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On Politics And Games That Politicians Play

Thomas Mathew writes: Since the scandal surrounding the abuse of parliamentary expenses by our servants of the people broke out in Britain we now know that politicians are mostly obsessed with securing a certain type of life style for themselves. We also know that they have no real interest in trying to improve the quality of life of others, whatever the colour of their political flag. And now we are told by political leaders that we will all have to make sacrifices to pay for their mistakes and blunders by accepting cuts in public spending in the near future.

The politicians know that there are many ways of saving money, apart from starving public services, but they prefer the easy options. None of them have the moral courage to follow the lead of Mr Peter Davies, a retired schoolmaster, who by a narrow margin was unexpectedly elected three months ago as an executive mayor of the once impregnable and famously corrupt Labour citadel of Doncaster.

Davies is a proud Yorkshireman, who tries to live by his conscience. Within a week of taking office he had slashed his own salary from £73,000 to £30,000, scrapped the mayoral limousine and abolished the council’s free newspaper. Better still, he has written to the Electoral Commission asking them to scrap two-thirds of Doncaster’s 63 council seats in order to save the town £800,000 a year.

‘If Pittsburgh can manage with 9 councillors, why do we need 63?’ he asked. ‘They each get a basic salary of £12,590 and we only have eight council meetings a year anyway.’

He also wants to scrap all ‘non-jobs’ in his 13,500 workforce – such as platinum-pensioned ‘community cohesion officers’ – and aims to shrivel future pay deals of council executives.

He is also in the process of ‘de-twinning’ Doncaster from its five twin towns around the world. Twinning, he says, is all about free holidays for councillors and their staff.I could go on and on about how Mr Davies is bringing about serious reforms in the council offices of Doncaster, which are designed to reduce the council tax burden on the local community and to improve the quality of their lives.

But do you believe for one moment that the main political parties in Westminster might follow Mr Davies’s example and announce similar types of savings? No, of course not. It would be paramount to political suicide for them as they love their perks and would not dare of upsetting the public sector.

The policy of New Labour was to pour public money into loony schemes and create as many non-jobs as possible in the public sector so that they could artificially ‘lower’ unemployment and create a fifth column of voters who would support them in elections. Given that the unemployed are in effect public workers too, as they are paid not to work using taxpayers’ money, why do we not include public sector workers in unemployment statistics and have a real picture of what is going on in the labour market.

I suggest this so that the electorate might realise the extent of the damage already done by New Labour to this country’s economy. And make no mistake, if the Tories come to power next year they would not dare to cut the numbers of public workers dramatically.

Sadly, in this present climate we cannot expect that Mr Davies’s example will make any difference to the thinking of the members of the various main political parties.

– End -

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