alt Hacker News> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.
Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.
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It’s not “ideological mistrust of the public sector.” It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions
> As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow
And this mistrust is deliberately sewn by right-wing politicians and media figures who are directly funded by government contractors.
Just wandering in to this as a relative political bystander, but as I look at the polling out of the UK [0] I see that the party currently leading is some group called "REF" and I gather they did pretty well in the latest round of elections. I assume they're an old-established party who represent the deep contentment the British have with how the public service has been run.
I suppose they do seem a little unpopular, they aren't breaking 30% but they seem relatively popular compared to the more fringe groups like, say, LAB and CON. Have they, in what I assume is decades of stable political governance, made any mistakes that might have engendered this ideological distrust in how well the political system is managed?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...