The Competency Crisis 1 - Concrete Claptrap

Get a grip, Britain; I hear you cry. But we cannot. The media is all caught up with drowning polar bears, honeycombed concrete cracks, new variant transphobic genocide and global boiling panic!

Damaged Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC)

The Media vultures circling the Sunak government would typically wait for the prey to die of dehydration and then set about it over the ensuing days, often preferring the decaying, riper, sun-baked cadaver flesh.

But needs must - best to get in now whilst the Prime Minister still has an outside chance of crawling towards the sanctuary of a hung parliament oasis, before smaller or more adventurous pack predators take their unfair share - case in point: the BBC's Orwellian Verify Unit who kicked off this farce.

For those of us who watched the end of Thatcher or Major, Blair-Brown, or Cameron, and more recently, Sturgeon, the end of governments follows a usual pathology: the legacy achievements, real and imagined, are gradually eclipsed by costly failures as the end of their second term or the choppy waters of a third commence, and is usually accompanied by a delusional bunker mentality for the hapless leader stranded on the bridge of the sinking ship. 

The mixed metaphors are piled on. Just before they fall, the media keeps the mythmaking going, fearful of being denied access to stories and insider gossip- and then slowly, at first, they start to disgorge the covered-up corruption and the sleaze - editing out their role in it all - as the rats desert the sinking ship.

Sunak was the golden boy, Mr Furlough, a sane, secure man at the financial tiller, restraining Boris Johnson's profligacy, preferable to Liz Truss' inexperience and incompetence. Remember how rare it was to see a picture showing his very short stature? The spin was spun, and the media was happy to clamber into the web and lay back for a snooze. 

However, he was spraying printed money in all directions. The Bank of England was belatedly predicting rising inflation and a potential recession that they were supposed to have prevented - at least the inflation. Still, they were too busy undermining Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng's attempt to kick-start the economy.

As the press itself was zealous for lockdowns, social distancing, and mRNA jabs and berated the Johnson government for faster, sooner and harsher measures in press conference after press conference, it could hardly attack the current leadership for the consequences of the policies it demanded. 

Well, that is not true. They can be as hypocritical as they like. But rather than say the furlough spending splurge has led to record inflation, that high public sector pay deals will make things worse, not better, that the lockdowns were ineffective, primarily unnecessary and highly damaging to our economy and livelihoods, our children's education and well-being and also behind the majority of the NHS backlogs - leaving aside the record excessive deaths, primarily cardiac related, that point to the mRNA jabs not the “underfunding” in the Health Service - no, the pro-Labour media pack needs to look elsewhere and descends on the austerity cuts 2010-2019, via the "research" of the BBC Verify (propaganda) unit.

The BBC constantly explained, at the time, that austerity cuts were necessary to cut the deficit and restore the nation's international credit-worthiness; the austerity cuts were supported by Labour and Conservatives and at first reluctantly, then zealously by the Liberal Democrats once they were in the coalition government and had seen the state of the country's financial books. 

What about the Trade Unions and the extra-parliamentary left? Zilch, a couple of one days of action and then the Trade Unions buckled down to negotiate the sequence of the cuts, redeployments, salary down gradings and eventual mass redundancies of swathes of their local government members whom the Unions had previously negotiated away former favourable end of service redundancy settlements to no better than the meagre statutory minimum: a month's wages for every year served. 

Meanwhile, redundancy pay in the Health sector was a whole year's salary. Many senior Primary Care Trust managers cashed in, took redundancy, and signed up for interim agency work, often on higher wages minus pension; and they waited a further year before finding new permanent pensionable payroll. Two-tier indeed. But by 2015, the deindustrialised Trade Unions were more an effete insurance policy and a pale reflection of the combative masculine barnstorming flying pickets of the mid-seventies and eighties.

But who recalls the profligate Public Private Partnerships inherited from John Major but massively ramped up by Gordon Brown? PPIs enabled massive public infrastructure projects off the Government's books whereby major private contractors raised the investment funds to do the build on the promise of huge returns on the exorbitant prices for the facilities, repairs and maintenance contracts of the completed new or refurbished schools, hospitals, rail tracks and government infrastructure projects. 

Schools in line for rebuilding work under the Labour PPI scheme Building Schools for the Future (BSF) did not pass the value for public money austerity test when the Coalition came to power. Micheal Gove trimmed back without any significant complaints at the time. 

Step forward: Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC), which is now beyond its sell-by date, given it was deployed in some cases as early as the 50s and has been determined to be more at risk of decay and fracture than before.

By risky, I mean health and safety risk assessment risky. In most cases, we have no major risky cracks no immediate risky worry, but it’s best to have a look and get a BBC camera crew in just to be sure.

Use the high magnification risky camera lens to see if you can find a crack, at least more prominent than the ones in the junior journalists’ own shared London flats. Put some risky mitigation in place, and it’s all better safe-than-sorry.

Before it all becomes yesterday's risky chip-paper.

A process to address this bogus crisis was already in place—nonetheless, cue confected scandal. Whilst tens of thousands die of cardiac failure due to dodgy mRNA jabs to deafening silence from the media, the cacophony of Concrete-gate drones on. No one on either side of the political divide has much time for un-dishy Rishi anymore - and with good reason - but the hypocrisy is a bit rancid.

So now its decisions made in 2010 by Gove over thirteen out of five hundred schools and by Sunak in 2020 over fifty out of a hundred schools with RAAC in part of their structure, that has led to the attack on the Government by, well, the BBC.

In this age of catastrophism and propaganda, where sensible journalism should be, no one has pointed out the risk is manageable, no one is injured, and no buildings or ceilings have fallen down; the threat from Japanese Knotweed or school arson attacks is much greater.

And above all else, no one has pointed out there are 32000 schools in the UK, over 20,000 in England. For the dodgy RAAC, we are talking about infinitesimally small numbers of affected sites, 150 odd, with no immediate risk in any of the buildings.

But the "story" is good for the aforementioned Health Safety inspectors, let alone the structural engineers, building contractors, Head Teachers leveraging budget increases, and teacher unions seeking to blame the f****** Tories and fire a shot across the bow of the Labour front bench.

Not to mention selected Labour prospective parliamentary candidates with something now to directly campaign on if they are lucky enough to have a RAAC ceiling or wall in a School house or Bicycle shed, or – wonder of wonders a full school assembly room ceiling - in their constituency. 

Get a grip, Britain; I hear you cry. But we cannot. The media is all caught up with drowning polar bears, honeycombed concrete cracks, new variant transphobic genocide and global boiling panics!

The same Media that insisted that schools be closed for whole swathes of 2020-22 now complain about an on-site inspection delaying the School term by a few days or a couple of weeks in a similar number of schools.

The root of this is, in part, an ex-civil servant priming the outrage and then piling on. Expect more from our impartial civil service riddled with leftist activists. 

We are dealing with substandard concrete, but upon careful inspection by white-coated experts, it is also a case of unreadable journalism, infantile, hysterical, though unsurprising politicians, hopeless Government communication, absent civic vocation, and even intrinsically unethical and immoral conduct - on all sides.

It is the depths we have come to, and there is far further to fall. It shows a more pervasive disconnect between competent governance, administrators and calm, thoughtful accountability.

And how many RAAC ceilings go undetected in the BBC’s portfolio of brutalist buildings, I wonder?