No wealth of talent in the Cabinet

David Boothroyd

How exactly do you define "wealth-creating job"? Jacqui Smith was a teacher and economics lecturer, which gave other people skills to create wealth. Alan Johnson was a postman, delivering mail to business and thereby helping them create wealth.

David Cameron worked as a political adviser and head of PR for a TV firm - is that wealth-creating? Even if it is I would have thought being a teacher in a comprehensive school provides more benefit for society.

Tories talk rubbish

Rubbish. Gordon Brown worked for STV for a start - a commerical company. His chancellor was an advocate - ie in a commerical environment. And if Oborne thinks teaching (Jacqui Smith) doesn't help create wealth he should try ignorance.

IdlingAway

It would be interesting to know what percentage of all MPs have held wealth-creating jobs Do we have an entire political class ignorant of how business works?

kinglear

What's surprising about that? It's obvious from every single action any of them take.

Dean

I have read Peter's article, and the problem with it is that it relies on a logically circular argument. He defines public sector jobs as non-productive, a priori, and then draws the conclusion that they are "detached" from the real economy. This simply begs the question of whether public sector employees are, in fact, unproductive.

The vast majority of government employees do make a substantial contribution to wealth creation in the real economy, by providing vital infrastructure (schools, hospitals, waste disposal etc.) There is a hidden premise in Peter's article that only entrepreneurs create wealth, which is not the case.

This is not to say that there isn't considerable scope to reduce waste in government. But the familiar Tory tactic of trying to drive a wedge between public and private sector employees is nasty, divisive and - insofar as it alienates many voters who consider themselves to be productive members of the community - ultimately self-defeating.

Like many people, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the Tory Party under David Cameron hasn't really shed its "nasty" image. Articles like this tend to support the view that any change has, at best, been cosmetic.

Johnathan Pearce

This is true but hardly a new observation. Some of us have been pointing out that very few senior politicians have ever created a business or worked at the sharp end of one.

It was Clint Eastwood who, many years ago when he was mayor of Carmel in California, remarked that most of his councillor colleagues were schoolteachers. In that sardonic tone of voice that is his trademark, Clint remarked that "they were fine people no doubt but they'd never had to meet a payroll".

Tiberius

A few raw nerves touched here, I feel!

Wealth creators are those who take business risk with their own assets. They are people who indeed do have to meet a payroll.

There would be no public sector without private sector taxes. In the generally understood terminology, then, the public sector is non-productive and does not create wealth. It is designed to serve those who do, but latterly has assumed a self-importance and self-justification which is grotesque, none more so than at the BBC. The humility of public service of yesteryear has been taken hostage.

Chris Paul

Business, schmizness. Oborne is just plain wrong. Not for the first time.

"Wealth Creating" is meaningless and/or a useless discriminator as others have explained.

The shadow lot includes more "Born Wealthy" which arguably gives them a headstart in Wealth Creating in Oborne's sense ...

But does it give them any empathy or real world experience? Real world as in how the 99.9% who don't go to Eton and Oxbridge actually live?

Verity

The public sector is a usurper of wealth because its salaries and "taxes" (which is just a circular arrangement of state funds) come from those who actually produce revenues. Postmen and teachers do not contribute one single penny to the national wealth in monetary terms, which is what this statement is about.

Gordon Musgo

"Postmen and teachers do not contribute one single penny to the national wealth in monetary terms, "

Do workers for UPS contribute a penny? How about the teachers at Eton? Now there are a lot of public sector employees who are a tax on us all, but there are also some who do a job which needs to be done and shouldn't be criticised for it. We are mostly none of us wealth creators. If we are, it's only part of the time. Oborne is clearly not exactly right in his headline claim, but it is true none of the useless bastards have run a business, or seem to have any clue of what it is about. The same would be true of the tory side, and MPs in general. "I could not dig, I dared not rob, therefore I lied to please the mob".

strapworld

One would have thought that the Christmas Period may have given David Boothroyd some sense. However reading his illogical bit above, I can only conclude that the old guy must be summersaults all day long.

Presumable David Cameron must have been fairly good at his job, or he would have been sacked. He was working for a Private Company and not, as Boothroyd points out in his ridiculous examples, the public purse.

Ivy Eileen

Certainly, raw nerves are tingling !

Boothroyd reappears (boring) ... and when will he have a proper job, instead of rapid rebuttal. "Economics" in that lady's case means Home Economics (i.e. overblown cookery classes) - hardly injecting much into the nation's GDP. Being a postman contributes as much/little as the milkman. Did Brown have any executive responsibilities at STV - and how long was he there ?

Tiberius and Verity are correct. The public sector don't pay taxes, they recycle them.

If you want to make the same allegation against the Opposition then fine, but don't attack the argument because you don't like it unless you can disprove it.

Verity

Yes, Chris Paul: "Real world as in how the 99.9% who don't go to Eton and Oxbridge actually live?"

And "real world" as in the 99.9% who were never engaged in Trotskyite/Gramsci student activism (which they never matured enough to get over).

William

So, someone like Peter Oborne or Richard Desmond is a wealth creator but a brain surgeon or science teacher isn't?

What a wonderful, glorious vision that is.

PayDirt

Now this is being very picky and just shows the corner into which Conseratives seem to like to paint themselves. The wealth creators are farmers and perhaps energy producers (including the horrible old oil companies), these are primary producers. Then talk about house-builders and the like who produce a good people actually need. Others may add value or not as the case may be. Teachers etc certainly add value. If it wasn’t for my teachers at school I’m pretty sure I would not have as much money as I do now and I’m damn sure I would be less rich in other denominations.

David Bouvier

We need most of our politicians to understand viscerally - from experience - that livings are earning not owed.

The important distinction (reflecting Jonathan Pearce's lovely Clint quotation) is between people in jobs where you know that you will most likely be out of a job (one way or another) if you are not earning your keep, and those where neither personal nor systematic failure will effect your employment.

Entrepreneurs are at one end of a spectrum, Public sector bureaucracy is at the other.

How about just some ministers from the entrepreneurial half of the spectrum.

Slim Jim

It may be useful to look at this from a different angle - how many politicians have had experience in management? To go from teacher, postman, TV production or PR to a senior ministerial position is a quantum leap. No qualifications required, except a velvet tongue and thick skin. What percentage of the cabinet are graduates? A lot, I suspect. Another big waste of public money then.

Jonathan

David Boothroyd & 'Toroes Talk Rubbish' have missed the central point of the article.

Most public sector workers - Teachers, Policemen, Doctors, even Tax Inspectors :) perform vital roles in society. It is to the benefit of us all, that Parliament has a number of ex-teachers, doctors etc.. amonghst its members. But Parliament and in particular the cabinet should also have its fair share of former entrepreneurs, managers as well as Trade Unionists. Otherwise, how is GVN expected to understand how industry and wealth creation works...?

On a personal note - I'd be far happier if both the current cabinet and its shadow, had a few less lawyers...

mac

" "Wealth Creating" is meaningless and/or a useless discriminator."

And why not add that all property is theft, while you're at it?

Ross

This is what the cabinet actually did before entering politics:

Public Sector:

Gordon Brown (College Lecturer)
Alastair Darling ( Board of Napier college)
Jacqui Smith (Teacher)
John Hutton (College lecturer)
Alan Johnson (Postman)
Ruth Kelly (Bank of England)
Geoff Hoon (College lecturer) *
Tessa Jowell (Social Worker)
Baroness Scotland (Commission for Racial Equality)
Lord Grocott (Polytechnic Lecturer)

Trade Unionists:

Alan Johnson (Communication Workers Union)
Hilary Benn ( Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs)
Peter Hain (Communication Workers Union)
Jack Straw (National Union of Students)

Lawyers:

Alastair Darling
Des Browne
Jack Straw
Harriet Harman
Hazel Blears
Baroness Scotland

Pseudo Charity:

John Denham (War on Want, Oxfam, Christian Aid, British Council)
Harriet Harmen (National Council for Civil Liberties)
Ed Balls (Smith Institute)
Baroness Ashton (Various)
Tessa Jowell (MIND)
David Miliband (National Council for Voluntary Organisations)
Shaun Woodward

No Known Career Before Politics:

Douglas Alexander
Ed Miliband
James Purnell
Andy Burnham
Yvette Cooper (Although she later did a stint in journalism)

Journalism:

Gordon Brown (Scottish Television)
Ed Balls (Financial Times)
Ruth Kelly (Financial Times)
Yvette Cooper (Independent)
Shaun Woodward
Lord Grocott (TV)

With the exceptions of Jacqui Smith and Alan Johnson they were all parasitic roles.

A Price

Politicians' stunning ignorance in running a successful business is simple to demonstrate. One is willy-nilly way they burden us wealth creators with stultifying bureaucracy and its cost. Two is the absence of real-economy logic, eg the bounty for employing a long term unemployed is totally perverse … its funding would have been better used to cut NI (which is going up), or paying an unemployed person to find a job and keep it for 12 months (instead of putting the onus on the employer); £2,500 is peanuts to the risk & cost of taking someone on. Meeting a payroll is a sobering experience … it is your money on the line, unless you are in the public sector when it isn’t your risk. We have a successful private business, but will never expand greatly as we don’t want employees … sad but true.

Paul

""Wealth Creating" is meaningless and/or a useless discriminator as others have explained."

Only if you are thick.

Wealth Creators risk their own money to increase their wealth. The rest take other people's wealth. Some of these jobs are justified on the grounds that they are contributory (e.g. a teacher) and some are not (e.g. Weds Grauniad) , but neither Smith, Johnson, Brown or Cameron have worked at a wealth creating job ; which shows in their attitude to public money and its extraction from people.

CS

***Postmen and teachers do not contribute one single penny to the national wealth in monetary terms, which is what this statement is about.***

Nor do doctors, nurses, policemen, firemen, soldiers or prison officers. Be interesting to see how long any of you could carry on creating wealth if they didn't exist though.

Mark

It might be better to talk of "tax revenue creators", that is those who generate more tax revenue than they consume.

Since all those employed by the state are paid 100% out of taxes but do not pay 100% of their earnings in tax, they are not "tax revenue creators".

It does not mean that they do not perform useful, even vital functions. But ultimately the money to pay them has to be made by the tax revenue creators.

There is no reason in principle why a state-owned enterprise could not be a tax revenue creator. Royal Mail used to make a profit as did BT and BP when they were publicly owned I seem to recall.

CS

What do you do for a living, Verity?

Daniel

Tiberius

Wealth creators are people who take risks with their own assets...in contrast presumably to banks, who take risks with assets belonging to other people, incur massive losses and then expect to be bailed out by the public sector to preserve their massive salaries?

Same old Tories....

Hysteria

I agree with the "purist" definition summarised by Verity and Tiberius - and I assume what Oborne was driving at.

Whether that language helps move the Tory position forward with the electorate is a different conversation!

Chuck Unsworth

Once again the cretinous class warriors arise, foaming at the mouth about 'Tory Privilege'. And that in itself is clear indication that they have never had to face a payroll, or look after a business and its staff. The management and running of a business carries rewards and responsibilities. How many of these class warriors will have to look their employees in the eye and tell them that the business has collapsed and they are redundant - directly as a result of this Labour government's inability to run a sound economy?

Have these idiots ever stopped to consider that the vast majority of self-made millionaires do not come from 'wealthy toff' backgrounds?

It's the smaller entrepreneurs who have done something to keep what's left of British Industry. However, it's also these individuals who have sold off their businesses to overseas ownership, simply because running a business in the UK is almost unviable. Are they class traitors, then?

Take a look at the Rich List and check out the background and origins of the wealthiest 100. Then take a look where these people get their money from and where it's actually kept. Anyone want to join the Hindujas etc offshore?

And while we're at it, where does Mandy's money come from?

Andrew Forbes

No-one is saying that lecturers, post-men, and many civil servants have no value (though one or two outreach officers might like to illuminate us as to how the world would stop turning if their jobs were abolished). What Oborne is saying and lots of us feel is that in the midst of a banking crisis, it would be nice to have some Cabinet ministers with experience of banking. As manufacturing goes down the toilet, it would be nice if a few of the Cabinet had experience in the management of manufacturing companies.

As it is, too many of them have trod the currently fashionable career path through local government to Parliament. It means that confronted by this very serious crisis, they lack the imagination to do anything more than things like this:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/3230511/equality-overdrive.thtml

Nick Kaplan

David Boothroyd and others who think the public sector creates wealth; a wealth creating job is one whose wages can be funded through voluntary exchange. Thus a job in PR can be wealth creating simply because the services provided are paid for by individuals who are better off through having the service then they are through having the cash which they used to pay for them. In such a free trade both sides necessarily benefit and hence wealth (or value) is created. A government job however is paid for via coercive means, i.e. money is taken from individuals (backed up with the threat of imprisonment) and given to others who then provide a service. In this case wealth/ value is not necessarily created, it may instead be merely transferred.

The reason the public sector is funded in this way is purely because it is not sustainable to fund it by voluntary means, i.e. what it produces is not of enough economic value (although it is certainly of social value and so still worth keeping) for it to be sustained by voluntary transactions. This is why the private sector is the wealth creating sector whilst the public sector is a wealth using sector, relying entirely on the private.

Saying that the public sector is not wealth creating is not the same as saying that it does nothing of value. It is of course true that much of what the wealth creating private sector does, relies on public sector services. But likewise most of what the private sector does relies on the existence of laws (contract law for example) yet nobody would say that the law is wealth creating, although it does facilitate wealth creation. Thus the assertion of the necessity of a public sector is not enough to prove it produces wealth.

Nicholas

Someone once commented at Guido's that he had been taught by Smith, that she was considered a "poor" (my euphemism) teacher who spent most of the time ranting and railing about Thatcher and trying to ram Marxist propaganda down their throats.

David Boothroyd promoting her value tells you everything you need to know about Lefties. I see her as once of their worst liabilities and one of the biggest threats to the cultural, historical and political traditions of Britain.

I suppose Boothroyd could be her husband, paid by the taxpayer to promote her on various blogs.

John Moss

There is no reason somebody without an ounce of business experience cannot run the Country or a Government Department. Margaret Thatcher was a research chemist, then took bar exams and became an MP. She never held a "wealth creating" job.

What is relevant when looking at the achievements of Labour in office, is their complete lack of understanding of money. Brown's failure to balance a budget since 2000-01 and his blase attitude to running a deficit budget through seven "years of plenty", followed by his assumption that he can add a further £500bn to the £250bn he has already borrowed, simply confirms this.

They have spent money like water, failing at every turn to improve services or deliver the same for less. They have, if anything, delivered less for very much more.

Cameron has likened them to headless chickens. Happy to throw our money around without a care when the good times rolled, but now clueless and panicking as the shit hits the fan.

In short they are totally and utterly incompetent.

Lola

Nick Caplan. Exactly. But, under New Labour a lot of taks that should be carried out by private business have been sequestered by the State. education, health and refuse collection for example. Each of those would be better if run by private business on the basis of volutary exchnage even if some or all of the cost was met by some form of national insurance.

Wells

Are we now-days counting bankers and other city-types as wealth creators?

Quite a lot of those on the Cameron side

Paul B

Why not privatise schools and other non wealth creating (service) sectors of public provision and turn them into the wealth creators ? To stay with education. Good schools can expand and achieve economy by size and turn a profit , which can be taxed for the public good, and sink schools can go bankrupt. The public can be issued vouchers to pay for these services and schools and teachers can be made to compete to attract business. This would slake the thirst of many in the public sector who like to think they are wealth creators.

With thanks to the late great Sir Keith.

Matt

Dean seems to believe he speaks for "many people."

If someone imagines that they speak for many people, does that somehow legitimise their opinion in their own mind?

Paul B

Oh and on the point of the great lady never having a wealth producing job,I would point out to our friend, that she was born into a wealth creating family and was raised through her childhood by wealth creators. She also helped in the family store from an early age.She was only after all a grocers daughter, but went onto become the greatest peacetime PM of the 20th century.

Jeremiah

A fascinating discussion. James Forsyth has certainly been comment creating with the minimum of input - real wealth creators must be ogling that principle with envy.

As to who offers more value - wealth creators or public servants - it remains a stupid comparison, as each thrives on the basis of the others' existence. Only a journalistic parasite like Oborne, who creates neither wealth nor promotes public good, would come up with that sort of nonsense.

As for the shrill pro-wealth creation voices, it is worth remembering that the majority of wealth creators enshrine the principle of selfish gain; they are not creating wealth as some sort of great public endeavour, they are doing it to make as much money for themselves as possible. Whether that is a good basis for then entering government is a moot point!

Jeremiah

Paul B @ 7.18 - so now we are endorsing the joys of inherited wealth creating! You don't have to actually have done it yourself, so long as you were brought up by those who have! And there was I thinking the Tories have moved away from the principle of justification by birth.

Paul B

No, you twist my words, she worked in the shop Jermiah.

Verity

Jeremiah writes, in a high-pitched, uppity voice, "it is worth remembering that the majority of wealth creators enshrine the principle of selfish gain; they are not creating wealth as some sort of great public endeavour, they are doing it to make as much money for themselves as possible."

Exactly. Selfishness is what makes the world work! Selfishness creates wealth. As St P J O'Rourke writes, "When the water level rises, everyone's boats go up."

Meditate on it, old chap.

liquid lunch break rocking horse rubbish

Yes Nicholas because everything posted on 'ordure-ordure' is completely true and all the posters are exactly what they claim to be.

Mike Stallard

Public sector: paid for by taxes
Private sector: risks own capital top produce taxes.

Jeremiah

Ah well, Verity, there I confess you have it. I wouldn't disagree with you, I would just caution against adulating the wealth creators too much, which is what some of the posters here are doing! My voice is more evenly pitched usually. But I can do high.