Civil Servants Pay

Today, a big announcement, the renumeration packages of all people working in the public sector who earn more than the PM's salary.

The government are presenting this as a case of honesty and transparency. There's certainly an aspect of that, but it's also very clear that they're trying to set into the public mind the idea that those in the public sector are overpaid.

You can see this is going on because, to start with, there's the cynical line about "more than the PM's salary". Yes, the PM's salary is £142,000. But the PM also earns another £60,000 as his MP's salary, putting his overall income abover £200,000. And all of the figures published today are "overall income". So, if you want to present a fair comparison of "Hey, look, all these people earn more than the PM", you'd discover that, in fact, it's about 20 people, not the 170 that the government are pushing.

Apart from this cynicism from the government, what is the point of publishing this list? Well, almost nothing, I think. Full transparency across the full spectrum would be nice, of course. I don't think anyone should be coy, or should need to be coy, about what they earn, and if someone else actually cares the information should be public. But that's not just in the public sector; and that's not just high earners. It's a bit weird that it's just high earners.

The other thing it tells us, oddly, is that the public sector really isn't that obscenely overpaid, at least at the very top levels. The people running multi-billion pound organisations in the public sector, and running the country, earn a hell of a lot less than the equivalent jobs in the private sector, and will never have the opportunities for share options and bonuses that those brilliant men who run Northern Rock or BP or BA will.

I imagine the relative job security of the civil service, along with perhaps a sense of public duty, will be the only things that keeps the high-quality people in these kinds of jobs. The sense of public duty will weaken every time a real attack, or a coded attack like this, comes in on the people who run the public sector, and I suspect the Tories are working to lower the job security, too. That can't be a good thing.

It's simple and trite and easy populism to attack high earners in the public sector, but, frankly, I suspect it's very counterproductive in the long term no matter how much it appeals to the public at large in the short term. It's almost Blairite in its populist stupidity.