Somebody should remind the Conservative Party of the old adage that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

We certainly have monkeys running the UK government at the moment, because more than 80,000 full-time civil servants have left their jobs since the Conservatives started their reign of idiocy in 2010.

Now you know why nothing works properly.

The Tories actually thought it was a good idea to get rid of the people who actually know how to run government properly – Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove have been particularly keen on this.

Now, despite planning to get rid of a further 80,000 experienced and intelligent public servants – and thereby plunge the United Kingdom further into their new Dark Age, the Tories have started re-hiring some of the old hands they have already laid off.

Here’s the catch: They’re coming back on zero-hours contracts.

At one level, this might seem a good idea. Zero-hours work was always intended for people who had made their money already and merely wanted something productive to do in their spare time.

But no formerly-senior civil servant with any self-respect should be taking it up because they should know they are worth more – and because zero-hours work has been tarnished by the abuses of such contracts to harm the prospects of the genuinely poor.

This Blog predicts the only people taking up the offer will be ideological Conservatives, who will blindly follow the Tory line without advising on any better alternatives because they believe in it, and those who need the money and will do what they’re told for fear of losing it.

That will not give us good government.

Retired and redundant civil servants are being re-recruited to government jobs under a pilot scheme launched by the Cabinet Office. Some former staff are being re-employed using zero-hours contracts when full-time employees cannot cope with the workload, a leaked document shows.

The disclosure of the pilot, dubbed by opponents as a “Dad’s Army” solution to Whitehall’s staffing crisis, comes as mandarins brace themselves for further cuts. More than 80,000 full-time civil servants have left their jobs since 2010 with a similar number expected to leave during the current parliament.

Source: Government scheme to rehire former civil servants on zero-hours contracts | Politics | The Guardian

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