I refer not to Mark Drakeford, our First Minister. He is clinically insane so should not be judged too harshly for the scandal that is evident at the Welsh Assembly. For its members ( an MS) are set to get an inflation busting 2.4% pay rise next year taking the stipend of an ordinary MS, let alone a minister, to £69,273. This is a reward for failure. It is certainly not the sort of performance related pay we wicked capitalists in the private sector like to advocate.
Wales is currently seeing more coronavirus cases per head of population than any other country on earth bar Lithuania. The tiny Baltic state saw 99.8 new cases per 100,000 citizens last week, hard on its heels was Wales with 90.5 cases. Putting that in perspective, Donald Trump is lambasted by the liberal media for his Covid failings but the US rate was a mere 64.1 new cases per 100,000. Please can we swap Mad Mark for the Donald?
Now maybe the Lithuanians are protecting the economy at the cost of higher cases? That cannot be said for the rain sodden nation which I now call home.
According to the ONS, across Britain, more people were made redundant between July and September than at any point on record, as the caack-handed response to Covid laid waste to large parts of the economy. And Wales saw the largest increase in joblessness out of the whole of the UK, with a jump to 4.6%. Now doubt the Members of the Senedd will flag up that the overall British unemployment rate is 4.8% but at the rate we are going in Wales we will soon overtake the other three nations.
In Q3 there were 42,000 fewer folks in Wales with jobs. Sadly none of those 42,000 were the third rate brains in the Senedd.
Putting the greed of Senedd members, their reward for failure, into context, the mean average wage in Britain is £27,000, but here in Wales wages are c91% of the British mean. So while those Welsh folks who do have jobs face an uncertain future on sub £25,000 a year, those in charge who have managed to push through quite insane lockdown policies which appear to have created a petri dish generating both mass infections and economic ruin and poverty, get an inflation busting pay rise leaving them earning more than 95% of those in Britain and 96.5% of those here in Wales.
Talk about a reward for failure.