So, you’re a lifelong civil servant. You’re quite competent, and you’re amazingly good at tolerating people who aren’t, especially your political ‘masters’. You’ve spent over 30 years in the service, and you’ve risen to be in charge of collecting tax and that.
You’re well aware that a lot of companies are headquartered in the UK, that it costs them a grand and a few Ryanair flights a year to be headquartered in Ireland where there’s hardly any tax at all on foreign earnings instead, and so any company that makes the majority of its money outside the UK is only not sodding off to Ireland because the boss quite likes his office on the Thames/being among the London advisory community/and so on. But that this isn’t necessarily worth billions of squillions of squids.
So, given that the government’s official ethos is “we’re OK with people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their bills”, rather than “fuck everybody we don’t like TO DEATH”, you come to deals with people, under which the UK gets shedloads of tax money, far more than if the companies in question had just fucked off to Ireland, and nobody has to fuck off to Ireland.
Then, you get a disastrous recession, caused more by the governing ethos that both parties have shared for 20 years than anything else – and which you’ve bought into wholly, as did everyone except for some marginal cranks (no, shut up, as did everyone except some marginal cranks). And it all goes to ratshit, and the incoming government declares war on the public sector.
What better to do than to a) strongly encourage you-as-lifelong-public servant to quit now; b) smear you to fuck as a FATCAT PUBLIC SECTOR SALARY PERSON, even though the pension difference is vastly less than the enormous lifetime paycut you accepted for working in the public sector in the first place?
It’s not quite fair to view the current UK scenario solely as an excuse to fuck over people who work in the public sector. It’s also massively fucking over people in the private sector, but they have to meekly take it because FINANCE IS GOD. Thanks to Mrs Thatcher, as played convincingly by Corinna Harfouch, that’s the perceived medicine for everything. “Oh, you’re poor? Well, we’ll stop helping with your rent and your dole, then you’ll be less poor”. < - FACT | SATIRE -> “Oh, you’ve got cancer? Well, here’s my asbestos-themed cigar bar; also, this lady in heels will kick you in the genitalia whenever you care. After all, you wouldn’t want to bring kids into such a world”.
(I lied with the Harfouch resemblance. At lest Mrs G got the “not wanting to bring kids into such a world” part).
But yeah. Everything’s fucked. Dave Hartnett devoted his life to making the best job of public service, for paymasters who haven’t (at least yet) been hanged. Until and unless we hang them, we owe him that deal, just as much as we owe everyone else who rejected easy private sector money in order to do hard stuff for crap money with the sole benefits being a smile on your face and a tolerable pension.
"…just as much as we owe everyone else who rejected easy private sector money in order to do hard stuff for crap money with the sole benefits being a smile on your face and a tolerable pension."
A comment seemingly written from a perspective of avariciousness, where money is god.
But Finance / Big Money is indeed God, which is why we shouldn't question it.
This gent's salary was not "crap", and his pension is more than "tolerable" – if the private sector meanwhile offers stratospheric remuneration for a few by comparison, that doesn't mean the majority outwith the rich mens club aren't allowed to question how this all works out.
(And no, you shut up – most people did not buy into the now defunct economic paradigm "wholly" – they just went along with it, because it's how things were and that's what most people do. You bought into it "wholly" though. You probably did quite well out of it.)
That wasn't actually an argument, was it? You seem to be broadly on the side of good things, but meh.