Pitiful!

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The government has carried out its promise to publish a list of civil servants who earn more than the Prime Minister’s £142,500 annual salary.

There are 172 of them, with the top earner, the Chief Executive of the Office of Fair Trading, receiving a salary of £279,999.

It is for debate whether some of these top earners are worth the rewards they receive, though there is an argument that in order to attract the right sort of talent the government must pay the going rate in industry.

What is clear from publication of this list is that our Prime Minister is pitifully underpaid!
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Planet Zog!

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Sir Patrick Cormack, Tory MP for South Staffordshire, has suggested to the Committee on Standards in Public Life that MPs pay be doubled to more than £130,000 in return for scrapping their second home allowance.

Labour have condemned the MP as being ‘out of touch’, while the Lib Dem spokesman correctly observed that he ‘must be living on planet Zog’.

He got that right!
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Reviving The Corpse!

British politics have long been confrontational and one gets tired of witnessing the endless round of unanswered questions in parliament which are met with counter accusations leading to pointless and fruitless exchanges of insults.

So I’ve always thought that Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesdays (for 150-odd years they used to be held on Thursdays until President Blair moved them as being more convenient to him) were a complete and utter waste of time whatever party happened to be in power, and yesterday’s session was no exception. As usual Gordon Brown didn’t answer any of the questions put to him but merely countered them with accusations against the Conservatives.

Brown did, however, tell us that he proposed to introduce an independent body to supervise MPs pay and conditions which would have power to impose sanctions on erring MPs. Fair enough - supposing the lot sitting comfortably with their snouts in the trough vote such a body in.

You’d suppose that Brown would then follow this proposal up with others that would deal with our appalling economic position, help rising unemployment, deal with the many issues affecting hospitals and schools and any of the dozens of others that impact on the lives of the ordinary man in the street.

But no, he announces a plan to reorganise the voting system. What a strange thing to come up with at this time! Might it have something to do with the fact that the Labour party is virtually disappearing as disaffected voters look to other parties who appear more able to sort out the problems that face our country? Or am I just a cynic?

This proposal seems to me to be akin to a surgeon attempting to revive a corpse which has already been embalmed!