pumpkinstrokemarrow

Lots of people apart from me have commented on the unfortunate trend away from equality, towards a world where the top 5% or whatever of people earn 100 times more than average people. We are told that the Swedes manage to incentivise their big people with a much more modest multiple of 10, a multiple which does much less to create envy, anger and crime in the lower reaches than ours.

So, as a former civil servant, I was sorry to read of large numbers of people who are effectively, if not formally, senior civil servants, arranging their affairs (usually by the creation of a nonce company, possibly in the name of their dog or some such) to avoid paying the tax that regular civil servants pay. People who are mostly getting paid in excess of £100,000, which even in these inflationary times is still a lot of money. I mourn the passing of the days when senior civil servants were in it to serve the public good, maybe collaring a bit of gong or other glory on the way, but not particularly in it for the money. The days when the civil service was a genteel place to work, somewhat removed from the rough and tumble of the world of business.

Particularly since it is far from clear to me that the coming of the rough and tumble over the past twenty years has done much to make the service more efficient. While it has certainly done much to inflate the salaries of those occupying the upper reaches and much to inflate the turnover of the management consultancies. Not to mention the way that senior staff brought it from the outside to populate the upper reaches are allowed to bring all their friends and relations in with them.

I allow that there is some force in the argument that it would be more healthy if pay and rations in public and private sectors were pretty much the same, job for job, and if there were more mobility between the two sectors. But jobs for life suited me - and I also think I gave good measure.