BETTER TOGETHER POOLING AND SHARING JOB LOSSES

They told us that the only way to save jobs in HMRC, was to vote No. (An independent Scotland wouldn't, it seemed, have needed tax collectors???)

Cumbernauld HMRC with Jim, making sure that their jobs were safe.

Indeed, they even managed to get people from HMRC to stand outside with banners proclaiming their jobs were only safe within the pooling and sharing UKOK. Save our UK jobs! Vote NO, they pleaded with us!

You'll maybe find this a little hard to believe, but apparently they lied.

And the irony is that these job losses will be happening in a department that has just been slated by a Commons committee for gross incompetence, and customer services that would make Attila the Hun Enterprises look friendly and magnanimous. 

And why are they so inefficient? Well, because they have too much work and not enough staff.

Fifty per cent of calls to HMRC go unanswered  because there's no one to answer them, and no one seems to be available to deal with the thousands of tax dodgers' names given to them by the HSBC leaker.

You'd have thought that given Gideon is short of cash, that he has to take food our of kids' mouths, he might have though it worthwhile to get his hands on the billions that the super rich have been salting away in Switzerland.

Chris and Stewart with union representatives
outside the Dundee Office

Somewhere between one and two thousand jobs will be lost in Scotland, including the closure of the offices in, yes, you guessed it, Cumbernauld. My home town of Dundee will also suffer substantial job losses.

So maybe Jim, who in fairness lost his own job following the great Pooling and Sharing, and who is now working as a conflict resolution consultant, can pop back from wherever he's creating chaos and disharmony at the moment and explain just how these UK jobs in Cumbernauld were served best by pooling and sharing within the UK. He might try resolving the conflict that he caused by advising these staff members that voting NO would save their jobs.

Good luck with that Spud.

ROYAL BANK JOB LOSSES : IS THIS THE START OF A MISERABLE WINTER?

Royal Bank of Scotland has just announced that in a further move to reduce costs another 3,500 jobs will go across the UK. Of course as the bank is 80+% owned by you and me, saving money would seem to be a good thing. Surely the leaner and meaner the bank can look to potential buyers of the shares, the sooner the British government can get rid of theirs and get back to do what it is supposed to be doing.

The jobs it seems are to go across ‘back office’ functions in the business services division. I suppose that is fair enough as there is so much less business to service, thanks to the banks themselves. It will mean the closure of 12 of its business services centres across the UK and put a further 3 under review for closure.

The job cuts, which will involve between 12 and 15 centres across the UK, and which will start next year and run on till the end of 2012, come on top of the same division's 9,000 job cuts announced last year. Additionally RBS is to close half its Churchill and Direct Line offices with further 2000 job losses and another 600 job cuts at head office in Edinburgh.

Some of the jobs lost in the UK will be relocated to China, India and the United States. Fortunately it is reported that there will be some work, and staff transferred to RBS’s offices in Greenock and Edinburgh.

This scale of job loss, described as a horror story by the Unite union, is I fear just the start of a winter of horror stories; job losses, home repossessions and general all round misery, as prices increase and some benefits are cut. Inflation for the poorest is already at a far higher level than the Treasury suggests, with expected increases in the prices of many staples because of the foul summer weather across the world, and a small VAT rise on other necessities. Let us hope that the power companies can keep their prices low, or that if not, this government will do what the French government does, and limit their ability to raise prices beyond inflation.

It is difficult to know whether the leaks of complete carnage across the Civil Service are designed to make us fear the worst, and the October statement by Mr Osborne will be greeted with sighs of relief all round....or if it is all too true and too horrible, designed to get to grips with the idiotic financial fiasco left by Labour.

The fear is that the UK along with the US is headed for a second recession. The US economy to which Scotland sells around 10% of its total exports certainly looks shaky and the European countries, which make up the bulk of Scotland’s exports (around 66%) are not long out of recession.
We cannot expect the private sector to be able to pull us out of this mess.

I just hope that Mr Osborne is as clever as his publicity tells us he is. There is a very great deal riding on his supposed talents.

CRASH AS THE STAFF OVERLOAD COMPUTER SYSTEM WITH ENGLAND MATCH....IN SCOTLAND

Some people just ask for it, don’t they?

Yesterday, at the start of the Slovenia v England game, the staff of the Dundee City Council crashed the whole computer system and the Council site was unavailable to tax payers for transaction of business.

The management (and I use the term loosely, because it implies some sort of foresight, forward planning and control, none of which has been in any way evident) quickly blocked the BBC website which was live streaming the match.

What?

The action they took was to stop the match being shown. Right.

The only councillor they could find to comment was a Liberal Fraser MacPherson (without whom the pages of the Courier would be decidedly bare). He rather lamely said that he would speak to Council chief executive, David Dorward, to make the point that they should not be watching sport in council time. But he pointed out that because of flexible working practices some staff may have saved up time and might have been watching in their own time.

What?

Don’t they have homes to go to?

MacPherson continued: “The bottom line is no one is going to object to staff watching sport in their own time as long as management is Ok with it. We would have to be sure that there were sufficient staff to maintain services and particularly those staff in public facing positions.”

What? Again. If they were doing it in their own time, but on our equipment why would there not be sufficient staff in public facing positions (whatever that is?)

If staff are at work, they should be working. If staff are finished work, they should go home, or to an internet café or whatever to watch the match. No one should be watching the match in the office. If we allow people to watch sport why can’t they watch Emmerdale or Strictly Come Dancing? What nonsense.

How could other staff do their job effectively with the distraction of television entertainment? That’s not what the computers are for.

A council spokesman has said that measures have been introduced to stop this happening again.

So let me just enlighten him or her to the fact that we, the people who pay for this, are incandescent. Why aren’t the people who were logged in to the BBC website being disciplined? It would happen to me if I did it.

Ironically the very next day, the Dundee Trades Union Council, in the form of Mike Arnott, its secretary, has suggested that as many as 660 jobs may be lost in Dundee City Council in the cutbacks. Apparently 600 were due to go before the Budget and that has been revised upwards because of the austerity measures announced by Mr Osborne.

The council’s administration leader, Ken Guild, refuted this saying that the figures had been “plucked out of the air”. He declined, however, to say if the figures were in any way realistic. He said that he didn’t know how many people would be going, but rolled out the usual platitudes about avoiding compulsory redundancies. It seems, however, that there will be many more unemployed in Dundee in the near future.

Whilst I hate to see people made redundant, I really can’t help but wonder what we, the Council Tax payers, get for our money.

ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND IT GOES; WHERE IT STOPS NOBODY KNOWS

I was listening to the news today with growing incredulity.

Early on I heard that councils throughout the UK were expected to make big savings over the next 5 years. A survey, carried out by the BBC and concentrating mainly on England (surprise) but also having effects in the Celtic countries, showed that most councils expected to lose large numbers of jobs, and could expect to see severe reductions in services.

The first cuts will affect the least essential, but still important services like leisure, parks, swimming baths, libraries, etc., but old people’s accommodations and social services cuts cannot be ruled out as time goes on. Birmingham in England, the second largest local authority in the UK expects to lose 2000 jobs, and cannot realistically expect to do this with voluntary redundancies and recruitment freezes.

I was reflecting that at least locally, libraries play a vital part in the lives of some of the poorer people in the city. They provide facilities for those who have no internet access at home. Kids who need to use the net to access information for school projects, unemployed people looking for work, older people who can’t afford computers and wouldn’t know how to set them up use the facilities of libraries throughout the town. They host reading groups for young children and facilities for people with learning difficulties; they run courses more easily accessible and less daunting than the college or the universities. And for some it is a warm place to sit on a cold day. And imagine closing down swimming baths, or reducing access to them, just as we were being told that the Olympics in London were going to be of immense benefit to us all; likewise all the other sporting facilities provided by the local parks department and the community centres.

As I reflected I thought about why we are in this recession. Of course (sorry Danny) it’s all America’s fault... according to Brown, but I have a recollection of Northern Rock having a loan book that even a Glasgow moneylender with access to leg breaking equipment wouldn’t touch. And I remember that RBS was up there lending to people who hadn’t a hope in hell of paying the money back, and who would make restitution to the bank only on the sale of their now much more expensive property....until, woops, the property bubble burst. So no, it was our bankers as much as it was theirs.... Much of this mess is down to bankers and financial institutions.

So I’m betting you can imagine how I was feeling tonight when I noticed that a certain Mr Gulliver of HSBC was awarded a £9 million bonus on top of his £800,000 base pay for “exceptional performance" in trebling the profits of his division to $10.5 billion.

OK this is an extreme case and HSBC didn’t take money from the government, but all over the banking sector, it’s back to business, like all this silliness of the last few years never happened. Last week, Stephen Hester, chief executive of RBS gave up his bonus but the state-owned bank revealed it paid at least two of its bankers more than £7 million in 2009.

It’s another of these moments when you ask yourself.... is this a dream? They were greedy; they got into a mess; we bailed them out; because we have bailed them out we don’t have any money and we have to do without basics; and they got greedy again.....

OK. I know it’s not quite that simple, but it’s not far off....

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