BASKET CASE BRITAIN IS GOING BANKRUPT

As MPs go off on their summer holidays…

Pay cuts for the private sector and pay RISES for public sector staff

Boris Johnson wants to clear Backlog Britain by the end of September. Good luck with that.

He hasn’t a hope in hell’s chance of persuading feather-bedded civil servants back to their desks any time soon.

Why would they, when MPs have just knocked off for six weeks’ summer holiday? If the Government was serious about getting the country up to speed again, Parliament would have scrapped the summer recess.

It’s not as if MPs have been rushed off their feet lately. Most of them have been content to stay at home, working out how to spend the extra ten grand they awarded themselves to cope with the corona crisis.

They should be at Westminster, subjecting the Government’s increasingly baffling and inconsistent Covid response to proper scrutiny. But while MPs are missing in action, the unions would scream blue murder if civil servants were ordered back to work.

Given the way ministers caved in to the teachers, there’s not the remotest possibility that the Civil Service will be back to normal by September. The backlog of passport applications, driving licences and birth certificates will only get worse.

of course, the Government could have set up a simple system which would have allowed people to download the documents online. They could have issued six-month or one-year extensions, complete with readable bar codes, to be attached to licences and passports.

It shouldn’t be any more complicated than Amazon’s system for returning unwanted or faulty goods.

But that would have called for innovation, flexibility and political courage. And the unions would never agree to it, so it ain’t gonna happen. My best guess is that it will be the middle of next year before the backlog is cleared. If ever, the way things are going.

CIVIL servants have no incentive to get back to their offices. Like the rest of the public sector, they’re all drawing their full salaries. There’s a clear distinction between those who kept the country ticking over — including the police, NHS frontline staff, dustmen, etc — and the vast majority currently ‘working from home’. What are they all actually doing?

By and large, it was the private sector that ensured Britain was fed and watered during lockdown. Even much-maligned BT rose to the occasion, maintaining reliable broadband connections for the most part.

But it has been private sector employees who have taken pay cuts, to help their employers through these difficult times, while their counterparts on the state payroll haven’t lost a penny. That’s why I wrote back in May that we weren’t all in this together. Even so, I couldn’t have imagined the Government would actually start handing out pay

rises to public sector staff. But that’s what happened this week, with teachers in England getting increases of between 2.75 and 5.5 per cent. There’s no justification for giving them more money when unions have been refusing to let them report for work.

Imagine how that must have gone down with low-paid delivery drivers and others who have worked throughout, trying to make ends meet. Plenty of parents have lost money because they have been unable to go back to work while the schools remain closed. The news that teachers are getting a pay rise must have been a real kick in the teeth.

It’s not only pay, either. The mounting job losses over the past few weeks have all come at private companies, from Marks & Sparks to rolls-royce.

I’ve not heard of anyone working for local or national government being made redundant.

But the idea that we’re not all in this together isn’t only confined to the public/private divide.

Even though the Government has eased social distancing regulations and encouraged the economy to start opening up again, millions are reluctant to return to pre-Covid normality.

Some major firms, including the banks, have no intention of reopening their offices until the New Year at the earliest. By then, it may well be too late for the shops, bars, cafes and restaurants which rely on the custom of office staff to turn a profit and keep people in jobs.

Yet the white-collar classes have become accustomed to ‘working from home’. So much so that they now look on it as an entitlement.

Listen to the phone-ins, read the surveys. They’re loving their new work/life balance.

Crisis, what crisis? To adapt that famous quote from fifties Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: Some people have never had it so good.

‘I’m better off than I’ve ever been. I’m not missing the commute, I’m saving on my season ticket. Why would I want to pay a fiver for a sandwich from Pret or buy an expensive cup of coffee from Costa? Plus, I’m seeing more of my kids. Go back to the office? No thanks, chum.’

Some people selfishly see the fall-out from corona as a godsend. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that this isn’t the way the economy works. Money makes the world go round.

There can be no prosperity if nobody is spending.

Central London is a basket case. So, I’m told, are the main shopping areas of other big cities such as Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds. Those stores and cafes which opened again recently are starved of punters.

If they don’t see a dramatic increase in takings soon, they will soon have no alternative but to shut for good.

If city centres die, and they are heading that way, millions more will lose their jobs. The tax base will collapse, the benefits bill will go through the stratosphere and there won’t be any money to spend on our Amazing NHS — or anything else, for that matter — let alone pay the interest on the billions of pounds the Government is borrowing every day.

And with the entire economy in free fall, it won’t be long before the jobs of all those ‘working from home’ start to disappear, too. Those lucky enough to be kept on will have to swallow substantial wage cuts. The rest could see their jobs outsourced to cheaper people working from home in Bangladesh or Eastern Europe.

That could happen sooner rather than later unless the Government takes the lead and hits the restart button with a vengeance.

Never mind the latest madness about having to wear masks to buy takeaway food, but not to eat on the premises — and in shops, but not pubs.

That’s a sideshow, displacement activity at best, right up there with Nero fiddling while rome burned. The country is on the brink of catastrophic economic collapse, yet MPs head off on their summer hols.

It can’t go on. Parliament should be recalled and the Civil Service ordered back immediately.

Instead of continuing to chuck money we haven’t got at everything from the extended furlough scheme to half-price hamburgers, the Chancellor should be offering generous tax breaks, whatever it takes, to get factories and offices back up and running again.

frankly, I fear few people — including half the Cabinet — have any idea of the scale of the carnage coming down the pipe.

Never mind Backlog Britain, it’s Bankrupt Britain we should be worrying about now.