Austerity nightmare

The future of making the Austerity plan work.

That is the white paper being prepared in every capital city in Europe.

Here are some of the items likely to be in it.

First Pensions must be cut. First public pensions. To do this a careful campaign of demonizing public workers must be persued. Stories must be provided to journalists about ‘gold plated’ public pensions paid to ‘lazy’ teachers and over-paid doctors. Police should not be targetted. We will need them to be on our side when it comes to the tightening of rules covering strikes and public disorder. See below.

Firemen, bin-men, social workers etc they can be targetted. The aim must be to question their motives for doing the jobs. The focus must be on painting them as only doing the jobs because they are looking for a cushy retirement, years before everyone else. Once the public has come to see them in this way, not only can their pensions be cut but their retirement age can be lifted and their salaries and ‘perks’ can be questioned.

Retirement for public workers should be raised by 3 years at a date sufficiently far in the future to be ignored by most people. Once the premise is established without a fight in this way, however, both the date at which it takes effect can be brought forward and the number of years it is to be lifted by can be increased.

The important thing is to get the principle accepted into public consciousness in a way that does not provoke effective opposition and only then push through the unpopular reality.

Once this is done for public sector workers, then it will be harder for those people who were keen to see it done to others, to mount a convincing case for defence of their own pensions in the private sector. This will clear the way for private companies, the large ones, to dismantle pension provisions. They will have to do this as most of their pension schemes are already catastrophically underfunded. But admitting to this is bad pr for pushing the ‘private sector does it better’ policies we want to advocate. Better to balme the debacle on greedy pension seeking senior staff. Turn junior staff against them.

The private workers will not get any sympathy or support for the public sector workers and thus will be powerless to stop ‘reform’ of their own pensions. Any opposition should be cast as restrictive and greedy minorities intent to destroying their own industries.

That’s pensions.

Benefits should be cut ‘with a thousand cuts’. Start with smaller specialist serives for minority groups. Then move on to making ‘small’ cuts to larger services. At all times emphasize that what are being cut are innefficiencies while ‘front line’ services are being protected. All dissenting voices are to be painted as ‘public service’ malcontents and probably those whose jobs are the very inefficiencies being targetted.

Strikes are a major danger and must be headed off firmly. First divide and conquer where possible. Always try to find a smaller more compliant union to talk to if the major union is not amenable. See Miners strike for a good example. Try to support more ‘moderate’ members to contest leadership within large non-compliant unions.

Next step is to tighten laws on strike balloting. See contesting of British Airways stike ballots for good working practice. Laws will also be tightened on civil disorder and unauthorized assembly. Editorials in sympathetic newspapers should make noises about how strikes are endangering national recovery. How a selfishly motivated and undemocratic minority is manipulating freedoms to endanger the whole nation. This kind of language will prepare the minds of the public for linking strikes with endangering the nation. From there, suggesting the use of anti-terror legislation, designed to protect national security – will not seem out of place. We can then use the ‘soft edge’ of stop and search, detain without a warrant etc , so far used on environmentalist ‘extremists’, on strikers and union ‘extremists’.

Think these ideas are far fetched? I hope so. But I think they are really the only way the austerity future can be made to work.

Mr Barosso sketched out his nightmare scenario why shouldn’t we play the game too.