Civil Servant meant 'time off in lieu'.