The post you are reporting:
Yes, Polly Toynbee. She was flavour of the month with the Tories for about six weeks when they went all IDS touchy feely. Anyway, she wrote the following:
The Society Guardian's ads for public and voluntary jobs are now the regular target of the right, a catch-all sneer that draws a guaranteed guffaw at any Tory meeting. The Tax Payers' Alliance has just produced its Annual Non-Job Report, adding up the ads in Society for one month. Naturally, the Tory press joins the attack with glee. The Mail: "The public-sector wage bill is being bloated by thousands of jobs with spurious descriptions and little apparent value." The Express: "Taxpayers are being forced to fund an army of public-sector officials with bizarre jobs." The Sun: "Bureau-prats!" Even the BBC's You and Yours took up this report, mocking the job titles and interviewing the Tax Payers' Alliance with no balancing comment, nor bothering to do the briefest research - pick up the phone - to ask what these jobs are.
All this goes to the heart of Tory policy, persuading the electorate that tax money is always wasted, public jobs are pointless and the state should shrink. That is why the shadow paymaster general, Mark Francois, eagerly endorsed this report: "Taxpayers are becoming increasingly frustrated at having to fund politically correct jobs while they themselves are struggling to make ends meet." Joining the attack, George Osborne has promised that a Conservative government would ban all newspaper advertising for public jobs, putting them all online instead. (The Daily Mail owns the company that runs the NHS online jobs site - but oddly, they don't mock any of the job titles there.)
Examine the Tax Payers' Alliance's final list of Top Ten Non-Jobs and it's true, some have terrible titles. Something happens to the English language when it falls into the hands of human resources. But it only takes a couple of minutes on the phone to find out what the jobs are in human, rather than in human resources, speak.
Here's its No 1 non-job: assistant director, wellbeing and community services. Hampshire county council, salary, up to £85,000. What's the job? Complete charge of a budget of £170m, delivering care services to 10,000 adults, the old, disabled and frail across all of Hampshire - which is, incidentally, Tory-controlled. They may think "wellbeing" sounds silly, but it is David Cameron's favourite word. Is £85,000 too much? I don't know in a world where Lord Browne has just left BP with £63m legally purloined from a public company holding all our pension funds.
No 2: programme manager for national Supporting People value improvement programme, Department of Communities and Local Government, salary £39,728-£53,144. This is an awful mouthful of a title, but what does it do? Supporting People is one the government's best programmes, doing what the Tories like - funding a host of charities, such as Homeless Link, that help 1.2 million people to live independently. They are old or mentally ill homeless people who risk falling back on to the streets. This job does what taxpayers ought to want - checks best value for money.
Job No 8 has a deliberately funny title: Cardboard Citizens managing director, £45,000. This Arts Council-funded charity for homeless people (living in cardboard) helps 2,000 people a year get back into normal life. It puts on plays with homeless actors (Michael Billington gave four stars to its Timon in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Complete Works festival at Stratford). It uses theatre to help people get jobs - 400 last year - with interview training and career guidance. It's brilliant - but is it essential? That depends if you want to strip public funding to nothing but the barest bones.
"Diversity" is the alliance's worst word. But even here, it gets it badly wrong. Non-job No 10 is diversity and inclusion manager, Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, salary £38,000. This job sees that disabled people can take public exams. Would the alliance not want deaf children to lip-read French oral and blind children not to take exams in Braille? Would it deny exams to children in hospital?
Here are the other six on the list. No 3 is group manager, assessment and care management, Scottish Borders council, up to £42,024 - self-explanatory manager of care services in this Tory council. What on earth is non-job about that?
No 4: strategic director, children and young people, Halton council, £100,000. This job runs all schools, social services and health for children. ("Strategic" signifies that it has cut the number of council directors from six to four.)
No 5: civil resilience manager, Stockport council, £39,132. Every council by law has to have someone in charge of emergency planning.
No 6: diversity programme manager, Redbridge council (Tory-controlled), £39,126. This job eases the way for the area's 48% ethnic minorities and 17 languages, while making buildings and events usable by the disabled.
No 7: strategic leader, partnerships and participation, Leeds city council, £60,000. This coordinates the work of doctors, schools and social workers, to stop more Climbie calamities.
No 9: mobile youth provision and rapid response manager, Islington council, £35,592-£40,578. This post heads a team of youth workers to go where gangs of kids hang about, offering better activities, saving police time, avoiding asbos, responding to what neighbourhoods say they need most. Good idea.
Are any of these non-jobs, then? That depends on your priorities and what services you think the state should provide. But most of them are so utterly essential that it is breathtaking to think Tory spokesmen, or even the Tory press, can imagine there should be no directors of children's services and no managers to run social services for old people.
But if tax cuts are a priority, it's necessary to rubbish the entire public sector as politically correct jobsworths. Call every manager a bureaucrat. Never spell out what the services do, simply mock their titles. The Tories claim they can cut waste and pen-pushers, and no doubt everywhere there is always some waste (though no such scrutiny falls on bad management in the private sector to make fair comparisons).
The danger is that Labour has failed to create warmth and appreciation for its many excellent programmes: they are easy to cut when few know anything about them. Blairite rhetoric on reform only encourages voters to believe mendacious propaganda against everything public, easing the way for voters to opt for Tory tax cuts because "nothing works".