LIVE UPDATES: Budget 2013

“If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
If you pay buckets of gold, you get this lot”

“Up until recently, a middle-class 'professional' would typically leave university at about 25 (tax-payer funded) after a gap year and walk into an easy public service job. Many of them retiring at 55 with gold plated pensions. These people really knew how to play the system and grabbed every advantage you could imagine. A working life of just 30 years without ever putting a penny back into the system, compared to the 50 year's service of the typical blue collar working in production who ends up with a measly state pension and dies early.

If you look to politics, finance and public services, all you see is failure, incompetence and deceit being massively rewarded. Ordinary people know this and our youth are expected to spend their whole lives paying off this huge debt incurred by others.

In Leicester, where if you are lucky enough to find employment it is likely to be temporary and low paid, it was announced that we have one of the highest numbers of town hall staff in the UK earning more than £50,000. Yet council tax has gone up and council tax benefit has been reduced. A more realistic pay grading structure for all council workers would be: £12,000 p.a. for standard operatives, £18,000 p.a. for team leaders and £24,000 p.a. for heads and managers. No pension, no expenses claims or using work's time for union activities. 5 year time limit for every worker in office to avoid stagnancy and corrupt practises. You would save loads of money.

But when bureaucrats lose funding, their tactic is to cut visible front-line services, the few things that are actually beneficial to the public and the vulnerable. They force people to complain and provoke civil unrest. It is a way of protecting the layers of invisible bureaucrats and shifting blame towards the Government. Their priority should be reducing the tax and council tax burden for hard pressed workers, not giving themselves nice titles and positions.”