Savage Cuts

Lots of people this week are lamenting the end of the UK Film Council.

I'm a fully paid up cinephile - I'm probably in the cinema twice a week, splitting my time between my local beret-and-turtleneck arthouse (The Curzon on the Kings Road) & the much more low rent picture palace just along from it, which shows an assortment of hollywood shlockbusters - I'm sure I'll trot off there to see this cinematic maserpiece:



As I write, Facebook, Twitter, an online petition and the letters page of The Guardian are alive with calls to save the UKFC. Am I disappointed by the end of the UK film council? No, because it represents exactly the sort of cuts that should be made.

To understand last week’s move, you need to know that last August Labour culture minister Sion Simon proposed a merger of the UKFC with the British Film Institute, the country’s other big film body, which manages the National Film Archive, runs BFI Southbank and organises the London Film Festival. The plan (despite Labour's shrieks of disgust this week) was to cut costs and prevent overlap. Neither did it help relations that the UKFC’s execs were on far higher salaries compared to those doing similar jobs at the BFI, but were to be the ones who were to be kept.

The BFI were horrified. They were going to be subsumed into an ugly New Labour quango, which was obsessed with pumping lottery money projects like Harry Potter and then claiming it as a "British Triumph". To claim the Harry Potter film franchise is a British Triumph is akin to claiming Monopoly is just like real bond trading. It looks sort of like it on the surface, but really is nothing of the sort. All the money, all the profit, flowed back to the USA.

People are talking about £15 million pounds being removed from UK film funding - that's not correct. The £15 million figure was amount of Lottery funds disbursed by the UKFC - minus the £6 million plus combined staffing cost of the 75 people who work for the UKFC.

The lottery money - which was often blown on shit films like 'Sex Lives of the Potato Men', 'Lesbian Vampire Killers' and 'The Parole Officer' is still there. It's just now in the hands of the eminently more reliable BFI - who have a far better track record than the UKFC - ‘Dog Soldiers’, '28 days later' & ‘Slumdog Millionaire' all started with BFI seed money.

Certainly, the UKFC did have a hand in some good films - notably 'Hunger' - but for the record, its last disbursement was for two street dance films in 3d, both of which utterly bombed at the box office. Of course, Hunger bombed at the box office in comparison to Harry Potter too, but it had the saving grace of being artistically brilliant.

So, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the UKFC were not. The french new wave, the UKFC was not. UK film funding has not dropped; we fired £6 million pounds worth of bureaucrats. This is no reason to weep. We need to take this sort of action across all the areas of the budget.

On this topic, the treasury recently set up a website, by which you could suggest ideas for cuts that the government hadn't thought of. Nice idea, but predictably, it had to be removed, as it swiftly filled up with lunatic racist rants - as anyone who has ever posted a youtube video or read the brilliant Speak your Branes would have been able to explain.

In the absence of the website, some of the things I'd like to see cut are:

Civil Service Pay

The Civil service is ludicrously bloated. There are 525,000 of them, out of 6 million public sector employees. Civil servants are on incremental pay scales, which rise automatically. They need a pay freeze. Now. If it was down to me, I'd also impose a 15% salary cut on all civil service salaries over £25,000, with some sort of phase in at the margin.

On top of that, there are hundreds of civil servants languishing in non-jobs, because they are too expensive to make redundant. Why? Because of the crippling cost of making them redundant. Civil servants have one of the most lucrative redundancy deals in the country, a system which Labour tried but failed to scrap. The terms of their redundancy deal is extraordinarily generous, with many civil servants eligible to receive about six years’ pay if they are made compulsorily redundant.

For example, a 46 year old earning £40,000 who had been a civil servant for 25 years could enjoy a cash payment of about 6.2 years’ salary on retirement, or around £300,000.

We literally can't afford to sack them, but cutting this to an (eminently fair) one year's salary as redundancy payment would save 6 Billion pounds over 10 years. If the unions strike, will the public support them in claiming this outrageous gilded perk? I doubt it.

Second, the civil service offers a pretty ridiculous pension scheme. Contributions to the premium scheme are only 3.5%, but the employer (us) is charged another 22% on top - and we have to maintain that pension, index linked, until death. We should renegotiate their contracts, making it clear they can quit now, or accept a deal which is fair to the country.

No Tax cuts

There are some taxes I loathe. Inheritance tax in particular. Sadly, the truth is, we can't really afford any tax cuts until the titanic deficit is cleared. Don't worry, in 2015 I'll start banging on about why it's unfair.

Means test all Benefits

Means test all benefits, especially child benefit. There's a whole plethora of universal benefits like this - for example, a couple of my friends who are reasonably well off recently had a baby, and the government sent them child toothbrushes and a teddy bear - plus they claim the £20 a week in child benefit.

This is a couple who aren't short a bob or two - he's an oil engineer and she's an oncologist. There is absolutely no way that people earning £100,000 a year should be entitled to free toothbrushes, teddies or cheques. This isn't an isolated case - other deeply middle class friends get child benefit, and I see no reason that the state should subsidise people buying Glyndebourne tickets (or whatever else they spend the money on).

Benefits are meant as a safety net, not a perk you get for citizenship.

Pensions

Equally, there's no way people with over £300,000 in assets should get the old age pension - why not means test it? Secondly, why don't we raise the retirement age to 70 for people currently 30 or under? All of us are of the "screwed generation" who had to pay to go to university - this has inculcated in us a feeling that we cannot rely on the state. We will have forty years to prepare for retirement. The saving from pushing our pension entitlement back would be tremendous - billions and billions of pounds.

Citizen allowance

There are 55 benefits for being out of work or on low income at the moment. ESA, JSA, New Deal, LCA, Income Support, ALA, Incapacity benefit, tax credits, housing benefit. Every single one has an office of bloodsuckers assessing claims, while picking their nose on the telephone.

Why not replace all these benefits with a single welfare payment to all unemployed people (pensioners, the sick, the incapable, the lazy - everyone), regardless of why they are unemployed? It would let us get rid of literally thousands of assessors and would have the tremendous advantage of greatly simplifying the benefits system, making access to it easier for those in need.

This was actually one of the quite a few parts of the Green manifesto I really liked, but more on that some other day...

Defence Cuts

Something has to give. We aren't a great power anymore. If we want nuclear arms, conventional weapons will have to go. If we want to maintain a decent conventional airforce, army and navy, our ocean-going holocaust delivery systems are going to have to be scaled back or cut altogether.

Another discussion for another blog post I think.

Centralisation of all Services for all Local Authority Back Offices

This isn't a very sexy cut. There aren't any movies with machine guns or aircraft carriers or middle class people using benefits to buy champagne & opera tickets. But it is vital.

Every local & county council up and down the country has rooms and rooms full of worthless pen pushers in Billing departments, Accounting departments, IT departments, HR departments & Procurement Services.

These are broad areas whereby each local authority manages the services independently (read:badly) and where the jobs are the same but managed locally by local authorities within local budgets. I can't see any reason why most of the above cannot be centralised. In particular, centralised procurement on major contracts would yield huge savings.

Conclusion

These cuts are probably further than the coalition will go - but they should be pushing this far.

These cuts are relatively painless; which will be crucial for maintaining the mandate of the electorate. To maintain support, the coalition has to cut the deficit, while not letting the axe fall on the weakest in society. We have to maintain the NHS; we can't let benefits fall too far.

In short, don't be distracted by all the noise around the UK Film Council - it was a room full of bureaucrats. More of those need to go.