Don't be fooled by Ed Miliband or those estimated attendance figures
Monday, March 28, 2011 at 7:28 Inspired by Ed Miliband and the TUC rally in London on Saturday I have written a piece for The Free Society about public spending cuts.
Here's an excerpt:
Famously, the British governed India (population 300-350 million) with just 1,200 civil servants. By all accounts, British rule in India was highly efficient.
Goodness knows how many civil servants there are in Britain today (where there is a population of 60 million), let alone public sector workers, but in 2009 the Ministry of Defence alone employed 85,730 civil servants.
Clearly there is a huge amount of waste and inefficiency in the public sector which is staffed by hundreds of thousands of unelected mandarins (the same mandarins who draft tobacco control regulations).
Don't be fooled by Ed Miliband, the TUC and everyone who attended Saturday's rally in London. The economic crisis has given Britain an unexpected but wonderful opportunity to cut public expenditure and reduce inefficiency in the public sector.
As for the estimated attendance on Saturday, I would treat that with a gigantic pinch of salt.
According to the TUC, between 250,000 and 500,000 people attended the rally. Taking its cue from the organisers, the BBC reported: "It is estimated more than 250,000 people from across Britain have taken part in a demonstration in central London against government spending".
I have very good reason to be sceptical about this estimate. In October 1983 I stood on the roof of an office in Whitehall which gave me a bird's eye view of a CND march in London. According to the BBC, it was estimated that one million people took part in the march and subsequent rally in Hyde Park. Bizarrely this was far greater than even CND's estimate of 400,000.
They were both wrong. The group whose roof I was standing on belonged to an anti-CND outfit called the Coalition for Peace Through Security (CPS). Julian Lewis, who was director of CPS and is now MP for New Forest East, takes up the story:
"The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had, in its time, managed to rustle up more shouters on the streets than most: it turned out about 150,000 and 100,000 in 1981 and 1982 respectively, and characteristically claimed a quarter of a million on each occasion.
"In order to frustrate yet another such cavalier exaggeration in October 1983, the Coalition for Peace Through Security commissioned an expert photographic analysis which showed the true figure on that occasion to be approximately 98,000 for march and rally combined.
"So as to show 'progress' on their own grossly inflated estimates for the previous two years, the CND had felt obliged to claim 400,000 – a total ruled out as absolutely impossible by our aerial survey."
Without a similar survey I don't know how anyone could estimate accurately the number of people at Saturday's rally, but you can be sure that neither the TUC nor the BBC will have erred on the side of reality.
A bit like Ed Miliband, in fact.
Reader Comments (8)
Sorry Simon, but that has to be about the silliest pieces you have ever written: you expose yourself to as much ridicule as you got in your days at the Media Monitoring Unit when you said you didn't find any right-wing bias in programmes because they had not been monitored when you forgot to set the video recorder.
Are you seriously saying there were only 1200 civil servants in India through that period - or do the thousands of Indian civil servants not count in your world?
There were a very large number of people in London at the weekend, you can't deny that. You saw them. Of course the organisers and the Police have motives for estimating high, just as you and people who think that the cuts are a good thing have similar motives for estimating low. But really - to make your claim on the spurious evidence of standing on a roof nearly thirty years ago amongst an admittedly biased group of people with a camera is laughable. Do you also claim there was no poverty in the North East in the 1930's because newspaper photographs show only 200 people turned up for the Jarrow March?
Come on, you can do better than this. "Badly done Emma, very badly done"
simon (nsc), are you stalking me?
Simon (Clark that is) are you sure this other Simon (nsc) isn't someone we all know, an alter-ego perhaps, deliberately jumping into the preverbial fire, so to speak, in order to provoke comment?
Not that most people would take his comments serriously; I certainly don't, and I am sure most people feel the same, but I did see a comment by someone else on here recently, which described this character as an idiot, which might well be true, but whoever he is, he certainly knows how to get the pulse racing and the blood boiling doesn't he? Which leads me to think he could well be some sort of plant. Any thoughts on the subject anyone?
Simon - not stalking. Just running behind you and tweaking your tail. :-)
Yes Peter, people who disagree with you are all part of a conspiracy. That's the only possibility isn't it?
Hardly a conspiracy little simon, just a pathetic joke!
I always had it in my head that there were at most ~20,000 British administrators during the British raj which is a drop in the ocean compared to how many administrators we have in this country. I also had it in my mind that Indians were put through the public
school system and universities in this country to be shipped back to India to preform administration there. I think the theory goes that the British had a lack of British people willing to work in India( go there yes , work no) . One of the outcomes was that Indians would be taught about how great British democracy was but when they got back home they find that any requests for a say in the way their country was governed would fall
on deaf ears. I believe the Roman empire only needed about 200 administrators to govern Europe, which I would guess is less than the number of people employed in the cleaning and maintenance of the two European parliaments.
For once Simon nsc is right. The number of civil servants in UK has drastically decreased over the past decade. MOD for example shed over 20,000 less than 10 years ago. The waste is infact in procurement and contracting work out, when it could be done more cheaply by civil servants. How many servicemen are there that actually perform frontline tasks? Exactly, most of them perform desk jobs which civil servants could do at half the price. But would Simon (Clark) call for their jobs to be cut? This blog post was nearly as cringeworthy as one which includes " we all know non-smokers prefer the ban....."
Theresa May told the Commons there were up to 500,000 on the TUC march. You'd better get in touch with her Simon and put her right. Wouldn't want her embarrassing herself by making misleading statements to Parliament, would we?