Scotland's public sector cuts and a stinking metaphor

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

They had to pee in the showers, which was fine until the drifting ship hit choppy waters and the overflowing shower trays spilled into the cabins and hallways.
The trickiest choice for passengers was over what to do with number twos.
The hen party interviewed in the documentary mainlined Imodium, while the young man trying to impress his father-in-law-to-be spent an age searching the boat's 13 decks for the last working bog.
Others tried to hold it in, but most opted for the small red carrier bags doled out by the ship's crew.
They left them filled and tied up outside their doors, leaving the ship's corridors like a Glasgow city centre street ahead of a major event.
Sometimes circumstances leave you with nothing but poor choices.
Take, for instance, the near £5 billion black hole in the Scottish Government's finances. Shona Robison is opting for Imodium, hunting for the one working loo and using the red bag all at the same time.
To plug the gap, the Finance Secretary is hoping for growth, searching for efficiencies and cutting the number of public sector jobs.
The red bag option here is the threat of compulsory redundancies. The minister believes she should be able to reduce staffing numbers by 0.5% annually for five years, through retirements and general churn, eventually saving £700m per year.
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But when asked if she could rule out compulsory redundancies, she could not.
You'd be right to think that 0.5% of roughly 460,000 devolved public sector workers isn't actually a huge amount, particularly when the workforce is now up 39,000 on pre-Covid levels.
But what makes this choice tougher is that the government probably isn't going to be looking at the frontline.
NHS staff, for example, will likely be protected. It'll be back office staff who are targeted
Suddenly, that makes the pool much smaller. Will retirements, voluntary severance and a recruitment freeze be enough to get the Scottish Government to their target?
As Professor Graeme Roy, the Chair of the Scottish Fiscal Commission told journalists on Thursday morning, if this "doesn't get you the number that you need, then you're going to have to find it either through direct redundancy policies or by trying to find and free up resources elsewhere from the non pay budget."
Basically, if ministers don't want to fire public sector workers then they will need to find the money from somewhere else.
Where this properly awful metaphor that I've hammered to death over 500 words falls down is that the Carnival Triumph was eventually towed to safety. There's no tugboat on the horizon for the Scottish Government.
The messiest situations demand the toughest choices — and sometimes, even the best options still stink.