So, today we learn that the Party with a part-time leadership, busy supplementing their parliamentary salaries with fat cat salaries, are going to have a purge of town hall ‘fat cats.’
OK… let’s take a glance down the list of the ‘fat cat’ Chief Executives listed in the Times article:
Newham (Labour)
Suffolk County (Conservative)
Kingston Upon Hull (Liberal Democrat)
Kensington & Chelsea (Conservative)
Bexley (Conservative)
Hertfordshire (Conservative)
Ealing (Conservative)
Surrey (Conservative)
Which rather begs the question for Eric Pickles (by the way, is there not something slightly distasteful about a man with several chins more than necessary talking about other people as ‘fat cats’?) as to why Conservative run administrations seem to be largely in control of the councils leading this pay inflation for Chief Executives, and why they haven’t done anything about it?
The answer to the question, of course, is that Eric and his part-time mates in the Shadow Cabinet, busy trousering their quarter-of-a-milion quid ‘outside interests’ money, have no intention of doing diddly squat about the pay of these people. The ‘do-nothing’ party are simply trying to persuade gullible journalists into writing newspaper articles like this one (step forward patsy journo Sam Coates to rewrite their press release) and gullible voters into believing they will do something about it.
By the way, whatever happened to that Tory pledge to allow councils more control over their own affairs, hospitals to be self-governing, etc.? This just looks like a promise of more interference from Westminster.
“busy trousering their quarter-of-a-milion quid ‘outside interests’ money”
I think you meant “earning”, not “trousering”. Your biased language on second jobs is hilarious. Yet again, the Labour Party reveal their hatred for successful individuals.
“Yet again, the Labour Party reveal their hatred for successful individuals.”
Errrm, remind me again…. who is it that is attacking the “successful individuals” who are CEOs of local authorities? Dear me, you Tories shouldn’t let your class hatred ruin your sense of proportion.
Can anyone remember the name of the local council that was sending it’s Chief Executive on a jolly boys outing to Florida to ‘find herself’?
Bob, the real point here isn’t one of party politics, it is that we’ve got thousands of civil servants and hundreds of MP’s sticking their snouts into the trough.
When they’re found out they react with complete incredulity. “How dare we ordinary mortals question their ‘rights’ to these perks?”
And before you go on about city fat cats and their bonuses, plenty of them are on the dole right now, something that rarely happens to civil servants. Or Eric Pickles, Peter Mandelson, the Sainted Tone
Preferably not, Snapper… I think the needle’s stuck.
How many Labour MP’s appear on TV earning a crust, write Articles for the media, go off on speaking engagements , all for money OK it’s not as much as the big boys it still makes them a lot of money, I can think of Cruddas, Abbott, Miliband, Blunkett,Khalid Mahmood.
But Blunkett is the top man earning
With the exception of Miliband (and I’m not sure which one you mean – or what work (?) you are referring to) none of the others are Front Bench spokespersons. If some backbench MP has the time to deal with their constituency work and write the odd newspaper article or sidle up to Portillo on late night tv, I don’t see the problem. But if the Shadow Foreign Secretary has got time to write a book, give dozens of after dinner speeches and trouser a quarter of a million quid on the side, you have to ask whether they are serious about the job.