Readers may recall that back in 2015 for a glorious 36 days between 21st August & 27 September renowned street artist Banksy treated the Tropicana Lido in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare to his bizarre pop-up art installation make-over known as Dismaland.
Banksy's self styled Bemusement Park put a sinister twist on the Disney Corporations Disneyland and amongst its controversial structures included a bus housing a collection of dangerous and violent objects, and a fake payday loan shop for kids called Pocket Money Loans which opened next to the children's sand pit offering kids an advance on their pocket money at 5,000% interest.
His premise for creating Dismaland was to pull back the curtain on the reality of the fairy-tale that is not fit for Cinderella. Rather like the current post pandemic, post 2024 budget, situation in the Isle of Man we feel which appears to create a similar juxtaposition with those inhabiting Cinderellas Castle.
Now we've opened Pandora's Box and mentioned the word let us deal with the pandemic comments first to provide some context to any criticism that may follow. It is not the fault of any one person in the current incarnation of Tynwald that the Isle of Man Treasury had to write a cheque for some three hundred million that was required to support the Island through the global pandemic. That has clearly left a hole in Government finances and could not have been either planned for, or indeed modelled into future budgets or fiscal projections, in any way. But the economy was going through serious structural imbalances well before 2020, and Treasury had been deficit funding budgets from Reserves for many years before this date as the size of the Island's public sector and its fiscal footprint burgeoned under the sleepy eyes of successive incarnations of Tynwald which fully channelled civil service egos until Cinderellas Castle became a very real analogy for the way in which our Government and its Officers have locked themselves away and ultimately detached from the real Island economy.
Coming out of the pandemic too, despite some rather toothless Pandemic Reports and investigations, we have also seen various modes of bad institutional behaviour being exposed. Be that Dr Rosalind Ranson's Employment Tribunal which has cost Treasury (ie, us) around four and a half million in damages and legal costs so far, the case of the Nobles Hospital Anaesthetists and the rather ambitious attempt to take them down for manslaughter that is likewise rumoured to have cost our Government over one million to defend (and has presumably put off a lot of professionals from ever wishing to relocate to practice in the IOM), or even the various machinations over the Abbottswood Nursing Home. We note, of course, that all these matters cover areas for which Manx Care is responsible but where the substantial costs, or embarrassing public relations episodes, incurred have absolutely nothing to do with the actual provision of healthcare.
Nevertheless despite the above it seems to have been imagined by some inhabitants of Cinderellas Castle that the good people of the Isle of Man would be happy to pay extra for healthcare via extra taxes or other levies because they still all love the healthcare folks after all that pandemic clapping they did and that they wouldn't really question what they are all doing at the higher levels even if they seem to be failing miserably in several areas that aren't directly relevant to the provision of healthcare. This failing doesn't always appear to be due to lack of funding either - but perhaps ongoing bad culture, poor employment practices, and a working environment that seems to be perceived by many working within it as genuinely horrible and as such fuelling burgeoning employment costs, bad-will and service shortages.
But let's consider the finances too for a moment. The DHSS came in some thirty million over budget this year and a vote was tabled for later on in February to retrospectively approve its additional budget allocations. So from a standing start Treasury this year has technically had to take some thirty million more out of Reserves to cover this overspend (or likely an under allocation) and the proposed solution now is an interim extra tax to apply to anyone earning over what is effectively the living wage in order to provide additional funds for healthcare - which is forecast to raise an extra twenty million in revenue in 2024. So presumably its hard for many to see how a tax that will raise ten million less than what the DHSS went over budget by this year is going to transform much financially. This tax, of course, is an interim measure until some sort of permanent health levy is agreed - which many might now guess will have to be substantially in excess of the current interim 2%. Especially as the unions are already now demanding that public sector workers should in future receive inflation plus pay awards to make up for the extra taxes they will be paying!
So it seems that most of us will now be living in some extended post pandemic version of Dismaland for some time to come - where once more the needs of our Cinderellas Castle government, its workers, and its workers remuneration expectations will be firmly put ahead of ours. Whilst our expectations of Government remain relatively low in that all most of us would seem to like to see is functional core services like heath, dentistry, schools and emergency front line services that support the Island's general health and well-being and provide a platform for our economic growth. Not a labyrinthine communist-style big infrastructure state which meets the mass employment and career expectations of some nine thousand government workers allegedly running a jurisdiction of eighty five thousand people at an existing cost of some £16,343 per resident.
So here's the future folks some peoples attempts to remain in Disneyland are going to continue to contribute to everyone else's Dismaland season ticket!
