http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/fleetstreetfox-dear-mps-your-employers-1529477
Dear MPs: Your employers really don't want to give you a giant pay rise
MPs think they deserve a £20,000 pay rise - FleetStreetFox disagrees in an open letter to the House of Commons
Allow me to tell you about the most bloated and disgusting part of the public sector.
There is a union of employees who, by banding together, managed to wangle themselves a basic salary which puts them in the top 3% of earners in the UK.
In case this wasn't enough, they insisted on being able to moonlight and do two or three extra jobs which enabled them to earn as much as 13 times their public salaries .
On duty they catch taxis and trains for free. They get subsidised fillet steak and fine wine. They have interest-free loans, their second houses paid for, stamp duty, solicitors' fees, new kitchens, gardeners, curtains and expensive furniture , all just to help them do their jobs.
Twenty per cent of them have made room at the trough for family members to chow down. Tuck in, kids!
They've probably all got a flatscreen telly, too. And you can bet most of them won't have paid for it themselves.
For all these perks do you think they worked longer and harder? Did they hell. This year they're turning up to the coal face for just 171 days, compared to the 240 or so the rest of us strivers put in.
At the same time as this the organisation for which they work, and from which they suckle, is broke. It has crippling debts, forced redundancies, and low morale. There is no money left.
Ordinarily the management would go to war with a union of shirkers as bloated and greedy as this.
Unfortunately, it's the management which is corrupt. It's the executive class scoffing in subsidised canteens and complaining their salami is not sliced thinly enough . It's the guys in charge who are soaking up a total of half a billion pounds a year in return for just ordering the plebs around.
And it's you MPs who have, just three years after the expenses scandal which threatened most of them with the electoral guillotine, grown the brass necks it would need to insist that all of the above is simply not good enough and they deserve a 32 per cent pay rise .
Not instead of your current system of pay and perks. Not instead of the golden goodbyes, generous holidays, second home expenses and gold-plated pension. As well as .
You haven't said what the alternative is. Presumably manning some chi-chi braziers sourced from a charming little Chelsea antique shop you'll get us to pay for, followed by a four-hour protest lunch at a nice restaurant.
Not only do you think you're worth more, this opinion was delivered just days after you voted through a four per cent real-terms cut in benefits for seven million working families, and just a few months after police officers, nurses, paramedics, teachers and others marched on Westminster over cuts to their pensions.
Complained one, nameless MP: "We receive endless requests for raffle donations... we spend money on things which cannot be claimed back." Oh, like the rest of us have to? You poor lambs!
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said the 'vast majority' of the public did not think £65,000 was a lot of money and said some MPs might have "to look their children in the eye at Christmas and say they can't have what they normally have because mummy or daddy wants to be an MP".
So if young Tamasin doesn't get a pony this year that's as bad as going to a food bank for your turkey dinner, is it?
I don't think so.
The 100,000 people who relied on food banks in order to eat last year, a figure expected to rise to 200,000 by April , wouldn't think so.
Half of the entire nation's households which will be an average of £165 worse off in the cuts won't agree.
Those members of the public surveyed at the same time as MPs who said your pay should be docked £5,000 a year probably wouldn't care about Tamasin's pony either.
But then the old line gets trotted out that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys, and former minister Cheryl Gillan parroted it saying: "If pay is too low it will only be attractive to the wealthy."
Or the poor. Heaven forfend they should be in charge! Why, single parents on the parliamentary benches, council house tenants on committees, people who don't own a BMW making laws and taking tea with the Queen?
What a great idea that would be.
Because for 97 per cent of us a salary of £65,738 a year is a shedload of cash. Working in London four days a week and an afternoon in the constituency is hardly a chore. Sitting down and yakking all day, for many people, would be a welcome relief.
They might care a bit more about earning that money by sorting out a tax system which is not fit for purpose, saving the NHS rather than taking it apart, and doing something about the fact one in 20 women in this country have suffered a serious sexual assault since turning 16.
They might just also manage it while not skiving off to yabber about their onesies on radio phone-ins, taking their tennis coach on holiday , or disappearing for a reality show when they're supposed to be at work.
They might even visit a food bank and talk to people who use them, in the way that our Prime Minister has yet to do, and decide that it is appalling people are being left to starve by one of the richest states in the world.
I don't really want captains of industry running the government - they already run everything else. Let the plebs have a crack at it, we certainly can't do any worse and we don't mind how thin the salami is.
It would be tempting to do as the old joke says, pin a rosette on a donkey and send that to Parliament. Except we've tried that already, and now we've got 650 of you sucking so hard on the withered national teat it's in serious danger of snapping off.
Far better to set your MPs' pay to the national average, which at the moment is £26,500. That would soon concentrate your minds on improving the economy and raising the standard of living, with the added bonus every MP who is in it for what they can get would flee the Palace of Westminster quicker than rats who've heard there's a man with a whistle in the building.
Because as the Prime Minister so rightly said: " We need a smaller public sector. "
We do, but you MPs have wielded the knife at our scrawny flanks while saving your own double chin. So let's direct some cuts to the shirking, scrounging, fetid, fat leeches of Westminster and unless you take a pay cut like the rest of the country you'll be out on your ears with the rest of the rats.
Failing that, Belgium managed without a government entirely for 18 months. What do you say we try to beat that?
No comments:
Post a Comment