Childcare minister Elizabeth Truss reckons too many nurseries are chaotic, with "children running around with no sense of purpose". Honestly, what sense of purpose does a two-year-old need? You heard the minister, attention freeloading toddler scum, grab a broom, get up that chimney and find a sense of purpose!
It occurs though, it is standard neo-liberal statecraft, for both Tory and Labour ministers, to decry public service. That's what executive power seems to mean. Make someone a minster the first thing they do is slag off the people they are responsible for administering and trash the service they provide. Why do they do this?
Part of the reason surely is that public service is provided often by skilled labour, which difficult to quantify and almost impossible to mechanise (the reason why public sector unions, badly organised and soporific, still hold some sway - skilled labour has sectional strength). We are still a long way from a digital doctor or a mechanical teacher.
Outbursts like these are partly technocratic frustration and partly a conscious way of holding down the public sector workforce. No one ever comes into office and says, "hey, you're all doing a great job by and large, keep up the good work" or "you don't get the resources you need and yet you still soldier on, I will fight for you". No. Ministers want these workers run down. In the case of nursery workers it means raising the minimum ratio of staff to children to one in six - a recipe for chaos if ever there was one. They want them run down and demoralised.
