Bonus issue
Sir: Ross Clark (‘Big bonuses in the public sector’, 21 February) summed up the challenge we face. The Institute of Fiscal Studies figure Clark quotes of a 12 per cent premium on public compared to private sector pay should be drilled into all taxpayers’ heads the way Mrs Thatcher used to hit Neil Kinnock with figures.
At a recent Conservative event, a member of the public suggested a riposte to Gordon Brown’s lame attempt to blame the current economic crisis all on the bankers: a blanket 30 per cent pay-cut for all public sector staff being paid over £150,000 and a 20 per cent cut for those on over £100,000. This would turn the ‘Cedric Brown fat cat’ pre-1997 Blair campaign back on Brown and his BBC cronies.
I could not possibly comment, other than to say those in the room from the bureaucrat class turned pale white!
Tony Devenish
Councillor, Westminster City Council
London SW1
Sir: Ross Clark just misses the bull’s-eye. It is not the big salaries paid to public sector fat cats that are the problem. It is the fact that the jobs were created in the first place.
There is no harm in paying good salaries to public sector employees provided both that they do a good job and that the job is necessary. But I have worked in the NHS for 40 years and since I qualified in 1969 the number of managerial posts has increased exponentially, like a metastatic cancer.
Both major political parties pay lip-service to decreasing management in the NHS, but none has yet made any significant move to do so. I wrote to Andrew Lansley recently, pointing out a specific example of several jobs in one NHS Trust that could be abolished without any loss of effectiveness. He took weeks to reply and then only to say that he had passed my letter on to a colleague. So don’t hold out much hope for action from the Tories.
Robin Jacoby
Bicester, Oxfordshire
The moral of the story
Sir: Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 14 February) asks where the moral is in Slumdog Millionaire. Isn’t it in the hero’s truthfulness and faithfulness and a cracking good love story?
The fact that he wins the money is irrelevant — even he doesn’t care any more — as he takes a guess at the question, knowing that he has won the girl.
Ben Bradshaw
House of Commons,
London SW1
Transferable experience
Sir: Lord Young (‘Health’n’safety everywhere — except in the banking system’, 14 February) says that when the Financial Services Authority was set up in 1997 ‘everyone who knew about bank supervision stayed with the bank; the FSA had to recruit new staff.’ In fact, when I left the Bank of England to establish the new authority, the supervision divisions came with me to the promised land of Canary Wharf — some 450 people in all. Many of them are still there.
Howard Davies
Director, London School of Economics
London WC2
Two tribes
Sir: Quentin Willson might have been converted to football (‘The zeal of the football convert’, 21 February), but how dull his experience was. The last time I went to a game in Ipswich we away fans adjourned to a nearby pub for a consoling pint (we’d lost). Instead of the ‘gestures of gentility’ he observed, we had to dive for cover when a brick was hurled through the window by Ipswich supporters. Then they invaded the pub. The place was ravaged: not a table or chair left unflattened, blood and beer mingling on the floor, one unconscious fan leaning against the bar. Happily, he was one of theirs. Which is the more ‘authentic footballing experience’?
Richard Holledge
London W14
Nantucket Graveyard
Sir: It is strange that, in a whole page devoted to American poets (And another thing, 21 February), Paul Johnson makes no mention of America’s most important 20th-century poet, Robert Lowell. It is stranger still that when he discusses poems about graveyards, Mr Johnson ignores Lowell’s ‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket’ — a far greater ‘masterpiece’ than the example cited by Longfellow.
Roger Billis
Plymouth, Devon
Spencer says
Sir: Following Dear Mary’s comments about Earl Spencer mispronouncing Althorp, I have a pretty clear recollection that, as part of his millennial celebrations, Earl Spencer formally announced the change of the pronunciation of his home’s name to reflect its spelling. If one assumes that he, as the current living occupier of the house, has the right to change the pronunciation of the name, then he is not ‘often heard to mispronounce’ it.
Peter Drummond
Bedham, West Sussex
Move goods, not people
Sir: Matthew Parris (Another voice, 14 February) claims that ‘if we say workers should not travel to “undercut” local labour markets, the corollary that cheaper goods should not travel to “undercut” locally produced goods cannot be far behind’. This is nonsense. Free trade has always meant trade in goods and services. It never meant unrestricted immigration, until the EEC brought that in to promote the integration of ‘Europe’, a political objective which has nothing to do with free trade.
John Stott
Devizes, Wiltshire
Lost in translation
Sir: I hope it is your editing rather than Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Meribel franglais’ (Any other business, 21 February) which has changed Christophe’s surname from Gormier to Gournier.
Alasdair MacKenzie
Muscat, Oman
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