How Baroness ‘The Pig’ Ashton has her snout deep in the trough of our money

Britain’s Baroness ‘The Pig’ Ashton has been widely criticised for her performance as�head of the EU’s diplomatic service. One newspaper called her �the laughing stock of the EU�; a member of the European Parliament quipped, �last year she was unknown in Britain. Today she is unknown all over Europe� and�a fellow Labour baroness remarked, �she is more suited to run a parish council than a major European institution�.

But being apparently�useless and incompetent has been no barrier to ‘The Pig’ getting very very rich at our expense.

With her salary of around �230,000 a year, she is one of the highest paid politicians in the world. In fact, she earns almost as much as the US President who gets in the region of �260,000 a year and she�s way ahead of her US counterpart, Hilary Clinton, on a modest �124,000 a year. Lady Ashton also has around �38,000 a year for accommodation, �10,000 for entertainment, a couple of chauffeurs and tens of thousands of pounds more in other allowances and relocation expenses.

Moreover, she has the choice of paying UK taxes or much lower EU taxes. Displaying that solidarity with working people that seems to be so sadly lacking in those who have supposedly dedicated their lives to �public service�, it appears the good baroness will be saving herself around �40,000 a year by plumping for paying the less onerous EU taxes. Moreover, if�’The Pig’�keeps her job for just five years, she will reportedly get a golden handshake of �464,000 in addition to her �64,000 pension for life. This �64,000 pension for life is equivalent to having a pension pot of about �1.8 million. It is as if we taxpayers had put �366,000 into Baroness Ashton�s pension pot for every year spent in Brussels. This is, of course, in addition to the huge pension entitlements the good baroness would have accumulated from all her public-sector posts in the UK. For many years to come, British taxpayers are going to be paying an awful lot of money ensuring that Baroness Ashton has a multimillionaire lifestyle that is probably unimaginable to those whose taxes will go into ‘The Pig�s’ brimming bank account.