Snouts in the Trough

Britain’s top academics must be partying all the way to the bank now that they can charge their long-suffering students almost as much as they like. Around 950 of them earn more than the prime minister with such academic superstars as the head of Plymouth University (yes they apparently do have a university – probably just a rebadged poly) on £283,000 and the boss of Gloucestershire University (not normally ranked amongst the best in the world) on £229,000.

In fact, many of the bosses of former polytechnics and technical colleges have decided that they are worth massive salaries. Yet to achieve university status, all they did was lengthen most of their courses from 2 to 3 years without adding anything to the syllabus. Now that they are overcharging their students to support their own luxury lifestyles, it’s time to stop conning their students and bring their courses back to 2 years so that students don’t build up massive, unpayable debts. But that will never happen as our academics seem intent on pocketing all the fee increases themselves rather than looking to provide value for their students.

Our greedy, lying, thieving MPs are demanding a pay rise by claiming they’re underpaid as they ONLY get a £65,000 a year salary. But they actually get a lot more than that. For example, their pension scheme is so generous that you or I would have to put over £50,000 a year into our pension savings to get the same pension as our MPs. That takes us to £115,000 a year. Then they get over £90,000 a year to pay for staff. With many MPs employing their wives or other family members, at least £30,000 of this also goes into MPs’ pockets. Now we’re at £145,000 a year. They can easily pocket another £20,000 a year, tax-free in expenses by playing the system. Now it’s £165,000 a year. Finally, they have so little to do, that many have lucrative extra jobs earning up to £50,000 – jobs they could only get because they are MPs. So we’ve reached £215,000 a year. And they claim they’re not paid enough!

Monitor is the organisation set up by NuLabour to ensure that NHS trusts are properly run and provide a high standard of care. It was Monitor who turned a blind eye while mismanagement at the Stafford NHS Trust led to over 1,000 avoidable patient deaths. Even after the scale of the massacre became clear, Monitor’s overpaid, self-serving politically subservient bosses didn’t see any reason to do their jobs.

I’ve just reported the Royal Bournemouth NHS Trust to Monitor accusing the trust of financial mismanagement when awarding a building contract to arguably Britain’s most corrupt construction company, Kier Construction. In 2009, Kier received the largest fine of 112 construction companies for bid-rigging and overcharging on £3 billion of public-sector contracts. When I was an elected governor for the Royal Bournemouth NHS Trust, a whistleblower working for Kier contacted me to tell me that the hospital had been overcharged by Kier who had rigged a £5.3m+ contract with the hospital. No doubt, the well-paid bosses at Monitor will once again do absolutely nothing.

When I worked as a management consultant we went into many organisations which had the BOHICA (bend over, here it comes again) syndrome. Basically, their managers were so incompetent that they kept endlessly reorganising to cover up their own incompetence. That’s what happening in the NHS under the management of our useless, self-serving, thieving, lying politicians – endless (BOHICA) reorganisations wasting tens of  billions, achieving nothing but allowing politicians to go on TV claiming they’re taking action and improving services.

Now we’ve got the hopeless Andrew Lansley about to unleash fresh chaos on the NHS. The main job Lansley held before becoming a politician was working at the infamous Department for Trade and Industry (aka Department for Total Incompetence). Even Lansley’s colleagues have admitted to me that he’s a waste of skin. So NHS, bend over, here it comes again.

I recently went to the US with Virgin and paid a fair whack to travel in their Premium Economy section. It was awful. The staff were arrogant, unfriendly and unhelpful – more interested in chatting amongst themselves than serving their passengers. You almost had to beg to get a second glass of wine with your meal.

It all reminded me of the 12 years I had to fly with BA most weeks for work and had to put up with BA’s appalling, overpaid, underperforming, stuck-up idiots masquerading as flight attendants. I wonder if Virgin have been hiring some of BA’s awful staff – it certainly felt like it.