cut public sector pensions and perks!

With the change of government in the UK, Allegra is pleased that there is going to be a massive drive to cut public spending in order to deal with a national debt requiring interest payments far in excess of several department budgets, but she is not pleased that the first step was to set up a new Office of Budget Responsibility to review the situation, no doubt hiring more bureaucrats who will no doubt take much longer than the five months proposed for it to review the situation and who will add to the existing public pension fiasco.

"Public sector pensions are one of the biggest drains on the public purse and they need to be overhauled," says Allegra. "A fund needs to be built-up like we have in the private sector, it is wrong that bureaucrats receive special pensions paid from the public purse – they should provide for themselves like we do.”

"The government can follow the example of private companies and change the generous final salary schemes into defined benefit schemes," explains Allegra. "We taxpayers just cannot afford to keep on paying over-inflated pensions to bureaucrats in the current ponzi scheme where your grandchildren and mine will be paying for them.”

"I also think Mr. Cameron and his parliamentary colleagues should start with themselves," adds Allegra. "Millionaire parliamentarians should not be able to claim off the public purse money paid for home maintenance and 2nd home mortgage interest payments - and a host of other travel, lunch, mail and entertainment perks and allowances. This sort of thing is a gross abrogation of power and privilege. Most of them, being millionaires, do not need a public pension - it should be means tested."

"Also, there should be an immediate stop to public sector worker pay increases," says Allegra, "and their pay should be in line with that of private workers. It is unfair that private sector workers are subjected to minimum wage laws, but public sector workers are not - especially when their jobs are secure for life, but ours aren't."

"You know, Canada put in place a successful deficit-reduction plan in the early 1990s that included increasing service charges and handing some services over to the private sector," says Allegra. "If all pen-pushing public sector jobs were eliminated and a private company was hired to do this work, then that would offload all of their pension pots to the private company, not the taxpayer!"

"And, if Mr. Cameron wanted to be really radical," laughs Allegra, "he could include the Queen and the whole royal retinue to this review, because the monarchy just adds another level of government to a system that is already bloated with parasites."


Read more by Allegra:

Cameron should cut upper crust welfare!

Cameron cuts welfare benefits?

cut military spending, the real terror is here, no...

cut foreign aid, charity begins at home

golden generation vs. boomers

The Golden Generation appear to be outliving their Boomer children and now that she is 60, retired and has time to think, Marina has come to the conclusion that her parents’ generation used WWII as emotional blackmail to justify massive exploitation and used her generation as the scapegoats for all of the world’s ills that they, not the Boomers, caused.

“With apologies to the few real war heroes, who truly deserve our respect – like my dad, who returned injured and died before his time -- I want to expose the rest of this generation as undeserving frauds, peddling endless war films and veterans’ marches to glorify themselves at our expense.”

“The Golden Generation never suffered unemployment throughout their lives as we and our children have – there was no globalization, their jobs were protected by tariffs and the union movement – and most important of all, they had very little competition because the world was a smaller place back then and millions of talented people had been wiped out by the war.”

“The Golden Generation never suffered housing or land shortages when they were starting a family. Many were given land grants for free! They built ranches; they had holiday homes, and double garages. They paid off their mortgages early and easily. They had drive-in movies, supermarkets a block long; vast tracks of wilderness to escape to and more recreational facilities per person than we can dream of. They deserved it – they fought for freedom!”

“The Golden Generation never suffered prohibition in their working years – they drank, smoked and did drugs with impunity, on and off the job. They deserved it – they fought for freedom!”

“The Golden Generation never suffered population control or family size worries in their fertile years – they procreated freely and easily, producing the unlucky Baby Boomers, a generation the size of which has never been seen before or since. They deserved it – they fought for freedom!”

“The Golden Generation never suffered racial or religious or other PC prohibitions in their working years – they called a spade a spade, so to speak, and protected their suburbs and borders from outsiders. They deserved it – they fought for freedom!”

“The Golden Generation never suffered environmental prohibitions in their working years – they slashed, mined and burned merrily, destroyed forests, polluted the land, air and waterways, hunted other species to extinction and littered the world with discarded motor vehicles which they still insist on their right to own and drive into dotage. They deserve it – they fought for freedom!”

“In fighting for freedom, are they proud of the overpopulated, under-serviced and horribly polluted world they left us necessitating loss of OUR freedoms?”

commonwealth guinea-pigs?

In a short time -- on July 1st 2007 to be precise -- the UK will have completed enacting smoking bans that it first tested on its commonwealth cousins in Canada and Australia almost a decade ago, and Marrielle is hoping that these bans will fail miserably because social life in the cold and hot extremities of Her Majesty's Commonwealth has degenerated dramatically since the bans and she wants to return home permanently to a sane community.

"I've been overseas on and off since I left school, backpacking and working in various places, and generally avoiding northern winters," says Marrielle. "When I've been home in the past it's just to touch base -- say hello to my family, and catch up with old friends -- and during these visits I've increasingly noticed the differences rather than the similarities between the UK and the commonwealth nations."

"Sure, both nations were forged by British immigrants -- mostly convicts in Australia's case -- and there's hardly a family in the UK that doesn't have a relative in Canada or Australia," says Marrielle, "but the old deference to the UK -- the colonial cringe mentality -- is breaking down."

"I think that just about every new social engineering policy that Westminster thinks up gets tested in Canada or Australia before it's foisted on the people at home," says Marrielle. "It's almost as if we've been using these commonwealth countries as guinea-pigs, and they don't like it."

"I'm ready to come home permanently because I don't feel as welcome in the commonwealth countries as I once did," explains Marrielle, "and also because their governments are becoming repressive -- far more so than in the UK -- and people here do blame the UK for all the changes they've had to put up with."

"Because their populations are minuscule compared with ours, Canada and Australia provide an ideal social laboratory for testing new laws that the UK eventually wants to bring in at home," says Marrielle, "and people here don't like being guinea pigs."

"I believe that some of the social experiments carried out in Canada and Australia are not going to wash in the UK -- at least I hope so -- because of geography and ethnic mixes."

"You could drop the UK in the middle of Canada or Australia and it wouldn't make a dent," laughs Marrielle. "Both countries are absolutely h-u-g-e, nobody thinks twice about traveling a hundred miles or more to a party, and because of their land masses the people are really not as cohesive as we are in the UK."

"What social experiments am I talking about? Well, two that come to mind are raising the age of retirement (and eligibility for pension) for women from 60 to 65 -- which came into force in Australia a few years ago; and the draconian smoking bans which came into force in both commonwealth countries much earlier."

"Because the number of women affected by the raised age of retirement in Australia is very small, the change has not caused riots in the street," explains Marrielle, "but imagine its affect in the UK. When I told my mother she freaked out and said that they wouldn't dare bring that law into England. I bet they will, and there's even talk of raising the retirement age for both men and women to 70 (another Westminster experiment soon to take affect?)"

"The smoking bans as tested in Canada and Australia have had a mixed reception," says Marrielle. "In the big cities, where most people huddle, there has been a considerable backlash but people have settled down begrudgingly over the years to the new draconian regime."

"Everywhere else, though, life goes on as usual and people couldn't give a stuff about the smoking bans," laughs Marrielle. "So, if the UK government thinks that its non-smoking experiment in these countries will relate to the UK -- especially England -- then I believe it is in for a big surprise."

"The big cities in Canada and especially Australia have a FAR greater proportion of immigrants than our big cities do and this matters," explains Marrielle, "because their immigrants are vastly different to ours in ethnicity, social class and compliancy. They do what they are told to do without hesitation."

"I don't smoke myself, thank God for small mercies," laughs Marrielle, "but my boyfriend does and he agrees that there are far too many smokers in the UK -- far too many people generally, and far too many smoking immigrants -- for the smoking ban to work in the UK as well as it SEEMS to have done in Canada and Australia."

"Besides which," laughs Marrielle, "since when have the English been slaves to Westminster? It's supposed to be the other way around, isn't it?"

"Let the Irish, Scots and Welsh do what they want to do," says Marrielle, "they're a law unto themselves and good luck to them. We English have a reputation of freedom to uphold and we're not going to let Labour's Nanny State dictate to us about what we can and cannot do in the same manner it seems to dictate to the commonwealth governments."

"By the time my boyfriend and I come home permanently I hope Labour has been kicked out on the issue of the smoking bans -- if not it's proposed surrender of what's left of Britain's sovereignty to the EU constitution," says Marrielle. "There are many ex-pat Brits around the world who desperately want to return to a recognizable homeland."

"I can't imagine my local pub without smokers," says Marrielle. "It didn't bother me when the smoking bans changed the local scene in other countries because it was alien to me to start off with, but it will most definitely affect us if we return and find a lot of prissy non-smokers hogging our local pub."

"Because my boyfriend smokes and I don't we've already discovered the joys, not, of trying to find accommodation that allows smoking," sighs Marrielle. "Sure, it would be easier if he quit, but he wouldn't be same person, he wouldn't be the person I love."

"I don't see how Westminster has any right to interfere in our private lives like this -- and especially so the private lives of people in commonwealth countries," adds Marrielle, "and the sooner we get back to a good old-fashioned Tory government the better."

"It's not that I don't think the commonwealth countries are capable of enacting laws of their own -- after all Canada was smart enough to keep out of the War on Terror," says Marrielle, "it's just that I truly believe these countries are being used as guinea-pigs for social experiments by the UK if not the USA."

"On the smoking issue, particularly, it is far too fishy that Canada and Australia enacted the bans about the same time -- and now the UK is going ahead with them full-steam."

"Don't tell me that these countries are the trend-setters and the UK is following them?" laughs Marrielle. "Of course not, and there's plenty of talk that the UK is still sending its 'convicts' to Australia and generally using the commonwealth countries to hide persons of interest."

"Another big issue the commonwealth countries have that the UK doesn't have is the indigenous populations," says Marrielle. "In both Canada and Australia the indigenous populations are becoming a vocal force, and even without the smoking bans (that they laugh at) they are fed up with white people telling them what they can and cannot do and see white settlement as a scourge."

"Scared of their indigenous populations -- and guilty about what they did to them in the past -- perhaps the commonwealth countries need the UK to continue being Big Brother for a long time into the future," adds Marrielle, "but if I were a citizen of Canada or Australia I'd be mending fences by joining forces with the indigenous people against the UK (not aggressively, of course) and going for a republic."

"Who knows what nasty social experiment the UK may foist on you next?"