I'll tell you what's even more depressing...

From The Telegraph:

For all the Government’s talk of austerity, something seems to be going slightly wrong. On Monday, The Daily Telegraph revealed that two thirds of council executives received pay rises last year, and yesterday, it was reported that the Coalition is generally failing to gain control of public sector pay, with automatic pay rises still the norm.

Aside from the envy such news provokes in the private sector, this news is hugely important – and hugely dispiriting. With salaries making up almost 80 per cent of budgets, the cuts that the Government needs to make to reduce the deficit will simply not be possible without radical pay reform.

The article is well worth a read, but the author makes the usual deliberate Tory schoolboy error: "with salaries making up almost 80 per cent of budgets".

I'm not sure what budgets he's talking about but public sector salaries and pensions add up to less than a third of all government spending, i.e. total spending = about £700 billion; there are 7 million people officially on the public sector payroll x average salary £25,000 = £175 billion plus a bit for pensions. So if they think they can eliminate the deficit of about £140 billion by reducing spending on public sector salaries, they would have to reduce it by eighty per cent.

They'd save a lot of time if they had a closer peek at the £280 billion a year which the government pays to private businesses for the provision of this, that and the other. But that doesn't fit in with the Tory class warfare narrative, does it, whereby all public sector employees are leeches (no more than half of them are leeches) and privately owned businesses are the holy of holies (even though most of those with their snouts in the public trough are the most corrupt and wasteful of all)?