HALLO readers. My word, UKIP supporters are a sensitive souls! Who would have thought a few inconvenient truths would have raised so many hackles. Badger particularly liked the correspondent who told me it was wrong to criticise UK IP’s policies because they had not yet produced their manifesto. How proud he must be to follow a party with no policies (apart from the obvious one). Badger is certain we can all rest assured that as soon as Brother Farage is able to type with more than one finger and work out how to stop spelling ‘banana’ w c will be faced with a literary tour-de-force to rival “Hurrah for Little Noddy”.

Back to matters Pembrokeshire, however, readers. Let’s put the Euro elections back in their empty ballot box. Over the last couple of weeks, while he has been slaving away over Latin epigrams, Badger has read the story of Beloved Bryn’s brush with luxury motoring with considerable bemusement. Not, however, amusement. He’s not even driving the Brynmobile. No readers: we are paying the lease and insurance on Beloved Bryn’s Porsche so Parry Jones junior can tootle to Valero every morning! That, readers that takes the biscuit! Badger has a question for you readers. One he has used before. One that he has been ticked off by his editor for using before. It is a short question. Badger is prepared to take the risk of having to stand in the naughty corner for a while to ask it. WTF?
Readers, even IPPG leader Jamie Adams must be aghast at the CEO’s complete lack of political nous. It appears as though, at least when it comes to insensitivity and arrogance, Jamie takes a distant second place to Bryn. When Jamie told the Full Council that he often popped along to the CEO’s office to engage in “challenging” discussions, when Jamie told the Full Council that he and Beloved Bryn didn’t always see eye-to-eye. did Jamie have in mind how the news that Bryn had availed himself of a Porsche Panamera Hybrid S with a list price of C85.000 would look and sound to a Pembrokeshire public told relentlessly that the Council can’t afford to maintain essential services?

Or was Jamie appeased by a trip around the car park in the Brynmobilc and playing Robin to the CEO’s Batman? Jamie is fond of harping on – like the good Toytown Tory Boy that he is – that all these spending cuts people complain about are the fault of the “Welsh Labour Government in Cardiff Bay”. Well, readers, there are two problems with Jamie saying that: Firstly: you can usually tell when Jamie is spouting (expletive deleted) codswallop. It happens when his lips move. Secondly: Cardiff Bay dots not raise its own taxes. it receives a block grant from the Coalition government in Westminster. With that block grant it has to allocate funding for services across Wales. The Welsh Government is funded nearly entirely by a block grant  The Dynamic Duo: Bryn and Jamie are “on a budget” provided by the UK Treasury.

The change in this block grant is calculated using the Barnett formula, based upon changes in the budgets of Whitehall departments that deliver services for which the Welsh Government are deemed to have responsibility in Wales. Large increases in spending on the NHS and education in England therefore fed through to substantial increases in the amount of grant paid to the Welsh Government in the first decade following devolution. But cuts to government spending as pan of the fiscal consolidation mean that the Welsh block grant has been cut substantially since 2010-11.

The total block grant allocated by the UK government to Wales in 2013-14 is set to be 9.4% lower in real terms than that in 2010-11 (after adjusting for the transfer of funding for council tax benefit to the Welsh Government). Further cuts have been announced for 2014-15 and 2015-16, which, if implemented, would take the cut to 12.2%. So, when Jamie says it is all Welsh Labour’s fault, he really is ejecting a particularly large quantity of a substance with which, as a farmer, he would be intimately familiar. Readers, if Jamie’s was the only whopping porker we had to contend with that would be enough.

But it isn’t. Badger is not talking about the way the Council claims to overpay its officers because to get the best it has to pay the best. Badger isn’t even talking about the nonsense Jamie told Tenby Town Council about the rationale underpinning his decision (made with others) to give Beloved Bryn a whacking big tax break on his pension and to make unlawful payments to the CEO, to boot. Badger wants you to consider the following: Beloved Bryn became CEO of Pembrokeshire County Council in 1996. He was appointed at the top of his then pay grade and received a salary of around f60,000 a year.

The Council’s 2012/13 Accounts show that the Chief Executive received £194.661 in respect of gross salary, fees and other emoluments plus benefits in kind of £11,665. Corresponding figures for 2011/12 were £208,170 and £10,017, plus in that year, employer’s pension contribution to the local government pension scheme of £30,000. Had the lowest paid worker’s wage risen at the same rate as Beloved Bryn’s over the same period, a manual working for the local authority would be on somewhere near £25,000 per year. Care workers would be on around £27,000 per year.

Badger can bet his boots that there are no lowest pay grade workers on that sort of screw. The big lie, readers, is that senior officers have to be paid the same sort of wage as notional equivalents in private industry. However, senior officers in local government have blue-chip, gold-plated pensions funded by tax payers. Senior officers in local government have the type of job security a manager in the private sector can only look at and envy.

The idea that there are companies battering down the council office doors to get at the senior staff and spirit them away to the private sector is a lie of such size and magnitude that it even dwarfs the lie by implication that Bryn would have run away from Pembrokeshire if he hadn’t been given unlawful payments by his employers. Readers, if a senior manager in the private sector had presided over the number of crises and cock-ups that Bryn Parry Jones has, do you think he would still be in a job? If your name is Jamie Adams or Suc Perkins and you answered “yes”. please lie down. The nurse will be with you shortly to show you to your room.