Six weeks in and the coalition government has made such a stuttering start to the year that even Colin Firth is envious. Economic growth has stalled, inflation and tax rises are hitting living standards, and hardly a day goes by without an announcement of large-scale council job cuts. As yesterday morning’s CIPD/KPMG Labour Market Outlook survey report notes, the overall public sector jobs cull is gathering pace, while private sector employers are less optimistic about the jobs outlook than they were last autumn. Yet, despite all this, the government continues to put politics before policy, dogmatically sticking to an inflexible plan for deficit reduction and hoping that political gimmicks will divert attention from what the CBI has rightly said is the absence of a coherent strategy for growth and jobs.

First up was deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and his clarion call to ‘alarm clock Britain’, praising those hardy souls who get out of bed at the crack of dawn to do an honest day’s work rather than hang around until the dole office opens. Unfortunately Mr Clegg failed to notice that the start of the year saw the sharpest rise in unemployment since the end of the recession, with the result that far fewer people actually have jobs to go to.

Not that David Cameron has fared much better. His ‘Big Society’ ambitions have been questioned by many of the voluntary sector bodies he wants to place in the vanguard of social change. It seems that effective community initiative goes hand in hand with properly targeted public spending; state and society are far more closely intertwined than Big Society enthusiasts believe. The prime minister should take heed of the social impact of spending cuts announced last week by Manchester City Council, which go so far as to shut all but one municipal public convenience. Without public subsidy, it seems, we won’t even be able to sustain the 'bog society’ in future.

Most depressing of all, however, was the publication of what ministers have labelled the ‘employer's charter’, alongside a consultation on changes to the employment tribunals system and an increase in the length of time staff have to work before having the right to challenge an employer on grounds of unfair dismissal. I was far from surprised by this move – my previous blog at the start of the year warned that workers’ rights would be used as a scapegoat to explain away muted private-sector job creation in the coming months. But the coalition government’s move nonetheless leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

I will return in future blogs to the subject of why watering down employment rights is not the way to go if we want the UK to be a high employment, high productivity, and high happiness society. But aside from the economics, anybody in HR or the wider employer community who openly advocates a more ‘hire and fire’ workplace should acknowledge that this runs counter to talk of employee engagement, good work and high performance working.

Do we really want to reinforce the lack of trust in senior management and intense job insecurity that still pervades so many British workplaces? The UK doesn’t need an employer’s charter but a ‘workplace charter’ that seeks to foster engagement rather than further instil a damaging sense of ‘them and us’. The employment relations scene in 2011 is likely to be difficult enough without measures that seek to turn back the clock to 1981. Perhaps Valentine’s Day would have been a good time for the government to reach out to workers as well as bosses.