Not a day goes by without the latest rumour of cuts or the need to respond to the dire state the MoD’s finances are in.
We discuss merging services, cutting programmes, destroying capability and withdrawing from operations as a means of cutting cost.
Yet despite this intense atmosphere it seems the people at the MoD public relations/news management/web team can still find enough time to tell us all something vitally important to the coming SDSR or operation in Afghanistan, the rising up the Pink List for example!
So whilst the vultures are circling, the Treasury label the MoD as wasteful, the NAO refuse to sign off its accounts and the very real prospect of irreversible and damaging budget cuts loom, one might think across the whole defence piece, the MoD might be pushing out stories about equipment, cost saving measures, think pieces on strategy and news about operations in Afghanistan.
To quote Liam Fox
“We must make sure that we make every penny spent on Defence count”
Absolutely bloody spot on Dr Fox
So can you please explain to the nation and service personnel from the RN, RAF and Army how this adds value or in any way counts?
Quoting from the article
Lt Cdr McBain is currently assigned as one of the Naval Service’s Equality and Diversity Policy Officers in the Naval Command HQ in Portsmouth. In that role she is part of a small team that develops and implements policy in relation to gender, gender reassignment, race and ethnicity, religion or belief, and sexual orientation
Why do we need a uniformed personnel to develop what are basically HR policies that could quite easily be handled by much cheaper MoD civilians or simply outsourced to HR service providers, thus neatly avoiding pension, leave and other costs?
One assumes the other services have similar organisations.
Think about this, a Lt Commander’s pay scale is £46,824 – £56,078 per year, plus pension, plus allowances, plus accommodation, plus office costs, plus IT costs and plus, well you get the point .
Lets say the Army and RAF have an equivalent, the capitation cost is likely to be somewhere near a quarter of a million pounds per year and this makes the assumption that there are no other more senior or junior ranks or MoD civilians involved in similar activity.
What does £250k buy these days in the world of defence, not a great deal, but hang on, also in the news today from the MoD is piece about the ‘black bag’ of kit issued to personnel deploying to Afghanistan that includes such luxuries as body armour and boots. Credit where credits due, this is a brilliant bit bit of kit and really does mean that the usual practice of personnel buying their own kit has largely been eliminated. The piece from the MoD described the the £3,000 price tag of the bag as ‘staggering’
One might argue with that description, especially in the current climate as it sort of implies it is a one time deal and we should all be jolly well grateful that the MoD is buying body armour instead of holding LGBT conferences or building new restaurants in Germany.
Back on the diversity theme, how many black bags does £250k buy; 85 or nearly an Infantry Company’s worth
Don’t take this as some homophobic rant, it is not
But seriously, how does this kind of activity
Make every penny spent on Defence count?
Maybe the MoD doesn’t deserve to be treated any differently from other departments, this kind of nonsense says loud and clear the MoD has more money that it actually needs and doesn’t consider itself to be at war.
Back to comparing ourselves to Gok Wan
So a two-and-a-half ringer is somehow the 51st most influential gay/lesbian in Britain? That makes the not inconsiderable number of openly gay commanders, captains etc what exactly? Oh that’s right, they’re too busy doing their actual job for the taxpayer and their oppo’s – they probably don’t have time for the chaps from Pink List!
I think the vast majority of people are pretty grown up about a person sexuality and realise its basically a non issue, who cares, but my point is about cost, nothing else.
And the rank stupidity of the media team who think just when the MoD is in the bunker with enemies all around that this is actually a sensible story to run
To be fair to New Labour I actually think they were right to go overboard on issues like this in the public sector… i think if we travelled back even to ’97 we’d be amazed how much attitudes have changed for the better since then, so credit due. But as you say the money has gone, people have (mostly) grown up and it’s time the MoD realised it.
I suppose if you create a unit in the service to report and improve on a thing (anything, not just equality & diversity) they will judge their success by the volume of their output. The problem isn’t really the Equality and Diversity dept. but the higher-ups in the MoD PR departments who prioritise this above the message about the equipment now being delivered and how the Services and Ministry is cutting costs.
“To be fair to New Labour I actually think they were right to go overboard on issues like this in the public sector… i think if we travelled back even to ’97 we’d be amazed how much attitudes have changed for the better since then, so credit due. But as you say the money has gone, people have (mostly) grown up and it’s time the MoD realised it.”
I understand and accept the point, but perhaps it has now served its purpose given these straitened times?
What is interesting are MOD news priorities. It can be extremely difficult to get hold of hard information on force structures, military operations, equipment programmes, policy papers,etc, but their PR people pack their website with trivial politically correct stories on topics such as all female Chinook aircrews, homosexual issues, environmental issues, anodyne formulaic obituaries of dead service personnel, etc. If you look at foreign MOD websites you will find that many have detailed accounts of Afghan operations, complete with maps. MOD talks around the subject: for example it will publicize the stabilisation unit, while avoiding giving any detailed information on how well or badly stabilisation operations are being implemented.
The rot set in when New Labour got rid of the old neutral civil servant PR officers and replaced them with a much larger bunch of ex-agency PC, right-on, ‘Tony is wonderful’ types, whose purpose was just to spin good news stories, not to tell the truth to the taxpayer. This was when Labour thought they ‘owned’ the assets of the state and there would never be another Tory government. I can even remember a PR proposal to rename the British Army as the Peoples’ Army, which says it all.
If we are serious about defence cuts perhaps a 90% reduction in the PR budget might be a good start.
Strategic Communications – yet another area that the MOD does not excel in, or even understand…?
Couldn’t agree more with TD. Before you know it the MOD will be holding positive, non-challenging group-awareness events on how we can get more disabled people onto the front line. Maybe wheelchair accessible tanks.