By the time you read this it’s likely we’ll be experiencing the largest public service strike for decades. Even my father, a union official who prided himself on never having called a strike in 32 years, would be behind this one.
How, in God’s name, does the government expect those at the bottom of the pay scale to make sacrifices to subsidise those at the top? The only public sector workers whose pensions are not threatened are the MPs. How does that work?
Closer to home we have services under fire, jobs threatened and a chief exec earning £200K a year. Where’s the equality of sacrifice in that?
The speculators and bankers, whose colossal greed created this financial catastrophe continue to pay themselves outrageous sums while everyone else must work longer for less on ever reducing pensions.
Sir Fred Goodwin, the man at the helm when the Royal Bank of Scotland, recorded a £24Bn loss, the largest in UK corporate history, now struggles by on a reported pension of £350K per annum while the bank paid out £950M in bonuses during 2010 despite losses of £1.1bn.
How do you justify that to the taxpaying public?
The answer is you cannot. Not to teachers, nurses, postal workers, townhall staff, carers, refuse collectors or to any of those small entrepreneurs losing their homes and sanity in the financial tsunami.
Ministerial promises made during the election to protect public banking from speculative gambling are negated; control of grotesque bank bonuses hastily forgotten, and regulatory control of energy prices ditched.
The only agenda still firmly on the cards is job losses, service cuts and pension reform.
After Blair and his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ the most insulting lies ever told to the British public are: ‘There is no alternative’ (to screwing the lower paid) and: ‘We’re all in this together’, (except for MPs, council executives, bankers, speculators, energy companies, etc).
If the government hasn’t the courage or the appetite to reign in corporate greed, share the pain equally among the rich and powerful and insist that MPs face the same impositions as the public, it deserves to reap the whirlwind.
My father, a man of the utmost integrity, would have been first on the picket line.
UNFORTUNATELY I was away on holiday during Barnaby. I believe it was a fantastic success. My heartfelt congratulations to the organisers.
