And no councillor has the right to abrogate responsibility for understanding their job and remit. It is simply unacceptable to let any of them off the hook such that they can blame Jason Kitcat or anyone else for not understanding what they were doing in delegating to officers. Too many beginner councillors chucking it.

Instead of spending so much time on twitter, blogging, on the party group email forums, etc. and conferring endlessly or going abroad at every school half term and off to France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, etc. so much, Green councillors should just focus down and learn the job – and not on officers terms either.

And hurrah for noticing the frightening sight of elected councillors ‘going native’ and BECOMING officers in all but pay grade. And I am not talking Jason here either. It has been chilling to watch it unfold. One now-removed Committee Chair seemed visibly to become something of an officer’s puppet.

Officers and officials deploy feint and obfuscation in highly trained ways and a simple question will be drawn out into a 100 emails if you have the stamina to stay with it to get a straight answer. And before they are even remotely close to being cornered, the politician is gone – taken out at an election or has quit to get a proper job.

And of course they have a lot of PC weapons they can deploy to fend off a politician (or member of the public) with which they can destroy the irritant at the stroke of a claim against them.

David Harvey – whose book on Neoliberalism is a must-read – defines neoliberalism as a system of “accumulation by dispossession” with four principal characteristics: the privatisation and commodification of public goods; financialisation, in which any item can be monetised and turned into an item of exchange and speculation; the management and manipulation of crises; and state redistribution in which the state becomes an agent of distribution from poor to wealthy. Now these points are all up for debate and Harvey is arguing from an explicitly Marxist point of view, but the point is that these are all political rather than purely economic conditions. (On the last and most controversial point Harvey argues that this effect has been so pervasive that it seems impossible to argue that it’s a by-product – it’s certainly consistent with the fact that nearly all the benefit of the growth of the boom years was accumulated by capital, not labour, and that real wages remained largely stagnant – before of course falling sharply after the 2008 crisis. I’d perhaps modify Harvey’s formulation to talk about the balance between wages and capital rents, which Harvey does at length in other books).

The coalition is a good example of how neoliberalism is more than an economic doctrine – nobody voted for what it has done, and a crisis has been used to justify an economic policy that has no mandate and has led to a huge transfer of wealth from poor to rich. In Spain, Italy and Greece that transfer has been all the greater.

As far as falling living standards are concerned, I’d say that austerity economics is doing a pretty good job of reducing living standards. The argument that growth increases wealth is an interesting one because while there are undoubtedly times when that has happened (like the 1950s and 1960s) the longer-term history is much less clear. (Supermarket development, for example, is often promoted because it “creates” jobs, and quite obviously supermarkets employ a lot of people, but the overall effect of this kind of development – especially in sucking wealth out of local economies – is often detrimental both to employment levels and local diversity; supermarkets have actually led to a long-term decline in the number of people working in retailing, with real pay having fallen drastically too – and are now being effectively subsidised by workfare). It seems to me that austerity capitalism is delivering the worst of both worlds – unsustainability and for many people plummeting living standards too.

If you believe in challenging market capitalism that is fine – but if one takes cover behind a bogey word like “neoliberalism” when the time comes to tell people of the consequences of for example, a siege economy, you will find it harder to take them with you if they thought all they were facing was a philisophical abstraction.

As an aside, re: HR – I do enjoy reading HRmagazine.co.uk, especially the comments, which never ever stray from the accepted theoretical framework, whatever the policy under discussion. It’s a bit frightening really – even accounting websites discuss the theory behind the policy and the likely impacts.

I am currently negotiating with some very ‘able’ people to do just that…