And, of course, Gesture politics are tokenistic.
I noticed the headline about pay freezes for public sector workers above £18,000 - except for soldiers.
Now, interest declared, I am a member of the Public and Commercial Services union, so I have a personal interest in this. I don't want a pay freeze; I certainly don't want a pay freeze imposed on me for two years hence when who knows what inflation will be at that time.
But I'm no idiot. I don't see any political advantage in arguing for pay rises for faceless bureaucrats when employees of small and medium enterprises and the self-employed are hit by the consequences of the reckless greed of Osborne's city mates (did you know that pre-credit crunch his only economic advisers were hedgefund managers?).
As long as I can remember, public sector pay 'restraint' has been a blunt tool of policy. It has its uses, even though it has considerable disadvantages, too. But let's just for the sake of argument say it's a good thing, then it should be applied across the board.
But Oik* Osborne has declared that armed forces personnel should be exempt from this pay-freeze. I realise that there can be compelling reasons for carrying out a fundamental review of the salaries of one sector; if the evidence shows they are falling behind or not getting the fair rate for the job, that presents a strong case for bucking the trend.
The fact that they arbitrarily select the armed forces, without any evidence to support this, gives a very strong indication about which areas of the public sector are the priorities of the Tories. They don't give damn about the NHS or about the state education system, and they probably haven't got the slightest clue about what Environmental Health Officers or Covert Security Officers do, and consider them to be of less value than soldiers.
It may be a peripheral issue, but again it illustrates something very telling about the Tory philosophy. The armed forces are disproportionately male, and, I would guess at >£18k pa, disproportionately from public school backgrounds. Whereas, I would hazard a guess that police tend, on the whole, to come from a state education. And health and local government front-line services are disproportionately female - and, unlike the Armed Forces, at least proportionately from ethnic minority backgrounds.
So Gesture George - pay rises for posh white boys, freezes for the rest, including women and Black and Ethnic Minorities.
* the Bullingdon Boys call him that because he 'only' went to an expensive private school called 'St Paul's' not to superposh Eton.
