Public sector should accept a pay freeze

SOME £5.6 billion has been doled out to the public sector on ‘sweeteners’ according to a Freedom of Information request by the Taxpayers Alliance, and now this same public sector is carping about a possible pay freeze (with one or two worthy exceptions).

Since the Covid-19 scare started in March these people have been on FULL pay, including their ‘weighting’ allowances, even though most of them have been ‘working’ from home, so haven’t had the usual expense of travelling to their place of work and saving a fortune at the expense of the rest of us.

However the private sector, which in some cases has been helped by Mr Sunak’s furlough scheme (but by no means ALL, particularly some of the self employed, who are often described by politicians as being the ‘backbone’ of the economy) may soon be facing job losses and redundancies on a scale not witnessed for generations, without the ‘golden handshakes’ enjoyed by the public sector.

Now is the time for the public sector to step up to the plate and repay the rest of the nation for the sacrifices they have had to endure to keep them featherbedded from reality.

They should hang their heads in shame as they seem oblivious to anything that goes on outside their own little world.

It is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette’s attitude to the poor who had no bread, ‘so let them eat cake’, and she ended up being ‘cut down to size’.

Let’s hope the public sector take note. Now this WOULD be the sort of Whitehall cuts the rest of us would support.

Edward Kynaston Lydney, Gloucestershire