ANOTHER SET OF GREEDY PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT ALL IN IT TOGETHER

I mentioned a few weeks ago that it seemed to me that there were few people in the UK who were avoiding the swinging cuts...
The royal family, as befits their position, were at the top of my list. Not only has the Treasury agreed that in future the royals can have a percentage of the Crown Estates money that previously went to the government, but the Duke of Rothsay has managed to increase his private income by over £600,000 and increase his state earnings by 40%. Nice recession guys.

The Lords were having a problem with people cheating (some would say 80%) on their expenses, so they introduced a new system whereby they pay themselves expenses whether or not they have expended anything, and needless to say, that now costs the taxpayer more. Brilliant way to not earn a living chaps and chapesses.

The bankers, fearful that their gigantic bonuses would be stopped by the government , awarded themselves massive pay rises to make up for the anticipated loss in income, only to find that the bonuses weren’t stopped after all, and so now they have both. Smart thinking lads.

And now, according to a report in the Telegraph, despite pleas from ministers not to do it, senior civil servants are taking bonuses worth between £8,000 and £20,000. The bonuses, which were agreed with the last government, seem to be set in stone. Although if I were the government I'd be inclined to tell them that they could fiddle for the bonuses. What are they going to do? Go on strike?

The total cost to the treasury will be around £10 million.

Helen Ghosh, permanent secretary at the Home Office (that bastion of efficiency) defended £10,000 bonuses for her staff as “not exactly big bucks”. She told a committee of MPs in the coherent manner you might expect: “The average was... I think the very maximum for the highest earners was £10,000.” Gosh Ms Ghosh. As people may be paid as much as 10% of their salaries, as salaries are as high as £200,000 pa, and as the bonuses are performance related, it is rather an indictment of the quality of staff in her department if they are only achieving £10,000. Why, at £180,000 pa, Helen's own bonus has the potential to be £18,000.

Not big bucks at £10,000 for Golly Ghosh, but twice what a pensioner gets to live on for a year and now the government has reduced their winter fuel allowance, regardless of the quality of their performance. And three times what the paid off civil servants all around the country will be collecting in Job Seekers Allowance.

What a grim, miserable, greedy, unpleasant country the UK is. Let’s get out of it.

Pics: Ms Ghosh and her shiny Home Office, which reminds me of Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou, to my mind, one of the world's most unlovely buildings.

ANOTHER WHITEHALL FARCE

Times are hard. Many people who were working this time last year in shops, factories, warehouses, even banks and insurance offices, and who are now on the dole know this. Many people being asked to reduce their hours or take unpaid leave just to keep their company afloat know this, and goodness knows poor soldiers out in Afghanistan on around £20,000 a year for risking life and limb on our behalf know this.

Why then is it that the Daily Telegraph is reporting that £130 million in bonuses has been paid out to Civil Servants in the last year? Some senior civil servants are getting as much as £50,000 in bonus payouts - twice as much as the threshold of the bankers’ bonus tax that Alistair Darling announced recently that he was levying on the City.

The new bonus figures will come as an embarrassment to Gordon Brown who recently talked about a “culture of excess” in some parts of the public sector and promised to bring about a new era of pay restraint in public bodies. He vowed to cut £100 million a year from the salaries of senior civil servants. Another Gordon Brown promise gone west?

The Cabinet Office confirmed that the bonuses relate, in the main, to the senior levels of the civil service, the “upper-middle management and above”. Well, I’d never have guessed, the people who make the decisions about bonuses are the ones that get them. The highest-spending department was the Ministry of Defence, while the Department for Work and Pensions paid out more than £23 million with a further £6 million allocated for in-year rewards. The Department for Transport set aside £12 million for bonus payments and the Foreign Office spent £7.6 million rewarding staff. One senior civil servant at the Department of Health received a payment of £49,004.

The bonuses are officially termed "non-consolidated performance payments". Ministers have sought to justify them by saying they were to reward "exceptional" performance and link pay to delivery across the year.

You wouldn’t mind so terribly much if any of these departments was working well, or even slightly efficiently. The Ministry of Defence has been criticized over and over again for deficiencies in the way it handles procurement and logistics among other things, for the troops in Afghanistan; the Dept of Work and Pensions seems almost totally incapable of getting people back to work; the Dept of Transport falls apart at the mere mention of snow. Excellent performance my posterior!

How much longer can we tolerate this nonsense?

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The Wonder of Woolas

If Mr Brown had had anyone at all that he could have used as a replacement minister responsible for immigration, it would have been a good idea to have sacked the present incumbent pretty soon after he was made to look like a complete and utter muppet by Joanna Lumley over his ridiculous misreading of the “court of public opinion” concerning the Ghurkhas’ case.

Clearly, having trawled the back benches in the Commons and the Lords, and looked around anywhere and everywhere, under park benches for all I know, looking for someone, anyone, from anywhere, that could take the job, he has failed (again).

And that is why we were all entreated yesterday to listening to the unlovely Phil Woolas (OK, I’ve heard all the jokes... probably?), rumble on about how perfectly reasonable it was, in the current economic climate, for him to pay out bonuses of around £10,000 each to the senior executives of his Border Controls Agency.

He claimed that they were very brave men and women who put their lives on the line for us.

WHAT?

Firstly, I don’t want to put down the work that some of the members of that department do. There are hands-on people working undercover trying to find traffickers, indeed people who probably do risk life and limb in the pursuance of a good result. But we’re not giving them bonuses. The people who are getting the ten grand extra of our money are senior management.

Mr Woolas told the Today Programme “We’ve got a superb management team that is getting on top of what is probably the most difficult public policy area in political life. There are 285 million people who visit the United Kingdom every year, and organising that mass movement of people to protect our borders from the people who have bad intent is a huge job.”

He indicated that to do that job of protecting our borders from all these people with bad intent he needed to get the best people. Apparently, unless you pay massive bonuses to managers they just won’t do a hand’s turn. I’ve often wondered why governments of all political shades seem to find it necessary to pay vast amounts to get good managers (otherwise you just get rubbish), but seem content to have one of the lowest minimum wages in the EU for ordinary workers.

(In any case, it seems that all that extra money hasn’t really made any difference at all. We all know that the government’s immigration policy and practice went off the rails years ago. We have no idea how many immigrants are here; we have no idea how many released from prison are not deported... indeed, we have no idea......... of anything. Oh, and another thing, whilst it is relatively important to guard the borders, I'd think it was a bit of an exaggeration to think that it was the "most difficult public policy area in politics". Hmmm, talk about being up your own Woolas!)

Anyway, he added insult to injury by making the remarks on the day that the 100th death of a British soldier in Afghanistan this year was reported. Of course, I don’t make any distinction between the 100th and the 99th or the 3rd, but there is for some at least a symbolic importance to the number 100.

These front line troops are entitled to a bonus after 6 month tour of duty. It amounts to somewhere in the region of £3,500 for a normal infantryman out there fighting the Taliban. Now I wonder if Mr Woolas would like to compare and contrast the various dangers that a soldier in Afghanistan, on the front line faces with those of a typical manager in the Borders Agency moving his desk to that side of the room, or arranging his flowers on the coffee table we provide him with....

Like I said at the beginning, surely, surely in the whole country (coz Brown has long since given up trying to appoint ministers from the Commons) there must be someone with just a little more savvy that this dim-witted placeman, whose foot seems to reside permanently in close proximity to his mouth. He’s not even likeable; he comes across as a smug, self satisfied, supercilious moron. Phil Woolhead would be every bit as appropriate a name for him.

THIS CAN'T BE RIGHT, CAN IT?

I’ve just read, over on the Ranting Penguin blog, something that I completely missed on Sunday, and which has left me totally speechless, not to mention incandescent with anger.

According to The Times, there are civil servants from the Ministry of Defence working over in Afghanistan. Fair enough, there are soldiers out there in Afghanistan, and there must be back up ancillary work that requires an administrator to do it. And so it is right that we have a group of civil servants out there. The civil servants work at army bases, and may accompany Ministers in walk abouts, but they volunteer for the job, they are not deployed in the front line, and none has been killed in Afghanistan.

Now we come to the bit that might be considered to be rather strange.... OK, strange is not the right word.

A junior infantry man, on a six month tour of Afghanistan will receive a boost to his wage for undertaking the dangerous and difficult work that he will encounter out there. Good, I hear you say. No complaint there. On his £16,681 annual salary, he will receive something in the order of £580 a month as a bonus. On the other hand, a junior civil servant gets a bonus of..... wait for it.......£6,750 a month on top of his salary.

Alan Johnson defended the bonuses that the civil servants get (it seems that Mr Aintworth was unavailable (or too stupid) for comment), saying they did difficult and dangerous work.

Does the Home Secretary know what soldiers do?



(Sorry I couldn't get the links to work.... don't know why)