TALES OF CLUNKING IDIOTS AND GREEDY BASTARDS

This might sound familiar, but as long as there are greedy bastards I will be castigating them. Till the day I snuff it, then.

I wrote about this elsewhere last year but now I need to get it out of my system again: Gordon Brown, the best Chancellor of recent times, is also a clunking idiot who should be ashamed of himself.

How can a Labour Chancellor, be it old or New, put up income tax for the poor and reduce it for the better-off? It makes me bloody livid. In his last act before becoming Prime Minister he cut the basic rate from 22 per cent to 20 per cent – great so far – and then abolished the 10 per cent starter rate for the low paid to ‘standardise’ the tax system.

It was announced last year and people moaned but nothing was done. And now it’s snuck up on us and the poor will be poorer still by the end of this week.

I pay the basic rate, but I’d be more than happy to keep my contribution at 22 per cent if it helped some poor hospital porter who can’t pay his bills. I wouldn’t put money on it, but I feel there are many more out there who would put fairness above selfishness.

All this comes as it is revealed that a handful of Lloyds TSB directors tucked away more than £12 million between them last year – and then awarded themselves inflation-busting pay rises of up to nine per cent in January. The greedy bastards.

Lloyds of course spouted all the usual garbage about having to pay top dollar to attract and keep high-calibre executives. Yeah, but only because these so-called high-calibre executives have built up this myth and then exploited it ruthlessly.

I think we should put it to the test: I’ll find an up-and-coming financial whiz, a few years out of university, already earning £50-60,000, and give him or her a GP’s wage (about double at £100-120,000) to do the job for a year. No bonuses, no share option, no huge pension contributions.

I would put my money on this – that the whizkid would do just as good a job as the high-calibre executive. I’d volunteer to give it a go myself if my maths was up to it. You may not know this, but five out of four people don’t understand fractions – and I’m two of them.

*Tory nest-liners-in-chief David Cameron and George Osborne don’t escape my wrath. The millionaire old Etonians used their MP’s second-home allowance to pay the mortgage. I trust they will repay the Exchequer – plus any profit as interest – when they sell those homes.