Lies, damn lies… and Tory Scum

The government has released a list of all the public servants earning more than £150,000, i.e. more than the Prime Minister.

The idea is to shame them into taking pay cuts, or at least not pursuing pay rises. Ok, you might say, it's wrong for a civil servant to earn so much money - some are on £275,000 per year, though I reckon running the NHS, for instance, is a hell of a job.

Well, up to a point. The trick the Tories have pulled is to make the comparison with the Prime Minister, despite successive PM's freezing or reducing their salaries every year to make themselves look good in front of the voters (and it's easy for Cameron - he's a multimillionaire).

I'm a supporter of CEOs earning no more than 10-15 times the wage of the lowest-paid employee. But why are we humiliating the civil servants? Let's look at Bob Diamond (£80 million, despite the bank losing massive amounts) or Bart Becht, who 'earned' £90 million last year, 1374 times that of the average Reckitt Benckiser employee. Do these gentlemen work harder for £90m than they would for £10m? I bet they don't pay much tax either… If you read The Spirit Level, it turns out that more equal companies and states are more successful, and that the rich benefit from equality too!

Despite this subtle attack on the state from the Tories, there are definitely some employees whose greed is blatant and unsustainable - it's weird that many of the highest paid work in the Ministry of Defence, whereas the Treasury only has 4 top earners.

My boss is a prime example. She's on £230,000. That's several tens of thousands more than the Prime Minister before he took a pay cut. Now it's £100,000 more than the Prime Minister. That's £240,000 for getting us a massive fine from the government, £240,000 for sacking 150 people to pay the fine, £230,000 for cutting courses and dumbing-down the degrees. £230,000 for failure.

Except, of course that by her lights, she's a success. She's negotiated a massive salary. The end. It's just a business, and success is a matter of individual enrichment.