The curse of bureaucratic self-importance

Good stuff from Ross Clark in last week’s magazine about the extraordinary amounts of money wasted by our local councils, largely – as every newspaper has subsequently reported – on themselves. In a sense while the humungous salaries of the chief executives are indeed infuriating, it is the massive increase in salaries lower down the chain which ensure we pay crippling council bills. Councils have presided over an exponential increase in staff earning 50k and more.

And it’s not just councils and not just the public sector. This morning my local station was “inspected” by Southeastern trains; fellow commuters counted ten of the uniformed fuckers, wandering around with clipboards. What a fabulous waste of money, and one of the reasons why it’s twenty quid return to travel the half an hour into London and back. I suppose if it were a First Great Western station there’d have been a hundred of them, mind.

But while local councils point, spuriously, to the “market” to justify the salaries of their bigwigs, private companies are not above borrowing the bureaucratic self-importance of the public sector when it suits them.