All aboard the good ship Extravagance!

Fancy a career in the public sector? Cushy number, 9 -5, six weeks’ holiday, lavish pension?
Well, try this little quiz to see if you are suitable.
Question: You are an NHS manager and suddenly discover you have £500,000 surplus to requirements. Do you:
(a) Buy cancer drugs for desperately ill people who are normally denied treatment on the grounds of cost?
(b) Order an immediate deep clean of all wards to cut down on the scandalous number of deaths resulting from hospital-acquired infections?
(c) Buy an ocean going yacht in order to give unemployed youths “something to do”.
If you answered (c) congratulations – you’re a shoo-in for the Hull Teaching Primary Care Trust where common sense is an impediment, but reckless abandon with taxpayers’ money an absolute requirement.
The idea, according to the PCT, is that if you recruit a few scallies from the streets of Bransholme and take them on a jolly cruise aboard the HMS Extravagance, you may persuade them to lead healthy lives and stop mugging old ladies and sniffing glue.
What this astonishing episode demonstrates is that there is no recession in the public sector, where the gushing spigot of cash – your cash - remains in full flood.
We are faced with three million unemployed within 12 months, pension funds that are plummeting in value and even the city slickers have been forced to tighten their belts – but the nation’s pen pushers continue to spend money like it is going out of fashion.
Consider some recent examples: Peter Mandelson’s extraordinary £1million pay-off – for voluntarily leaving his EU job, or the £170,000 a year in benefits paid to enable an Afghan family to live in a seven-bedroom £1.2 million mansion.
The common thread is that it is all paid for by the taxpayer – and when you work in the public sector, money is no object.
Since 1997 Labour has recruited at least 800,000 new state employees, plus thousands more quangocrats and various hangers on. The cost of the gold-plated pensions fund alone is enough to bankrupt the country.
It simply can’t go on like this. The least we can expect is an immediate, non-negotiable freeze on all public sector recruitment. Even better would be wholesale sackings of thousands of people in non-jobs.
And the best place to start is with the yacht-buying idiots of the Hull PCT, who should be given a black plastic bin bag and ten minutes to clear their desks (that’s what happens when you make a crass error in the private sector folks!).
And if the unemployed youths of Hull still want to go away to sea, they can always join the Royal Navy.