I dare say it will have come as a crushing shock to you to read that a report has suggested the Home Office is a dysfunctional convocation of mithering wet-lipped halfwits living on a planet considerably distant from our own and more concerned with attending Sapphic Sounds workshops than doing anything that might alleviate the miseries which daily afflict our nation.
I have taken one or two liberties in summarising the report from the former Home Office adviser Nick Timothy, but I have stayed true to the gist, I think. I don’t suppose your view will have been tempered by the news that an asylum seeker convicted of sexual assault was bunged some dosh and released back into the community rather than taken to a deportation centre. Or that this kind of thing happens every other day.
We are told staff are demoralised by the failure to cope with the small boats crisis and all those migrants pouring in. You’re demoralised? How the hell do you think the rest of us feel? Mr Timothy also expressed some surprise that so much working time was given over to identity politics and social issues, such as that Sapphic Sounds stuff I mentioned (a download of the noise of two lesbians trying to move a piano upstairs, I think, grunting and gasping as they attempt to round the bannisters. You are supposed to listen to it and empathise, as if you too were a lesbian trying to move a piano upstairs), plus the Ally Working Group Catch-Up (who is Ally?) and something terrifying called the Listening Circle.
Workers were enjoined to bring their “authentic selves” to work, which is a mistake, in my experience. People who bring their authentic selves to work are nearly always deserving of a slap around the chops. Most of us should keep our authentic selves chained to a post at the back of the garden and let it loose only on Walpurgisnacht. Authentic selves need to be socialised so that they become clubbably inauthentic and thus, on a daily working basis, almost bearable. Take as your role model Ben Shephard from Tipping Point.
It was also reported the civil servants tended to adopt a defeatist attitude and were remiss in telling ministers things they might not want to hear. The problem we may have here is a Gen Z cohort brought up to avoid conflict, as well as being inept in social situations unless it involves tapping the screen of their phone. The defeatism comes from the intense discomfort when the real world suddenly intrudes upon their own, ideal private domain where nasty things are not allowed to happen and all migrants are to be welcomed to our country and lawbreakers are simply people rebelling against the very great economic injustices within our society.
The Home Office has been dysfunctional for as long as any normal human being can remember, of course, and was famously called “not fit for purpose” by the then home secretary John Reid in 2006. It was probably not fit for purpose a long time before then: put shortly, the Home Office needs to do stuff for the good of the country that the arts and humanities grads who make up its staff do not agree with. But the main problem is not really political; it is cultural. It is tied in a little with wokery, but runs deeper than that.
Do you remember the time when we had personnel officers? Maybe one or two, in a medium-sized company. They are gone. What we have now is human resources, a sector of our economy that has increased by 83 per cent in the past 14 years: we now have more than half a million of these monkeys on the payroll. This is the consequence of a “people-focused” business approach and the relentless iteration of the phrase, by every company boss, “our most valuable resource is our wonderful staff”. And so the notion of what, actually, a job was, changed beyond comprehension over the last 20 or so years. No longer was someone employed to produce a product, or put into effect a policy; they were there to achieve self-actualisation, to express themselves, to find themselves fulfilled. The whole point of the job somehow got lost in this process — it became a kind of afterthought.
If you really believe that your most valuable resource is the people who work for you, then your priorities as a company shift and the original point of the exercise quickly gets sidelined. And nowhere has this shift been more marked than in the public sector, where the crudities of commerce and competition are not allowed to intrude. Here we see more days taken off sick, more days taken off as holidays, a higher salary (on average) and a shorter working week. In other words, it is all about the comfort and convenience of the workforce, not about the stuff that needs to be done. Eventually that stretches to “listening circles” and lesbians pushing a piano upstairs — things they have introduced to keep them all happy. Except it doesn’t make them happy. Perhaps outright ownership of the means of production will cheer them up a bit, but our present approach — to treat employees as if they are needy babies — does not work. Regardless of which selves they bring to work every day, their authentic selves or their inauthentic selves.
Louvre jewel heist
Fly away, spotty home invaders
A scary report in one of our morning national newspapers revealed that a woman’s house had been “invaded” by thousands of terrifying insects and she didn’t know what to do. Experts later identified these strange creatures as something called “ladybirds”.
They also said that they were louche ladybirds, carrying sexually transmitted diseases. That is presumably because they are reluctant, for aesthetic reasons, to employ prophylactics. The newspaper reassured readers that these diseases were not transmissible to humans, although I suppose that depends upon what you do with them.
Someone should have told this woman that the sure way to get rid of ladybirds is to inform them, en masse, that arson has been carried out at their domiciles and their children are sadly dead.
I predict many more Caerphillys
I wonder if there is a living to be made as someone who accurately predicts the results of minor regional elections. A kind of Nostradamus of the Senedd. I reckoned Plaid Cymru would win that by-election in Caerphilly because there seemed to be enough fat left in the Labour vote for tactical voting to occur.
It’s a more damaging defeat for Labour than if Reform had won, frankly, for it suggests it might be repeated wherever the imperative is to Stop Farage. Sometimes the challenger to Reform will be Labour and sometimes anyone else wearing a nose ring and a keffiyeh. And in the north the Labour vote splits roughly 50-50 — for Reform versus Anyone But.
Future flawed
There will be nobody left alive on Earth by the year 2339, according to the scientists David Swanson and Jeff Tayman. And even in 2338 you’ll be stretched to find an Uber in rush hour. The demographers came up with this somewhat startling prediction by extrapolating from present world fertility rates, which have indeed been on a downward trajectory. In much the same way, then, as I might suggest that the average age at which women give birth by 2339 will be 147, the world record for the 100-metre sprint will be 0.0 seconds and at least 78 people will have been sent back to France under the government’s one in, one out scheme.
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