Britain's corrupted civil service.

In my post of yesterday on the truly horrendous scale of Britain's debt I concluded with an attack against the country's political classes who have brought this disaster about. In catching up with other blogging over the past weekend I ran into this post from the 'not born yesterday' blogger, John Ward, who now regularly, accurately and most entertainingly posts on 'The Slog' while retaining the former URL. Although Mr Ward has yet to draw the direct lines between EU corruption and its progeny within the UK administration he has very accurately homed in on the disgrace which is today represented by the upper echelons of the British Civil Service, by revealing that about an eigth of Britain's indebtedness is owed due to the pension commitments for 600,000 Whitehall mandarins and that this disgrace has been deliberately contrived and hidden. The following is a brief quote to provide the substance of his revelations: What the British public has not yet been told is that out of the £78,000 owed by every British domicile, fully £36,000 is down to under a fifth of the working population....and an obscene 24% of that, we understand from figures shown to us, involves an estimated 600,000 adults....or just 1% of the UK population. But how did this pension double-up happen - and why is nobody in a dock anywhere? In 2003, when asked the question directly, the Treasury lied: 'Projections of future expenditure on public service pensions are taken into account in the Treasury's long-term fiscal projections. They are sustainable' it replied. But in that same year, Matthew Young, a project director at the economics think tank Adam Smith Institute told the Daily Telegraph that "The Government's recruiting frenzy and the fact public sector wages are rising at twice the rate of private sector pay has made the situation far worse". Most of us reporting on politics and government are used to bare-faced lies masquerading as estimates, but in this particular instance we believe there was a concerted conspiracy on the part of the Sir Humphreys to not just lie about sustainability, but also about how much pension money taxpayers would have to stump up on their behalf. The mendacity chiefly involved the level of entitlement - and it is by no means a new development. The link for reading the entire posting is repeated here. The saving grace from this disgraceful state of affairs is that public pensions can be wholly or partially withdrawn by a renewed Parliament in a trice and virtually at a stroke of the pen, just as we have long advocated on this blog for many MPs and former Cabinet Ministers. The same is true for these "Sir Humhreys", terminating their pensions does not necessarily have to be accomplished by the recipient suffering a sharp drop at the end of a rope, although I imagine there will be many British subjects who will feel, looking at the state of their nation, that such would be their most deserved fate!