Monday saw the neo-Stalinist Labour Party at its most vindictive. Last Friday talks between employers and the Fire Brigades Union had reached a point where agreement was a matter of tidying up the language on the long running pay deal. Then the nasty, vindictive, and entirely petty wreckers on the employers’ side moved in – and now the agreement is in tatters.

I am not a member of the FBU and would normally say that my sympathies lie rather a long way from their normal political and rather anarchic agenda. Today I am right behind them, although I would probably vote against any strike purely because I have never seen my time in the Fire Service as a “job”, but as a “vocation”. And, yes, I have managed to climb the promotion tree and enjoyed a career in the process. That is perhaps why I am so disgusted by the employers’ side deliberately wrecking an agreement for purely political reasons, and it simply re-inforces the contempt in which I have held them for some time. These are not people with the interests of their communities at heart. These are not the actions of people of honour or of good faith; they have the typical attitudes of jackals and hyenas – incompetents who resent the professionalism of a service they haven’t the balls to be a part of, but want to reduce that, instead, to their own usual levels of mediocrity.

Let me make it clear that I have not arrived at this position lightly. Too many years of watching these cretins wrestle with budgets they do not understand, policies they create out of ideology which they know will cost millions, and are unworkable or destructively damaging, but couldn’t give a damn as long as their petty demands are met. In one Local Authority area the Chairman of the “Public Protection Committee” – in law the body responsible for providing you and me with both a fire service and a police service, moved into the Headquarters, set up an office suite between the two service heads, and insisted that the mail to the Chief Fire Officer and to the Chief Constable be opened by his secretary and copied to him. Not only was he not authorised to do this, but he was, as an out of work miner, utterly incompetent to take or make policy decisions on the matters these professionals deal with every day.

Mr Blair has changed all the rules, giving the power to these incompetents and their cronies to do just this. The latest legislation, the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004, has no reference to a Fire and Rescue Brigade, simply to a Fire and Rescue Authority. It makes no reference to “Officers” of the Fire and Rescue Services, merely to “employees”. The way is open for the cretins to strip out all the professional Fire Safety Officers, Fire Investigators, and other uniformed “managers” in the heirarchy, replacing them with civilians with no fire service background. This is already underway with one Brigade already appointing civilian “Station Managers” to run the fire stations, with the senior uniformed “manager” taking orders from them thus reducing the promotion opportunities for uniformed personnel dramatically. This is what the “modernisation” is really all about – putting our “placemen” in the positions of control so that the service can be de-professionalised and reduced to a bunch of water squirters on fire stations with lots of self serving civil servant types earning the rewards that used to accrue to the higher echelons of the rank structure – without having to get their hands dirty and bloody or taking responsibility for the things that can go wrong on the fire ground.

The longer these despicable creeps can keep the dispute going the more likely they are to be able to speed up this destructive process.

Why am I so pessimistic about it? Well, it starts with the recruiting tests. These used to include literacy and numeracy skils, fitness, and personality testing. All of that is now gone. The London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority has decreed, and the rest of our poodle Chief Fire Officers have followed meekly along rather than argue with the cabal that run that authority, that numeracy and literacy have no place in the recruitment process. They argue that these place certain candidates at a disadvantage. Well, not being able to read the warning labels on a dangerous substance will certainly ruin somebody’s day! But it won’t be the “Chair” of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority. Nope, she’ll simply blame the training on the “macho” attitude of the Firefighter – and shed bucketloads of false tears over the “tragedy” she and her cronies have engineered.

I and others have noticed with considerable interest that the architects of the “new” training scheme – labelled by the troops as a worthless paperchase – have cunningly decreed that “managers” do not need to be competent in any of the skills/knowledge sets required for those they “manage”. This raises two interesting questions; what are they then actually competent to do? And how did they become qualified to make this assessment in the first place? It is equally interesting that the majority of uniformed people who are peddling this scheme also fall into two categories – the retired Chief’s who have usually left a trail of wrecked services in their wakes and those coming up for retirement and therefore OBE’s, CBE’s or even Knight Bachelor awards, and the young “up and coming” backroom boys who have been hiding in “Research and Development” for the last ten or so years and whose contact with the realities of fire fighting and training can best be described as tenuous! One can only hope that they will eventually be exposed by the tragedies which will slowly mount as this destruction of the formerly fine Service mounts, and eventually they will have to answer for it in courts of inquiry or the criminal justice system.

From personal contact with many of them I can only say that the only thing that matches the depth of their ignorance is the scale of their arrogance!

The lack of literacy and numeracy skills in the recruits would probably not, in itself, be so dangerous, were it not for the fact that the change to “vocational” and “competence” training does not ensure adequate standards of underpinning knowledge. This is, in turn, compounded by changes to the discipline system. No longer are training staff allowed to impose any sort of discipline; this might damage fragile egos! No, recruits are encouraged to do things in their own way and at their own pace. “Competence” is now the buzzword, but gone is the recognition that competence involves more than just being able to do something – you have to understand why it is done a certain way, why doing it any other way is dangerous, likely to fail or, indeed, why something actually works at all! The lack of underpinning knowledge becomes immediately apparent when things don’t work as they are expected to – and then the supposedly “competent” operator can’t fix it and keeps trying to make it work, usually compounding the problem.

One place you cannot afford to have this happen is on any sort of emergency response! The potential for a simple problem becoming a big problem extremely rapidly is something only a competent and thoroughly professionally trained fire fighter could even begin to grasp. But this is not what the wreckers and tenth-rate politicians running the show want to hear. “My mind is made up – don’t confuse me with facts!” is their watchword.

The uniform, which we all wore with mopre than some pride, even as we acknowledged that it was rather old fashioned, has been replaced in most cases by something cheap and nasty looking, indistinguishable from that worn by refuse collectors. All it needs is the Orange patched weatherproof jacket – and some brigades even have that! Ranks with insignea are deemed to be “elitist” and “exclusive” (meaning the civilian staff can’t wear them and might feel excluded!) – so they have been chucked out, and now everyone has labels – which means you no longer have any idea of who you are talking to – the teaboy or the Chief! One Brigades HR officer proudly boasts that they have done away with ranks, put everyone into the same uniform, everyone is addressed by their first names, and such old fashioned practices as “award ceremonies” which used to be for handing over long service medals and certificates of achievement, have been scrapped! This she trumpets as progress and inclusivity!

Why have the neo-Stalinist Labourites wrecked the pay agreement? Simple, these nasty little cretins want revenge! The Fire Brigades Union – which I would normally classify as being Left of the the Socialist Workers Party – dared to withdraw its membership and support of the Labour Party a couple of months ago. Why? Precisely because they were fed up with the intransigence of their supposed friends in the Party!