An understandable wave of shock ran through Britain last week when our new Government revealed the explosion in recent years of the pay given to our top public officials, 170 of whom now allegedly earn more than the Prime Minister. But the other side to this grotesque inflation in salaries is that it has been accompanied by a corresponding deterioration in the performance of almost every public body one can think of. One glaring example, not on last week’s list because it is not a government body, is the BBC, the head of which, Mark Thompson, now receives a staggering £834,000 a year. Twenty-odd years ago, as I learn from one of Mr Thompson’s predecessors, my old friend Alasdair Milne, the salary of the director-general was a mere £80,000, less than a tenth of what his successor now takes home in his wheelbarrow. Yet in almost every respect over the same period, the performance of the BBC’s bloated empire, awash with £3.5 billion a year of licence-payers cash, has declined, to the point where it has become a national scandal. The more its professional standards have fallen, the more puffed-up and pleased with themselves its grossly overpaid executives and celebrity presenters have become. I recall Mr Milne saying in the 1980s that the one issue on which the BBC was proud to have defied its charter obligation to impartiality, by adopting an unequivocally partisan position, was South Africa’s policy of apartheid. Yet since then the BBC has adopted a partisan agenda on so many issues, from the EU to Palestine, from its mindless “multiculturalism” to wind farms and global warming, that in many respects it has become no more than a gigantic engine of propaganda. There is scarcely a single subject on which we do not know exactly what is the “BBC line” and what it wants the rest of us to think. Another once-respected body which has suffered a catastrophic drop in its reputation – again not least thanks to its infatuation with global warming – is the Met Office, currently run by John Hirst on £170,000 a year (under the chairmanship of a former climate change activist Robert Napier, onetime head of WWF Europe). The hugely expensive computer models on which the Met Office relies for much of its prediction have become such a laughing stock that it was recently forced to drop its wildly inaccurate “seasonal forecasts” altogether. Yet these are the same models which for years have been relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to drive its great scare over global warming, by forecasting what the earth’s climate will be like 100 years into the future. The Met Office and its discredited computer models were also recently part of another massive official system failure, the volcanic ash fiasco, which in April cost the airline industry more than £2 billion. It has now been confirmed, at great expense, by the airlines themselves, that the closing down of Europe’s air traffic thanks to the Met Office computer was wholly unnecessary. As British Airways’ Willie Walsh put it, after 8,000 engine tests, “there was no ash”. The problem was that the official bodies responsible for air safety, including our own Civil Aviation Authority, had concocted a crazy new system which relies solely on the UK Met Office’s modelling of the direction of winds around Europe, without at the same time providing any means whereby specially equipped aircraft could be used to measure the density of the ash and thus whether it posed any genuine risk. This is why on Friday it was reported that EasyJet is to fit all its aircraft with monitoring equipment, to do a job which should have been done by the various bodies responsible for the new system, such as the CAA. Yet it is that hopelessly flawed system which is still in place, being defended by the likes of Dame Deirdre Hutton, the “quango queen” now running the CAA. (She was formerly head of the Foods Standards Agency and the National Consumer Council.) For this work, for which she has no practical qualification, she receives £130,000 a year, just for turning up at the office two days a week. Similar examples abound almost wherever you look across the public sector. When Adam Crozier recently stepped down as head of Royal Mail, he had presided over a disintegrating postal service and an industry in chaos, with post offices closing almost as fast as the price of stamps has risen. Yet his pay package last year, as reported on Friday, was an astonishing £2.4 million, even more than the wheelbarrow-load given to the head of the BBC. No Government department had more of its officials on the inflated-salary list than the Ministry of Defence, headed by the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, on £245,000 a year. Yet this is a ministry whose record in recent years has been one of almost unmitigated failure, ranging from the humiliations it has presided over in Iraq and Afghanistan to the billions it has wasted on buying inappropriate or wholly unnecessary equipment. One specific, truly shocking scandal was lately highlighted by Stuart Fisher, a Lincolnshire coroner, after hearing how in July last year Captain Daniel Shepherd had been blown up in Helmand after trying to defuse by hand an improvised explosive device (IED). Recording a verdict of “unlawful killing”, Mr Fisher said: “It seems to me to be crucially important that wherever possible those working in this desperately dangerous area should seek to use remote-controlled devices.” He urged the MoD to supply them to the Army as soon as possible. Mr Fisher was right in suggesting that this is a crucially important issue. Of the 250 British troops killed in action in Afghanistan, some 80 per cent, more than 200, have been blown up by IEDs, many trying to defuse these deadly devices by hand. What the coroner was clearly not aware of, however, was that other national forces in Afghanistan – Americans, Canadians, French, even the Italians – have been supplied with heavily-armoured mechanical equipment for mine clearance which makes the job of detecting and destroying IEDs infinitely safer. In particular, they use a combination of Huskies and giant Buffalo machines, supplied to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as early as 2003. These can spot and explode IEDs without having to send in men on foot such as Captain Shepherd, equipped with little more than hand-held mine detectors and their unbounded courage. The MoD announced that it was belatedly proposing to equip our troops in Afghanistan with Buffalos, available “off the shelf”, as long ago as October 2008. But stilll, it seems, not one has arrived in theatre. What makes this even more disturbing is that, until the 1990s, the British Army led the world in using machines for detecting and clearing mines, as it did in mine-protected patrol vehicles. But, under the Blair government, these were all sold off or given away, the last of them just when he and the MoD were sending to Iraq those unprotected Snatch Land Rovers in which so many soldiers needlessly died. Although the MoD was responsible for this deadly catalogue of failures long before he was promoted to his present post, the one man at the top of the MoD who could have had the clout to ensure that our troops in Afghanistan were equipped with mine-clearing machines as a top priority was Sir Jock Stirrup. But still, for lack of the Buffalos and Huskies that protect their allies, men like Captain Shepherd continue to die. Scarcely a day now goes by when we do not hear of another British soldier being blown up, usually by an IED. And still Sir Jock continues to draw his £245,000 a year. The more all these public servants are paid, it seems, the less they understand what it is the rest of us are paying them for.Quangos: the more we pay, the less we get
A grotesque inflation of salaries has gone hand in hand with
a deterioration of almost every public body , says Christopher Booker.
Sunday, 6 June 2010
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