WINNERS

The general fund

Finally, the order for Thailand’s only female ex-prime minister to hand over a cheque for 35.7 billion-with-a-”b” baht has gone out — and her cheque is almost certainly in the mail to cover it. The country is going to be so much better off with that kind of gelt back in the treasury. It turned out Prime Minister Prayut Chano-cha was way, way too busy to sign that order by the way. He suggested Deputy Finance Minister Wisudhi Srisuphan and permanent secretary for finance Somchai Sujjapongse sign the bill and get it to the former premier. That’s because the persons who actually signed the bill will be the ones sitting in court when the lawsuits start. The invoice specified two years of horrible supervision of rice purchases totalling 178 billion baht, and her responsibility as national leader is exactly 20%.

The wages of labour

The government’s Central Wage Committee debated how much it liked minimum-wage workers, and came up with this: Starting in January, the CWC will buy most of the nation’s workers one lunch of kuay teow gai (noodles with chicken) and a glass of water, every two weeks. Not literally, but that’s the effect of a daily rise in the daily minimum wage from 300 to 305 baht. Save the pay rise for two weeks, and you have a free lunch. Sort of. Other workers in some provinces are to get eight and even, in Bangkok, as much as a stunning 10 baht pay rise, per day. Workers were overcome by the decision, although they didn’t use the word “generous”. A realistic Tanit Sorat, the president of the Employers Confederation of Thai Trade and Industry, said he was satisfied, and why wouldn’t he be?

Censorship

This is the first and quite possibly last time you ever will see such an outrageous statement on this page, but the government got a bad rap on censorship last week. The media restrictions during the mourning of His Majesty King Bhumibol were well publicised. But foreign media couldn’t handle that. “BBC, Al Jazeera blocked” was the sort-of standard headline, maddening because it is technically correct and still wrong. TrueVisions pay-TV decided to try to block foreign news coverage mentioning Thailand, but without government instruction about it. All other pay-TV and satellite services were unaffected and no news or social media websites were banned or interfered with. Truth is “Thailand” didn’t block a thing, and it’s careless of media who implied the government did it.