Culture of greed must end and equitable pay scales devised

From: Arthur Marson, Mountjoy Road, Huddersfield.

TALK is cheap. It is generally agreed that overspending is the cause of the present financial situation.

Our lords and masters and their predecessors in the public sector, who still refer to each other as Honourable and Right Honourable members are the ones who brought this about with their over-generous pay and pension awards to themselves.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

They seem unable or unwilling to accept that this is the case and make the usual mistake of trying to make savings at the bottom of the pay scale, instead of at the top. Going as far down as necessary to make the needed reductions.

This is the system that has been followed by most of the countries that now find themselves in the same predicament.

Too many of them play follow my leader, if someone is doing something it must be right and they do it too, regardless of the consequences. A large reduction could be made by reverting to unpaid councillors and making the top pay of council employees £100,000.

The culture of greed and envy must be abandoned and new equitable scales of pay, pensions and taxes devised. Until second pensions are made the responsibility of the employee, as with the self-employed, they should be based on multiples of the old age pension, which could and should be increased.

From: D Cooper, Chapelthorpe, Wakefield.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

SO James Bovington writes again (Yorkshire Post, December 1) telling us inter alia, that Germany is thoroughly democratic with the regions not ceding power to Berlin.

We are also castigated for dithering over £15m for Leeds city station, while Stuttgart is happily sending a E1bn. I Googled “Stuttgart population” and the first site was Wikipedia from which I clicked on to “Stuttgart 21” from where I reproduce a precis of some of the facts.

It is a controversial scheme instigated by politicians to modernise the link between Paris, Vienna, Stuttgart and Budapest. Stuttgart’s new logo is “The New Heart of Europe”. Construction was to start in February 2010 and overall costs not to exceed E4.5bn.

Frei Otto, one of the architects responsible for the project has called for it to be halted, as the ground is too unstable for such underground works and critics suggest that the costs could rise to E18.7bn. Since 2009, there have been weekly demonstrations on Monday evenings. On September 30, 2010 hundreds of demonstrators including children, were injured when police used water cannons, pepper spray and batons and the following day more than 50,000 demonstrated. On October 1, 2010, an estimated 100,000 demonstrated. I have seen on national TV reports of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Egypt and Syria, but nothing of 100,000 in Stuttgart.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

From a separate site, I note that the European Commission is providing E215m of funding.

From: Paul Andrews, The Beeches, Great Habton, York.

IN reply to Raymond Shaw’s letter (Yorkshire Post, December 7), I do remember the strikes and industrial chaos of the Seventies.

I recall sitting a law society exam in the David Lewis Theatre in Liverpool which had to be by candlelight because of a strike – I forget whether it was the power workers or the miners who were responsible. It was like going back to the Middle Ages.

By 1979 most people (including some union leaders) were tired of this situation, and wanted a change. We wanted to see the unions reformed, so that they could be taken out of the clutches of highly politicised Left-wing activists.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

To her credit, Mrs Thatcher did make the necessary change by banning strikes unless they were supported by a majority of workers in a secret ballot. This was successful and completely changed the attitude and outlook of most trade unions. However, this was not enough for her government.

Once they knew they had the upper hand, they vindictively persecuted the unions with more draconian measures and, with very little advance notice, suddenly withdrew subsidies from our historic heavy engineering and manufacturing industries where the unions had a strong power base, with the result that they went to the wall. Mrs Thatcher had thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

If voters had known that this is what she had had in mind in 1979, she would not have been elected.

Related topics: