Anyone active in collective bargaining over the past few decades will be well aware of the offer and acceptance of “allowances” when the demand was for a pay increase. It is therefore ridiculous to categorise all allowances as some kind of luxury extra that can be cut without touching basic pay.
Any restructuring of the public service which fails significantly and very obviously to reduce inequality of income in the public service is a failure for the Labour Party.*
The final details have yet to emerge but all of the indications particularly over the past week suggest that the Croke Park 2 agreement has been poisoned by the conservative doctrine of “fairness”.**
It goes like this. Because it is planned to cut “allowances” for “frontline” workers, “fairness” demands that highly paid workers who don’t get allowances have their pay cut too. In other words, we are back to “sharing the pain” and leaving the structures of inequality intact. It is certain that rich public servants will be cut by proportionately more but clearly they are much more able to absorb small reductions even when these are expressed in impressive percentages.
It is of course a matter of the Labour Party being outmanoeuvred by market liberals and failing to reduce inequality but it is also a question of leftist acceptance of enormous levels of inequality while maintaining a vestige of credibility.*** Credibility is secured by talking about merely the richest 1% and arguing that it would be “unfair” to tackle one group of rich people unless all rich people can be similarly affected. Even opponents of Labour in government and those on the left whose ambition it is to destroy Labour effectively support inequality of income.
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* I am a longtime member of the Labour Party.
** https://colummccaffery.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/fairness-has-become-the-conservatives-shield/
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