Tag Archives: real-terms

One rule for them: shocking government double-standard over pay is revealed

Under a cloud: considering the number of MPs who work long hours on multiple secondary jobs, it’s a wonder any of them ever have time to set foot in this place at all.

Once again Rishi Sunak is undermined by the behaviour of his own MPs.

In the week he insisted that a below-inflation, six per cent pay rise for junior doctors (meaning it is a real-terms pay cut) is not negotiable, the obscenely inflated amounts his fellow Tories (and a couple of others) earn from secondary employment have been revealed.

And some MPs are saying they need the extra cash from these second jobs because they can’t make ends meet otherwise.

Their MP salaries put these people among the highest-paid in the UK and they still reckon they can’t live without having more. They cannot justify this while pushing down pay for public sector workers including the junior doctors.

Here’s Sunak, follow by commentary that puts him right in his place by the great Peter Stefanovic:

The pay imposition means that, depending on their experience, junior doctors will receive a raise of between £3,000 and £3,700 per year (rising to £32,300 and £43,900 respectively).

If that seems like a lot, bear in mind that these are highly-skilled jobs for which they spend many years in training.

MPs, on the other hand, are unskilled; you don’t need any training for the job – you just need to persuade people to elect you.

Then you receive £86,584 a year as your basic wage (this is the figure as of April 2023), rising to £167,391 (as far as I can tell) if you are prime minister Rishi Sunak.

This puts him in the top one per cent of earners – and all MPs in the top two per cent.

And still they want more.

Sky News has published an exhaustive list of MPs’ earnings from second jobs, and it is a catalogue of greed, with those who have held ministerial jobs among the top earners. Now why would that be…?

The article states:

MPs with second jobs have an average wage of £233 per hour, Sky News can reveal.

The typical rate for MPs is 17 times the national average – and over 22 higher than the minimum hourly wage.

Indeed. According to the pay deal Sunak is determined to impose, junior doctors will get just £14 per hour, which is only slightly better than the absolute minimum wage.

Ms Truss’s most lucrative work since leaving Number 10 has been a speech in Taiwan. She was paid at a rate of £20,000 per hour – nearly 1,500 times the UK average hourly wage – for her insights into global diplomacy.

Even higher than Ms Truss is Boris Johnson, who resigned as an MP last month. His hourly rate comes in at £21,822, but having left parliament, he is free to work without having to publicly record his earnings.

The leaderboard of the MPs with the 20 highest hourly rates in this parliament reveals a clear pattern: 18 have government experience, suggesting a ministerial background is valued by some employers.

Or it means employers have been paying them in order to influence their decision as ministers?

Here’s Sky‘s Sam Coates explaining it:

Let’s have a look at the list.

Top is Boris Johnson (Conservative) – now an ex-MP after one Partygate scandal too many. He worked 117 hours outside Parliament and earned £2.5 million. That’s £21,800 per hour.

Then:

Liz Truss (Conservative): 12 hours, £189,200, £15,700 per hour.

Alok Sharma (Conservative): four hours, £20,000, £5,000 per hour.

Theresa May (Conservative): 622 hours – that’s nearly 12 solid working weeks! £2.7 million, £4,400 per hour.

Fiona Bruce (not the broadcaster)(Conservative): 245 hours, £733,100, £2,900 per hour.

Sajid Javid (Conservative): 174 hours, £412,300, £2,300 per hour.

Julian Smith (Conservative): 67 hours, £147,800, £2,100 per hour.

Greg Clark (Conservative): 14 hours, £17,770, £1,200 per hour.

Ian Blackford (Scottish National Party): 31 hours, £38,120, £1,200 per hour.

Michael Gove (Conservative): three hours, £3,100, £1000 per hour.

The next 10 are all Conservatives, most notably including Sir Geoffrey Cox at 12 (2,560 hours, £2.4 million, £960 per hour). This means he worked nearly 49 weeks solidly for other employers than Parliament. Has he actually turned up to represent his constituents at all? Even if he has, how can he be expected to have done a good job, working full-time for other employers?

And Jacob Rees-Mogg is at 18 (123 hours, £92,910, £750 per hour).

Some MPs are saying they need multiple jobs because the current salary isn’t enough for them. One can only agree with Richard Burgon:

Nor does our democracy need Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who earns almost as much in a week as many of us do in a year, and wants employers to push your wages through the floor. Here’s Jon Trickett:

Yes it is. “Do as I say – take home rapidly-decreasing remuneration for the grinding hours of hard work that you do, while I spend increasingly less time in the job where I’m supposed to represent your best interests so I can moonlight for the big corps and earn 17 times as much as you.”

Put like that, do you think you’re getting value for money from your Tory MP?

I don’t.

Note this also:

Now consider this:

These are the kind of people we need in Parliament. But Keir Starmer is doing his best to purge Labour of its left wing in order to make it into his dream: a Substitute Tory Party (STP). The SNP is incapable of forming a government because it would never have enough MPs. And the Green Party is habitually ignored by voters who think they have to support Labour or the Tories because their choice is the only one they think can keep the other one out.

Without better representation, the situation described by Robert Peston below will worsen:

Finally: the information provided in this article is vital for anybody in the UK who has a vote. It tells you what you need to know in order to make an informed decision when you come to vote. But I can predict that only around 200 people will read it.

This is because Vox Political must depend on the social media platforms for articles to be seen, and they are run by corporations that depend on other corporations’ advertising revenue to make their own profits, and fear regulation by a right-wing government that wishes to suppress dissenting viewpoints. So of the 42,000+ people who supposedly like This Site’s page on Facebook, only around 300 will actually see the link to this article on their newsfeed.

This is how Sunak, Bailey and the other greedy fatcats keep you down:

By making sure you don’t know how to impose change.


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BBC whitewashes ‘government propaganda’ NHS story

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Back at the end of September the BBC News website ran a story on 91-year-old Harry Smith’s speech to the Labour Party Conference, in which he detailed the miserable state of healthcare before the arrival of the NHS and stated his fears for the future of the service under the Conservative Party.

This was all fine. What a shame Auntie’s unnamed reporter had to spoil it by adding in two extra paragraphs that parroted – almost word-for-word – comments made by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt that seemed to contradict what Mr Smith had said. Tom Pride, over at Pride’s Purge, put the statements into an image, allowing people to compare Mr Hunt’s statements with the BBC’s. That image is reproduced again here:

bbc-hunt-quotes1

The BBC report was clearly paraphrasing Mr Hunt’s words. No attempt was made to indicate that this was the government’s side of the issue; the offending paragraphs were stationed at the end – as statements of facts that contradict Mr Smith’s words.

That’s blatant government propaganda, in the view of this blog – especially as both statements are false.

That’s right – analyse the facts and Mr Hunt’s/the BBC’s assertions fall apart.

Did the government increase NHS spending in the UK? The BBC attitude was that it has, because the amount of money spent on the NHS – in England alone – has increased.

But Mr Smith wasn’t talking about England alone. Look at the BBC article (which has been revised since Vox Political complained) and you’ll see he refers to “the Britain of my youth”. The final paragraph (as it is now) does not separate England from the rest of the UK.

You may think that’s nit-picking. Try this instead: A “money-terms” increase in NHS spending is not what the Coalition government promised. The Coalition Agreement of 2010 promised a “real-terms” increase and that is what Jeremy Hunt said had happened in the comment from 2012. But spending on the NHS has fallen in real terms.

The BBC’s complaints director, Richard Hutt, in a letter of October 31, admitted as much: “My research suggests that spending on the NHS has increased marginally in terms of the amount of money spent… but as you are aware, if GDP deflators are applied a slight decrease is shown.”

But, following on from a previous BBC response in which we were told, “your blog talks about real-terms spending. Our original article did not, and had we wished to refer to real-terms spending, we would have said so,” he continued: “Nothing in the article indicated that the intention was to refer to “real-terms” spending and so I have difficulty in agreeing that this is how it would have been understood.”

Then what was the point of mentioning spending at all?

The promise was to increase “real-terms” spending, and “real-terms” spending has in fact decreased. Any reference to spending other than in “real-terms” is therefore irrelevant to the debate and can only confuse the issue in the minds of the public.

In the face of the facts, Mr Hutt – it seems – isn’t having this. Doesn’t that suggest that he has been told to whitewash the BBC – deny any wrong-doing, no matter what?

Let’s move on.

Does the Coalition support the founding value of the NHS that nobody, regardless of income, should be deprived of the best care? The easy answer to this is no, it doesn’t.

It was the work of a moment on a search engine to find a story demonstrating the opposite. It was this Daily Mail article, detailing the predicament of a gentleman who has been forced to pay £450 per month because his local Clinical Commissioning Group (brought into being by the Coalition government) would not provide him with a drug that is available free on the NHS elsewhere in England. Ironically, the cash-starved NHS in Wales is reported to have agreed to provide the drug.

In response, the BBC changed the wording of the last paragraph slightly, claiming that this changed the meaning. It didn’t.

The BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit has done nothing but whitewash its story.

Never mind; there was still one more bullet in our gun. An email has just been sent to Mr Hutt, pointing out the words of Tom Pride that kicked off the whole affair:

“These are not facts. They are the opinions of a government minister being reported as facts by the BBC.

“That’s not news. It’s propaganda.

“Mind you, I don’t know why the reporter who wrote the article is so keen to remain anonymous.

“I mean, we all know that the reporting of unattributed propaganda from government ministers is a sackable offence for professional journalists in reputable news organisations.”

It’s best not to expect a reasonable response.

It’s clear we aren’t dealing with a reputable news organisation at all.

The Conservative Party – nasty, stupid and clumsy

Is this the face of a 'Caring' Conservative? Or is he nasty and clumsy? And if he is, does that mean the supporters behind him are stupid?

Is this the face of a ‘Caring’ Conservative? Or is he nasty and clumsy? And if he is, does that mean the supporters behind him are stupid?

Independent luminary Andreas Whittam Smith reckons the Conservative Party in its current form is both nasty and stupid – and also clumsy, if his latest article is to be believed.

Nasty because of its aggressive behaviour – such as the decision to withdraw support for rescue operations that save thousands of migrants from drowning as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

Or because of benefit assessment policies that mean people living with progressive and degenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s, motor neurone disease and rheumatoid arthritis are being subjected to what a group of charities describes as “upsetting and unnecessary” examinations to see whether they will recover enough to look for work in the future – a pointless exercise because their conditions are flagged up from the start as progressive and degenerative; they’re never going to get better.

Or because, after the Resolution Foundation found that one-in-five employees (4.9 million people) earned less than the living wage, George Osborne is promising that if the Conservative Party wins next year’s general election, then most welfare payments that the working poor rely on – including child benefit, tax credits, jobseeker’s allowance, housing benefit and income support – will be frozen in April 2016 for two years. They are currently rising by 1 per cent a year. He will make the working poor poorer.

zTorypromise

Clumsy because they have imposed unpopular decisions on the people in an unfair way. Mr Whittam Smith defines fairness in terms of “the four main elements that go into creating a sense of procedural justice: Those concerned should have been able to play an active part in the process. The rules should be applied with sensitivity to individual situations. Decision-makers should be impartial and fair. And the agents of the system with whom people have to deal should treat them with respect.”

He continues: “There is no evidence that people living with progressive and degenerative conditions or members of the working poor or families struggling to pay care bills for elderly relatives have been consulted. There is no evidence of sensitivity to individual situations or else the bedroom tax legislation would have recognised the special difficulties of disabled tenants who are unable to share a bedroom and would have taken into account where homes have been specially adapted.

“As for the agents of the system with whom people have to deal, outsourcing many of these tasks has not produced happy results. Naturally the outsourced staff work by the book. They cannot be flexible or understanding. They are chiefly concerned with getting the job done as quickly as possible so as to reach the profits targets set by their employers. And then, in the final analysis, claimants are not dealing directly with the state at all but with a sort or mercenary army. Mutual respect cannot exist in these circumstances.”

Let’s expand on the last point for a moment, and connect it with the previous points about benefit assessment, with this snippet of information: An academic report from Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Stirling has confirmed that the Tories’ welfare reforms are not helping people to find work.

According to Alan Wyllie on the A Working Class Man blog, the report showed:

  • “The current welfare system is not helping people find work. Those who had moved into employment found work independently and not due to Jobcentre Plus services;
  • “There was limited support on offer to help recipients of out of work benefits move into work. Those participating in the Work Programme did not report that it was helpful;
  • “Most people wanted to work but issues such as childcare, illness and training made it difficult for them to do so;
  • “The current welfare system also does not appear to meet its aim of ‘make work pay’. People who had moved into work felt only slightly better off and continued to find it difficult to make ends meet;
  • “Benefit freezes or restricted increases have meant falling real-term incomes, with many study participants finding it hard to meet basic needs.

“The report concludes that: ‘Participants with a health condition or a disability, and those who were lone parents, reported that they wanted to be in work but faced considerable barriers to doing so, which were unlikely to be addressed by increasing conditionality.

“’According to the views of participants, stronger conditionality is unlikely to get more people into work, due to a lack of suitable work and barriers in the areas of education, skills, employability, childcare and health.’

“The researchers found that claimants who did not abide by the new conditions faced serious consequences.

“’The impact on benefit recipients who fall foul of new rules – or who are affected by a mistake on the part of a benefits agency that is not their fault – can be severe,’ they said.”

That’s nasty – not only have benefit changes been forced onto people without any regard for them, but they don’t even work.

However, this – moving back to Mr Whittam Smith – may be the Tories’ downfall. He points out: “Nowadays we are no longer a homogenous mass but an agglomeration of minorities. In my own circle of family and friends, for instance, there are people who are disabled and others with serious illnesses. There are those who are single parents, others who are retired. There are middle-aged people with back-breaking mortgages, others who are and young and ambitious. There are regular Church-goers as well as non-believers. There are people in jobs, and people who cannot find work. There are Londoners who can’t conceive of living anywhere else (I am one of these), and people who resent the capital city and all its works.

“Each of these minorities has its own particular concerns and needs, prejudices and resentments, but yet feels sympathy for any group that is badly treated.

“The Coalition led by its Conservative ministers has often gone about its work in an unfeeling, insensitive manner. And for that shortcoming there could be a price to pay at the next general election.”

Quite so – especially as they came into government under the banner of ‘Compassionate Conservatism’. What a terrible joke.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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