Francis Maude, having successfully negotiated a pension rise for MP's and cabinet ministers, is now embarking on his next project - destroying the national pay rates for Civil Servants and replacing it with "local pay rates." This simply means that Civil Servants working in London and the South East will be paid much higher wages than those who work in those other areas of the country that don't count - i.e Wales and the North. The reason for this is quite simple, threadbare arguments about saving money apart - it is about entrenching the North-South divide and making sure that those areas who tend to vote Labour are suitably punished. A similar project is in the pipeline for health workers. This, Maude hopes, will destroy unity in these two organisations and open the way for privatisation by introducing an "affordable" pay scale for his rich mates when they take over. Of course most of this will fall on lower grade Civil Servants since the over-paid mandarins tend to live in London. Once more there is direct evidence that the Tory mantra, "We're all in this together," actually means pauperising ordinary wage earners to protect the rich and elevating inequality to the level of policy. Nor is austerity primarily aimed at reducing the deficit as the recent budget so graphically illustrated. It's primary aim is to reduce the tax burden of the rich funded by increasing poverty and severely curtailed services for ordinary people. Realising that the neoliberal economic theis has failed spectacularly, they are determined to handcuff us to its corpse in order to protect their money and privileges.
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