Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

I don’t live in Birmingham, and this bit of news won’t affect me personally in the slightest, but for some reason I’ve been trying to keep up with various news stories surrounding the cuts made by the Birmingham City Council.

A few months ago, I wrote about the handsome pay rises that the council’s bosses had awarded themselves, shortly before making some big job cuts for council employees. The hypocrisy of it all amused me.

Amongst those cuts, it was reported that “workers in the children and young people’s department are expected to bear the brunt of the losses”, a total of 2,000 job cuts across the council.

This week saw the release of a report criticising Birmingham City Council’s children’s department, stating that it was failing to protect children, and showed little capacity to improve. The councillor in charge of the department, Len Clark, said he was leading an immediate “re-alignment” of the service.

Yeah, a re-alignment that is going to leave the department much weaker because you’re going to be firing so many people, and yet you’re still going to be collecting a cushy salary that saw an inflation-busting increase recently.

But please excuse most of the media for not covering this story; I hear Kerry Katona has a new boyfriend…

And this is why we shouldn’t let media outrage and fear-mongering dictate such sensitive issues as government drug policy:

A few months ago, there was a whole flurry of hand-wringing in the media after a few people died after allegedly taking mephedrone, a legal high drug. In particular, two teenagers were among those deaths, and their parents were amongst the most vehement in calling for a ban on the drug.

Despite the lack of real scientific evidence as to the dangers of the drug, the government swiftly banned it, with immediate effect. A number of arrests followed for those continuing to sell it from websites and in clubs, and talk has risen of further bans on other legal high products.

The government basically took a completely kneejerk reaction to some fearmongering headlines, and now we have another drug added to the extensive list of illegal substances that really don’t have as much of a lethal effect as alcohol and cigarettes.

Oh, and the reason why reacting in this fashion is wrong? They didn’t have all the facts.

The toxicology reports released today for the two teenagers above have shown that in fact they had not taken any of that drug prior to their deaths.

This reminds me so much of the panic around swine flu, when a few people died at the start of that outbreak. There was a ridiculous amount of coverage, with screaming frontpage headlines proclaiming the apocalypse, for each death, but when those deaths were later shown to be entirely non-flu related, that news was relegated to page 94.

The fear had been put into the populace, and to be honest many won’t even have noticed the corrections or follow-ups. The media’s view of the story thus becomes the one which the public believes to have actually happened, despite that not being true.

And we’re seeing the same again now with mephedrone: a couple of scary headlines, and things change. The government’s reaction to swine flu cost us millions in buying Tamiflu and staffing a swine flu hotline. The new drugs policy has instantly criminalised thousands of people.

And this is why we shouldn’t let the media dictate government policy.

Now, there’s nothing I love more than some absolutely rank hypocrisy from those who we elect to govern us. One of the news stories that caught my eye today involved Birmingham City Council making 2,000 workers redundant in an effort to balance the books.

This is despite saying in October last year that only 800 jobs would be lost, and that these would be through natural wastage, not redundancies. Of course, the latest news is that voluntary redundancies will be a big part of the 2,000 jobs to go.

It got me thinking about whether those at the top of Birmingham council are planning to undergo similar financial hardships this year, as a sign of solidarity with their underlings.

A little investigation later, and it turns out that council leader Mike Whitby and his fellow councillors aren’t exactly in step with their comrades.

Last June, Whitby and three other senior councillors awarded themselves an extra £15,000 for attending a few more meetings each year. Previously, attendance at these meetings came with no extra salary.

A mere two weeks ago, Whitby joined the board of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, which I’m pretty certain isn’t an unpaid role.

I hate to link to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, despite their well-placed apostrophe, but in June they looked at Chief Executive Stephen Hughes’ pay packet: a whopping £200,000+ per year. This is as a result of an 18.2% pay rise over two years, way, way above the inflation rate. Not exactly a minuscule salary, is it?

To cap it all, the council’s auditors have refused to sign off on the 2008/9 accounts, citing a number of shortfalls in the budget. Most notably, the council claims that their property assets amount to £6.6 billion, whereas the auditors value them at £5.5 billion.

This has lead to a “black hole” in the council’s finances of around £60 million, resulting in the job cuts.

There’s been no statement from either of these senior councillors that they will take any pay cuts or forgo bonuses because of the perilous state of Birmingham’s finances. No doubt they’ll quietly award themselves various bonuses for meeting targets…

Things that really, really annoy me:

• Handles facing towards you on ‘push’ doors.

That is all.

Ever have one of those days when everything you do is second-guessed? As if people expect nothing more from you than a mistake and a fuck up, like you can’t do your job properly.

It’s really, really fucking annoying and demoralising.