The eight pointed Star of the UK Fire Service is a stylised version of the Cross of Saint John the Baptist.

Its origins date back to the Cross of Malta which was the emblem of the Knights of Malta.

It was used by the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades.

Later a sect of the Knights became known as the Order of the Knights Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem, or Infirmarians, who were dedicated by vocation to providing succour, food, and shelter for all pilgrims in the Holy Land.

The points, or more correctly, the Tenets of the Star were said to represent the qualities and virtues which a Knight required to discharge his vocation particularly in respect of his Infirmarian Hospitaller duties.

The Knightly virtues are illustrated thus…

By a natural extension of this philosophy, and with their vocation under the Star which they serve, these  ‘virtues’ should be inculcated and encouraged in all FireFighters, who on a daily basis, without distinction, provide succour to their fellow Citizens; their Community; and their Nation.

Indeed within the Fire Service today there are those who wear the insignia of Saint John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitallers, on their Fire Service Uniform.

They have a special responsibility to demonstrate to all members of the Service both present and past that they are worthy to wear this unique insignia with its heraldic responsibility to discharge these Knightly virtues in public and in private to the letter and intent.

History teaches the cautionary lesson of the past to all Knight Hospitallers of today, particularly those who seek personal aggrandisement and who act without probity whilst disregarding their duty to those they are supposed to lead without corruption and by pure and wholesome example…

“Inflated with wealth, laden with privileges which gave them almost sovereign powers the Order at last became so demoralised by luxury and idleness that it forgot the aim for which it was founded, and gave itself up for the love of gain and thirst for pleasure.

Its covetousness and pride soon became boundless. The Knights pretended that they were above the reach of crowned heads: they seized and pillaged without concern of the property of both Infidels and Christians”…

The UK Fire Service has always deluded itself that it leads the world in the Fire Service field and it still believes this self-perpetuated mythology today. Any well-travelled observant young UK Fire-fighter will tell a different story. While one hopes the UK aspires to be the best and that is a noble aspiration, and there have been times when we have been up with the best, it certainly is no longer the case. Thus by definition it is no longer a world leader in such matters.

A National Fire and Rescue Service of any note must ‘possess’, in any sense of that word, a National Fire Service College to lead and inspire the next generation of its Service. The UK  has uniquely failed in this respect and remains exceptional throughout Europe and probably the world in this respect particularly within a so called developed nation of the 21^st Century.

So how far has this Star fallen?

It seems reasonable using any yardstick, or by soliciting any opinion from inside the UK Fire and Rescue Service that one can only conclude that the Service is in terminal decline. It is simply a matter of reading the straws in the wind but who shares the responsibility for this terminal decline and fall?

Scotland has departed from the Fire Service union and with it Wales. Shortly to be followed by Northern Ireland which will in all likelihood ultimately pursue its destiny within an island-of-Ireland concept after the NI Assembly has cleaned out the NIFRS’s (or whatever it will be called in the future) a cesspit of corruption, and set it on a clean path of recovery and development for the remainder of the 21^st Century.

Should these three Fire & Rescue Authority Regions ultimately secede from the FBU, as seems likely, to seek their own employment Contracts from the political Assemblies which they serve, then it seems in the future that these contracts will be influenced more by their colleagues conditions in mainland Europe than with those within the diminished UK Fire Service.

The current industrial action supports this point of view in fractionating terms. It is significant that the Scottish FBU membership decided its own destiny by not toeing the FBU HQ party line and others will follow. These signs of the times come at a moment of falling and split FBU membership within which there appear to be above average numbers of ‘30 pieces of silver’ strike breakers during the last walk outs. Self-serving ‘Clock-on-Rescuers’ appear to be the order of this new day. It seems to be that if the Service pay and conditions are above the rate for the job then applications can be expected from those with little or no vocation for the Service, never mind its career potential.  If vocation-less shelling of peas paid a higher rate then no doubt that is where many of today’s applicants to the Service would go.

There is also the unaddressed disaffection in the ‘northern’ FBU rank and file membership that their Union has been taken over and driven forward by its partial self-centred self-serving London and southern counterparts to the detriment of their northern comrades mandate which as they read the wind  is reflected in less, rather than more, centralised representation.

Sadly the FBU can therefore be regarded at this moment in time as a spent force; a Union over the last decade or so which was clearly to a great extent the author of its own misfortunes.

Is this just the Morning Bugler’s opinion or do the historical facts bear this out ?

The star of the Fire Service started to rise under the Conservative Government of Heath with the Holroyd Report in 1970 followed closely by the Cunningham Report in 1971 though whether or not the Heath Government was the author of Holroyd/Cunningham is a moot point but it certainly was the facilitator of those rapporteurs visions.

Holroyd addressed the economies of scale within the UK Fire Service – leading to amalgamation in 1974 – with Cunningham spelling out the nuts and bolts in detail of how the Service would look in the future in terms of career prospects, qualifications, and pay, all ultimately factoring into fair play pensions. Once more ultimately implemented, by the Conservatives.

These were heady days as anyone who was there at the time will recall.

At last a Government was paying attention to the Service and perhaps someone really did care. But it was a false dawn and after amalgamation in 1974 and its General Election victory the Labour Party and its politicians went off to play somewhere else. Such cavalier disregard for raised and dashed hopes ultimately led, after fits and starts of industrial actions(like now), to a full blown 9 week strike. The First National Strike in the history of the UK Fire Service under the Labour Government of Callaghan.

Fire Service history records as a fact that it is usually a Labour Government which treats the Fire Service rather badly than as one might expect the Conservatives, or  the ‘also rans’…

But this battle which the working Firefighters won unequivocally left a political legacy with a disenchanted Labour Party and its chums in the Trade Union Congress who actually voted by one vote during the first National strike NOT to support the FireFighters in their battle! A prime example of divided and distorted ‘loyalties’.

The consequences of this strike secured by a united FBU membership led by officials who actually cared about their Service, as opposed to loving what it produced in their individual ‘officer rank’ linked pay packets, were far reaching.

Success was measured by the provision of an all essential Pay Formula which served the Service well for the succeeding 25 years. The principle was simple, effective, and fair to the national economy. A Leading Firefighter’s income was linked to a particular group of semi-skilled workers one year in retrospection. So if these semi-skilled workers had a ‘good’ year in respect of salary increases subsequently the Firefighters would benefit the following year and conversely a ‘poor’ year would yield less. The Firefighters were not setting the national salary scales they were following the national trend.  

The only aspiration not achieved at that time was the desire to be linked with skilled workers rather than semi-skilled (The lead author of the Pay Formula was a then Senior Economics Lecturer Mr. M.Hynes of Preston Polytechnic in conjunction with The Morning Bugler’s Editor.)

One direct consequence of the strike was the production of a new 1992 Firemen’s Pension Scheme.

A pension Scheme to which Scheme members were to subsequently contribute a significant 11% of their annual gross salary. Those politicians and others envious of this Scheme tend to conveniently forget two points.

A substantial individual fiscal contribution over 3 decades; and what is in practice a fixed 30 year Contract by the individual to serve the Nation and the Community, which was in effect their whole working lives. Even the armed forces never sign up for this commitment.

 It is extremely rare(if ever) in the private sector to find a Contract on a similar basis and if it is then the employers regularly ‘shift the goalposts’ as the paying out equity accumulates and the employers realise the financial commitment they have made to the individual. In the end it is all about their profits and not about a loyal hard working employee.

 Anyone reflecting on this fraught period can confirm that the Fire Service star then rose to its zenith by the mid 1990’s which was reflected in a report by the Audit Commission under Thatcher, neither of whom could be regarded as a ‘fan’ of the Service, or any working man. A report which, it might be added, was awaited with some trepidation in the Service.

This 1995 Audit Commission Report entitled… ‘In the Line of Fire. Value for Money in the Fire Service’ can be summarised by the phrase… ‘a notably well managed Service’, which was a vindication of all the hard work and sacrifices by all ranks contributing to this well-deserved accolade.

 Though debatable, it was at this point that the terminal decline of the Service began as the new generation came in and the old battlers faded away and the Service was about to reap the whirlwind which it had sown in 1977-78 by defeating the Labour Party in government.

The First National Fire Service strike in 1977-78 had taken place under Callaghan’s Labour government and by any industrial dispute standard it was a vicious affair. This battle to the finish was between an internationally embarrassed socialist government meant to represent the ‘working masses’  and the very ‘workers’ it represented who were fighting for a living wage.

It had to be fought and won and it was. But it left a legacy of vitriolic resentment within the Labour Party who subsequently blamed the FBU for its General Election defeat in 1979 which was of course fatuous nonsense because the Labour Party chose to forget that Firefighters had to support their families with family benefits whilst they themselves were in full time employment !  Politicians’ memories are only as good as the last winning vote.

The Labour Party concluded whilst staring at its defeated navel that the FBU and its membership had become too big for its boots and that in the future a score would be settled and indeed it was.

So perhaps thinking on a wider plane the success of the Firefighters in 1977-78 led in time to the demise of that which they valued most, ‘the job’.

Prior to the 1997 General Election in what can be best described as gerrymandering the aspiring ‘New’ Labour government was making the usual ‘promises’. In respect of the Service it proposed ‘reorganisation’ and in this interim period the Fire Service was renamed into Fire & Rescue Services though why not simply ‘The Emergency Service’ which bemused many. Anyone who considers that this was for the ‘benefit’ of the, by now FRS, can be considered a political fool.

In Lancashire for example the Labour M.P. Jack Straw made a behind closed door deal proselytising the ‘advantages’ of the  establishment of a Combined Fire Authority(the LFRS), the sole and exclusive purpose of which was to secure his ethnically challenged constituency seat in Blackburn, which surprise, surprise, he won again.

In 1997 the war monger Blair with his ‘babes’ and cronies led a ‘rehabilitated’ ‘New’ Labour Party out of the political wilderness to victory. The power of the remaining Unions was, as ever, a perennial problem on his mind. A mind shaped and mentored quite bizarrely by yet another war monger Thatcher who had broken the political back of the miners. An action which Blair fully intended to emulate on the FBU, among others, when he was good and ready.

This was the time of political long memories and account settling where the Service and ‘New’ Labour was concerned. Blair sent for Prescott, ever the get-ahead chappie who in conjunction with his acolyte Raynsford commenced the beating up of the Service in 2003 saying in a White Paper  that the Service had to be ‘modernised’ while conveniently ignoring the fact that only a brief 2 years before Thatcher’s government reported that the Fire Service was ‘notably well managed’. well, surely it could not be ‘notably well managed’ if it so badly needed modernising 2 years on could it?

This was also to become one of the most , if not the most disastrous periods in the history of the Fire Brigades Union which still continues today.

Allied with their cosy socialist chums in the ‘New’ Labour Government the gullible ‘new’ FBU generation of ‘leaders’ became the principle movers for ‘new’ pay and conditions including a ‘new’ Pension Scheme actually believing their own propaganda that ‘New’ must be good for their Members and that their Firefighter Members were actually worthy of a base income of £30k per year (a ludicrous 40% pay rise) at a time when thousands of ‘workers’ including trainee nurses were not even receiving the National minimum Wage.

It is such curious beliefs that took a lemmings Membership over the cliff…and they did.

Mr.Gilchrist (ex-London FBU) the then FBU General Secretary (a gift to the Government/NJC Employers and the Media) set out on an actual champagne trail to the delight of the Red Banner Editors to prove that FBU generations of hard won Service conditions counted for nothing and in conjunction with the gimlet eyed Raynsford they both set about ‘modernising’ the Fire Service by boring large holes in it with the resultant disarray the Service is in today.

It is easy to destroy but putting better conditions and

advancing mature ‘modernisation’ (a much abused phrase at the time) is another matter as the corpse of the ‘new’ 2006 Pension Scheme remains adrift on a turbulent sea of unfulfilled hopes and industrial action whilst the present Membership struggle to make headway in the realisation that the FBU ‘leadership’ of the past ought to have been a whole lot smarter in the first place and were indeed the authors of these present day misfortunes.

By 1998 the scandals which beset the Service today had just begun. In fact there are so many scandals at the top of the Fire Service today that it is rather difficult to know where to begin but it is reasonable to conjecture that around or about 1998 was the pivotal point of collapse. As of old first the cracks in the façade of decency, esprit de corps, pride, and morale appeared. Then came the age of ‘self-help’ in all matters financial and the rest follows the well-worn historical path of personal greed by those who owed not the slightest loyalty to their so called subordinates.

By early in the 21^st Century the Service was to receive its political baptism of socialism; nothing was sacrosanct and everything was to be sacrificed on this grand ‘New’ altar of socialism with the disaster that we see before us today.

Nepotism and ‘patronage’ have always run like an open sewer through the Service, aided and abetted by lazy money grubbing politicians in their sleepy hollow who turn up with their hands out whilst practising their well-known three monkeys act.

In Lancashire before this paroxysm of greed really got in its stride the CFA Councillors awarded themselves a 41% pay rise and because public unaccountability of the day ran riot the ‘management’ of the LFRS also awarded themselves an 11% annual ‘bonus’ which rather neatly paid their contributions to the Pension Scheme. All for doing the job they were already paid handsomely to do in the first place!

There is a truism about ‘committees’ and ‘work’ which, dear Reader, you need to be aware of. It runs something like this…One third(a little optimistic one fears) of any committee will always work…one third will, if asked…and one third, never will.

But the destructive Fire Service troika would not be complete without the FBU who in the naivety of a new generation rushed to aid the demise of their own Service whilst philosophically enriching themselves in this pursuit of their idea of ‘equality’. Gleefully they destroyed all those facets have always been a political anathema to them; Officer ranks, any ranks, any titles; centralised ‘cradle to grave training’ by approving the selling off the silver of the Fire Service College for a measly £10 million, it was only for ‘officers’ anyway; good order and statutory discipline which protected it’s own members, if  the FBU but knew it; and the greatest disasters of all the destruction of ‘automatic’ annual Pay Formula settlements linked ultimately to  pensions which had served their members so well for a quarter of a century. Peace and cooperation had reigned supreme in industrial relations in this period…

Now look at where the Service is today….back to square one with their public credibility in tatters.

The attitude was…well it was old fashioned anyway… and the FBU ‘leadership’ had brighter ideas but where are these brighter ideas? Today the fact of the matter is that the FBU is struggling to maintain a membership base and is endeavouring to encourage a divided membership to hit the streets to fight for a Pay Formula and decent pensions which the FBU wantonly threw away in the first place. Oh, the irony of it all….

At this point one is bound to ask what remains after this miasma of self-enriching self-destructing equality? What of esprit de corps? What of pride? What of morale?

The answer is a resounding who cares.

All that had been fought for and won at a huge price by past generations of Firefighters and FBU members was culled and thrown away. The FBU in its catharsis created its own well publicised Nemeses in Prescott/Raynsford whom, while all sipping champagne together at the Ritz, sketched out on the back of their a la carte menus how the Animal Farm of the future Service would look like, or so they thought….

They were also working from Orwell’s other script of 1984, which no one seemed to notice had already passed its sell by date, though it did indeed achieve an ‘idyll’ with  seats on the boards of FRSs where in one instance the FBU Executive member was described by the NI Assembly Public Accounts Committee as a ‘lackey’, and he is not alone. So much for representation where it is was meant to count.

If the FBU knew its socialist history, which it does not, there were lessons in history for it to read with regards to the destruction of any command structure, whether or not it was the product of nepotism or hand shaking patronage. Prior to WWII Stalin philosophically decided that ‘officers’ were an anathema to his vision of ‘socialist equality’ and so Beira his murderous hatchet man set about culling the command structure. If it was an ‘officer’ shoot it! Unfortunately for Stalin WW II commenced but by this time the pogrom left no properly trained ‘officers’ to command his armies with its resultant horrendous costs in troops’ lives.

The FBU needs to ask itself has the culling of the command structure in the Fire Service and all it abhorred in ‘officer’ training led to today’s rise and escalating graph in Fire-fighters’ operational deaths? The answer must be yes.

The FBU ‘leaders’ were all simply God’s gift to  Raynsford, Prescott, and Blair who used the age old methods of Conservatives to achieve their aims. Divide and conquer with greed by buying off the principal(or perhaps more accurately these unprincipled) Chief Fire Officers providing them with lavish salaries thus clearing the way for a complete sell out of all that was worthy in the Fire Service by these newly enriched ‘servants’ of their masters.

All this allied with the creation of a retitled Fire and Rescue Services which boasted and demonstrated it was independent of public scrutiny and accounting in all but name, thus setting the scene which will in the years that lie ahead unfold as FRS after FRS is publicly called to account for itself and its dubious and corrupt financial activities during this period in what can best be described as common theft from the public purse.

Led by ‘officers’ who whilst dispensing with lower rank titles (they were all now to be known as ‘managers’ in the future) cynically retained the grandiose title Chief Fire Officers (forgetting the ‘Rescue’ bit) for themselves as they led the charge to get their collective hands into the honey pot and noses in the trough.

These self-same sell out ‘leaders’ then as obedient lackeys took up the ‘hard sell’  line on this new 2006 Pension Scheme extolling its ‘virtues’. The government certainly knew what it was about when it used the greed factor to divide and conquer but to succeed it needed ‘leaders’ lacking in both probity and integrity.

The FBU were not far behind in this short measuring of the Service and its Members. This was an FBU leadership, which it may be hard for Firefighters to contemplate, whilst displaying abysmal ignorance of Fire Service pension Schemes, agreed to a two tier injury pension.

It now seems in practical terms that Firefighters can only be ‘half’ injured; they can only get half burnt in a flashover; only half a wall will fall on them; they can only ‘half’ run out of air on their breathing apparatus; then they can only get ‘half’ lost; and ‘half’ die.  It seemed any interested observer that this general craziness in the Service was contagious.

How the NJC Employers must have chortled on their way to the bank…this was a Union which had simply lost its way and the vision of its forefathers.

But the members of the Service must also share responsibility for this fallen star too .

Those still in Service who gullibly responded to the blatant ‘come-on’ blandishments of short term cash-in-hand benefits all dashed to the CFO’s trough and the so called ‘generous’ 2006 Pension Scheme of the future are just now awakening to the fact that the monthly financial reality has proved to be a myth when measured against what could have been earned under the ‘old’ Pay Formula both now and in the future.

If serving personnel had stood up for the enhancement of the ‘old’ Pay Formula based on the increased skills base necessary to respond to the government’s ‘resilience’ challenges and simply sought a higher ‘linking’ to ‘skilled’ or ‘professional’ workers they would no doubt have also retained an enhanced ‘old’ Pension Scheme as well.

The genesis of the current industrial action has it foundation in this disastrous pursuit of individual and collective greed.

The Executive Council of the FBU of the early 21^st century who wantonly threw away generations of hard won benefits because they knew best and their conclusion that all the ‘old’ gains were just so much hyperbole simply confirmed their naivety in industrial negotiations. They have much to answer for to their membership of today. Fire Authorities are not in the business of making employees wealthy or even paying them the going rate if they can get away with it.

It remains the case that a fool and his/her money are soon parted.

The Golden Rule, that the naïve and inexperienced FBU boys and girls of the Executive of today need to learn, is that when the Government of the day; the NJC Employers; and their ‘30 pieces of silver’ Chief Fire Officers bring forward proposals for change of conditions the FBU and others should as a matter of routine ‘head for the bunkers’ and prepare for hostilities because any proposals made are certainly not going to be in their Members interests.

Though the Northern Ireland Fire & Rescue Service self-evident corruption is already resonating throughout the Service and with a General Election already looming on the horizon which Party will call for a complete accounting of the top echelons of the Fire Service in the short period that lies ahead? None.

This breathtaking self service reached the scandalous and unashamed  practice of ‘double dipping’ where CFOs ‘retired’ on Monday; picked up their retirement pension worth up to quarter of a million on Tuesday with a half a million pounds in commutation; and ‘rehired’ themselves on ‘Wednesday’ at a reduced salary all the time espousing what good value for money they were and how much money they had just saved the taxpayer by this sleight-of-purse ‘accounting’? Brass necks had nothing on these Dick Turpins who did at least have the decency to wear a mask…and this current Government just let them…

So this is all so much hyperbole as the chair of the Lancashire CFA , a Councillor who was investigated by the Police for allegedly fiddling his expenses puts it or just ‘sour grapes’ on the part of those who objected. Really? Perhaps a published example might make the final point.

Go Here.

Who might Peter Holland be? None other than the Government’s own recently appointed ‘Fire Advisor’ who clearly is going to help clean up this practice throughout the Fire Service by ‘triple dipping’!

Can this get any more embarrassing? You will note that both the Conservatives and the Labour leaders on this CFA(those who gave themselves a 42% pay increase at the beginning of this financial feeding frenzy) thought this was a brilliant idea.

It seems a reasonable conclusion given this litany of appalling greed and self-service in the ‘trough’ by all those involved that they should share equal responsibility for its consequences.  Though it should be said in mitigation that if the rank and file see their so called ‘leaders’ so deep in the trough of greed that a casual observer cannot even see their snouts there is little hope for restraint in the lower ranks is there?

And so perhaps we should conclude where we began, it seems little changes where greed leads to decadence…

“Inflated with wealth, laden with privileges which gave them almost sovereign powers the Order at last became so demoralised by luxury and idleness that it forgot the aim for which it was founded, and gave itself up for the love of gain and thirst for pleasure. its covetousness and pride soon became boundless. The Knights pretended that they were above the reach of crowned heads: they seized and pillaged without concern of the property of both Infidels and Christians”…

This is why the Service is in terminal decline today…and the Animal Farm prophecy is made good...