What do you do if you are a powerful Tory politician and your friends in the City, whom you’ve resolutely defended throughout the whole period of the financial crisis, are still the subject of trenchant criticism? Answer: try to change the subject and have a go at public sector employees instead.

That’s what Boris Johnson was up to yesterday.
In his Daily Telegraph column the Mayor of London lays into public spending under Labour and complains that public sector pensions are “unsustainable” and “unaffordable”. Apparently under Labour we have socialism in one region: “the public sector been so massively swollen that some parts of the North East are run on more or less Soviet lines, with well over 60 per cent of the workforce employed by the state. There has been a complete transformation in the relationship between private and public sector reward.”

His case is that “public sector pensioners can still generally expect a final salary pension scheme – and these can be very generous indeed.”

Before you know it, he’s off in full Daily Mail flow. “With firms now laying off staff in their thousands with unemployment apparently set to hit three million for the first time since the 1980s, it is simply too much to expect council-tax payers to scrimp and save to pay for the pensions of local government’s colossal clerisy, when those pensions are so much more comfortable than anything they could afford themselves.”

The mayor goes on: “These public sector pensions are now, frankly, unaffordable.”

“It is not just that the markets have fallen, and the funds devalued. Human longevity – and the crackdown on smoking – are demolishing the actuarial calculations on which our pensions are based.” It’s an indication of how popular this stuff is with the Tory party’s unreconstructed base – and therefore what a disaster it would be if the Tories won the next election – that ConservativeHome has fallen over itself to fawn with glee at Johnson’s Thatcherite rhetoric, going as far to give Mayor Johnson an online award for “telling us the truth about the depth of the economic and social challenges facing Britain” – or rather having a go at public servants.

Johnson may have hoped that, by using the old ploy of wheeling out examples of the highest pay and pensions, he would strengthen his case and deflect criticism that he was attacking all public sector workers. If so, he was wrong. Pippa Crerar’s article in the Standard says it all. “The Mayor is certain to be criticised for his remarks since most public sector employees – including thousands of staff at Transport for London and in the Metropolitan Police – do not earn large salaries,” she reports. “Mr Johnson opened himself up to charges of hypocrisy as he himself is due a generous parliamentary pension for his seven years as an MP as well as a scheme for the Mayor of London – both to be paid for out of the public purse.”

But haven’t we been here before? When a dossier of Boris Johnson’s writings was published by Compass it revealed Johnson’s long track-record of attacks on public spending, public sector workers, pension rights and the minimum wage. It showed he had called for mass sackings of public sector workers. Johnson’s backers dismissed it.

Now, in the light of his latest outpourings, it’s worth revisiting what Johnson had written before.

He opposed the introduction of the national minimum wage:

“Not even Mr Blair has been able to erode the unions’ conviction that we all have a ‘right’ to a minimum wage…Both the minimum wage and the Social Charter would palpably destroy jobs.” (Lend Me Your Ears p387).

He opposed full pension rights for part-time workers:

“It’s like Brussels imposing full pension rights for part-time workers. The guys who turn up at the end get as much as the people who worked all day!” (The Spectator 16 December 2000).

He believed trouble comes from ‘too zealous’ attempts to tackle inequality:
Conservatives “accept that material inequality is inevitable, and that trouble comes from too zealous an attempt to change this.” (Lend Me Your Ears p126).

He called for large-scale sackings of public sector workers:

“It is the most ingenious feature of Labour’s public sector expansion that they have thereby created a clerisy of officials who depend for their livelihoods on a high-taxing, highspending politically correct government; and therefore any incoming Tory administration must realise that shrinkage of that public sector will necessitate real courage, and will involve real pain… that is why we must explain to them why their dismissal could be good not only for the economy as a whole, but also for themselves… It is also worth reiterating that many of these jobs are the result of reckless legislation and regulation: if you endlessly pass pointless health ‘n’ safety law, you will need pointless compliance officers, and so on.
“But the most important point is that these public sector jobs represent a huge transfer of wealth from the productive to the non-productive sectors of the economy, at a time when the private sector labour market is very tight, and skills are in short supply. There are other jobs waiting to be done and, if the coming shake-out directs people back on to the market, that will be no bad thing.” (Daily Telegraph 2 December 2004)

That’s just a taste. Yesterday’s Telegraph shows the mayor has not lost his appetite for opening up right wing assaults on public sector employees at all. The difference now is that he’s also their mayor and in some cases their employer.

So, welcome to Tory London: if you are a City banker the Mayor will defend you as best he can; he will even oppose you having to pay a new top rate of tax. But if you are a public servant you can expect to be on the receiving end of an attack on your pension rights by the most powerful elected politician in your city.

First published on Labourlist 11.2.09. Click here for the original.