Extravagant last gestures of the fading Gordon Brown regime was a bonus bonanza for fat cat civil service bosses.
Speaking in his first television interview since becoming Prime Minister last week, Mr Cameron said around £15million was being handed to three-quarters of Whitehall senior civil servants in annual bonuses this year.“I mean, giving something like 75 per cent of senior civil servants bonuses after everything that’s happened in the current year. Frankly that’s not a fiscal stimulus – it’s a crazy thing to do.”
He said: “We’re going to take action to stop the very bad decisions that were taken in the dying days of the last Labour government.
“They had planned an enormous range of bonuses for civil servants. Now we can’t stop them in respect of the year that has passed, but for the future we’re going to severely restrict them, cut them by something like two- thirds.”
Senior Tories have long feared that Mr Brown was carrying out a “scorched earth policy” designed to lay waste to the public finances, leaving a mess for his successors.
Hat/Tip to > Barking Spider
It serves always to distract the public councils and feeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration to confine themselves with in their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.
If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."
…George Washington’s Farewell Address…
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