Home is Where the Hurt is

I realised, yesterday, it was exactly five years since I resigned from the Home Office.

It was an elementary decision in the end. Having had six line managers in ten months, I was compelled to accept a demotion from a grade I had held for four years. Annual reports of my performance were not deemed relevant by HR.

From what I hear the working atmosphere has continued to deteriorate and with the almost indiscriminate cuts in staffing since 2010 has reached 'poisonous' levels. The last measure across Whitehall of morale in Departments put the HO at the bottom of the heap concluding: "Home Office civil servants have less faith in their department's readiness to do its job than employees in any other government office."

Although most of the turmol is kept within the confines of HQ in Marsham Street (above) we have all witnessed the suicidal cutting of UKBA staff and the inevitable huge queues at our airports. It does not seem to occur to Home SecTheresa May that you shouldn't cut staff when there is clearly a job for them to do. She acts like some penny pinching spinster running her life by austerity for its own sake, ready to watch her family be half-starved. To the Conservatives, civil servants are amateurish beauracrats first, effective dedicated public servants last.

The G4S "debacle" was a failure of monitoring a contract by the HO. My guess would be there were just not enough boots on the ground to the job, not after 8,500 redundancies. The relationshiip with staff generally could be compared to a dysfunctional family suffering sustained psychological abuse from a despised, aggressive figurehead.

So it was little surprise to see its maligned and ignored workforce seek to demonstrate its anger at the only time it would be noticed: during the Olympics. Ministers are gambling the public will continiue to relate any strike with the 1978/9 winter of discontent and condemn any exertion of union power. That antipathy won't last forever: unions are people too, my friend.