"In 1976 we were encouraged to organise street parties. Today there would be a hurricane of official discouragement; all adults would have to undergo CRB checks, £5m public liability insurance would need to be in place, and no-one would be allowed to bake a cake or make a sandwich for the party unless they had undergone food hygeine training and the environmental health had certified their fridge. There would need to be a risk assessment, a health and safety policy in place, an application to the council to stop-up the highway complete with traffic management plan, and if anyone wanted to sing, a temporary events licence, entertainments licence and police licence would be needed. If the street party involved a rum punch for the adults, then a whole spectrum of liquer licences would be needed. The licence conditions would specify bouncers, fire marshals and first aid and fire fighting equipment to be on hand; there would also need to be temporary toilets (with a sewer connection licence) as popping indoors for a pee wouldn't satisfy the statutory requirements. In short, in the space of thirty years the State has erected barriers of such formidable complexity that it has robbed the nation of any trust in ourselves."
In the Financial Times Sue Cameron has an interesting article on graduate applications to join the Civil Service, yet another article well worth a read and it includes a simple plan to obtain a nice pay-off.
On the same topic, we find that a quarter of all council tax payments "goes to meet the soaring cost of the gold-plated pensions of town hall workers."
Maybe this is what Gordon Brown meant by his infamous statement 'British Jobs For British Workers' - Get all the workers working for the state and therefore dependent on it. On the basis that 'turkeys don't vote for Christmas', his phrase could well be subtitled 'New Labour's plan to ensure it gets re-elected'.
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