A four-day working week? Great! Er, but who’s going to pay?
THE Government’s “Flexible Working Task Force” has been meeting to see if it’s possible to wreck the economy any further.
The latest idea being suggested is that we should move to a four-day week. Because working for just four days would be more fun than working for five days.
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Great idea, huh?
I’m slightly surprised the task-force hasn’t recommended not going to work at all. “We have studied the evidence and believe that the no-day week is the best way to improve the average person’s work-life balance.
“It will enable us to sit on our fat a***s all week, browsing the internet for videos of cats doing amusing things and making fatuous comments on Twitter.”
The man behind the four-day week idea is a bloke called Peter Cheese, who has been appointed by the Government to co-chair the task force in order to apparently “promote wider understanding and implementation of inclusive, flexible work and working practices”.
The pandemic has provided us all with a “generational opportunity” to change the way we work, he said.
Old Cheddar-head means we can do much less of it.
And so you might be thinking: Where’s the catch?
Well, if you’re a civil servant or other public sector worker — or maybe work in a do-gooding charity in the third sector — there will be none
You will get your same pay but just work a day less.
No wonder civil servants are champing at the bit to do less work for the same money (and to do it working from home, if possible).
The public sector — where there really IS such a thing as a free lunch.
And that’s because it is all paid for by the rest of us.
Because if you’re working one fewer day per week and getting the same moola, someone is going to have to pick up the tab, aren’t they?
And I assume that Peter Churned-Dairy By-Product expects the taxpayer to do so.
The public sector has never had it better than during this crisis.
Public sector pay has soared, while the pay for those in the private sector has dropped.
No surprise they want to keep it like that.
Because when push comes to shove, the public sector, like the BBC, doesn’t have to face commercial pressure.
FANTASY WORLD
It is like living in a fantasy world.
Vast pensions and days off for no fathomable reason.
In the private sector it would be very different.
A four-day week would mean you would be paid less.
No question.
And you would probably have to cram your five days of working into four days.
That’s because in the real world you get nowt for doing nowt.
And here’s the thing.
An economy in which the public sector is growing and growing and the private sector shrinking is an economy that is on a one-way ticket to bankruptcy.
Someone, somewhere, has to pay for it, no?
I have no great objection to home working.
It means far fewer meetings with stupid middle managers, for a start.
It might also free up some room for housing, too.
But we need our economy to grow right now.
Many of us have been on a kind of holiday these past 15 months.
We need to start working again. We can’t kid ourselves that this can go on for ever.
Mr Cheese’s suggestion is pie in the sky — which is probably why it was in the manifesto of the Labour Party.
The party of the public sector.
Online safety
THE Government is trying to push through its Online Safety Bill.
But it’s a dangerous piece of legislation.
It will restrict freedom of speech by allowing the big internet companies to censor what you say.
The excellent Conservative MP, David Davis, is opposing it.
He said: “The Online Safety Bill is a censor’s charter. Lobby groups will be able to push social networks to take down content they view as not politically correct, even though the content is legal.
“The idea we should force Silicon Valley companies to police Britons’ speech online seems out of Orwell’s 1984 and is not what our voters expect of us.”
The Government should drop this bill right now.
I need to get one of those boltholes
I’VE just spent an entertaining two or three minutes looking at Cara Delevingne’s vagina.
She’s had one built in her house.
It’s pink and very large and she likes to crawl into it to get inspiration, she said.
I can’t remember the last time I was inside a vagina, so I can’t verify the “inspiration” bit.
I might have one installed in Liddle Towers, though.
It’ll be a talking point when guests come round.
“Sit yourself down next to the giant minge, Archbishop, and tell me how you’re diddling.”
A jock and bull story
NEVER hug a Scotsman. You can’t tell what you might catch.
Mason Mount and Ben Chilwell are both in isolation because they spent a few minutes talking to Scottish starlet Billy Gilmour after the England-Scotland game.
Never have the covid protocols seemed more stupid, mind.
Are we really meant to believe that Gilmour spent more time with those two English players than he did with members of his own squad?
Surely the entire Scottish squad should have quarantined. (Wouldn’t have made much difference to the score against Croatia, would it?)
Further, loads of England players came into close contact with Gilmour during the game.
And, later, even closer contact with Chilwell and Mount.
Why weren’t they isolated too?
None of it makes very much sense.
Politics of fear
THERE’S a by-election up in Batley and Spen next week.
Labour will almost certainly lose the seat.
But the really shocking thing about this by-election is that none of the major parties is talking about the real issue there.
A teacher from Batley Grammar School is still in hiding, fearing for his life, having shown a picture of Mohammed to his pupils.
That should never happen in this country.
And yet the only candidate talking about it is Ollie Purser, for the Social Democrats.
The rest are too scared to open their mouths.
'Race theory'
THE horrible and corrosive concept of “white privilege” has just taken a battering from a committee of MPs.
The cross-party education committee says that teaching children about “white privilege” is divisive and that it may breach equality legislation.
Furthermore, it’s not even true.
Poor white kids do worse at school than kids from ethnic minority backgrounds, on average.
Teachers need to stop filling the heads of their pupils with this rank nastiness drawn from “critical race theory”.
Good baddie
SHARON STONE reckons she makes a far better villain than the much-praised Meryl Streep and that other actresses are just as good.
I make her right.
I’ve never quite understood why Streep was so highly regarded.
She plays the same character too often.
And there always seems to be a bit too much simpering going on.
Stone, though, is fabulous.
Remember her in Total Recall, as Arnie’s traitorous and lethal wife?
No one plays a screen villain better than Sharon Stone.
Still remoaning?
FIVE years on from that rather wonderful day.
The day we voted to leave the European Union.
And what has happened?
Few of the Remainer warnings of apocalypse have come true
Our economy is performing better than most in Europe.
We have the same number of people in work as we did before we left – despite the ravages of Covid.
Investment has not dried up.
We are not at war.
We haven’t seen cuts in spending to fill the “black hole” created by Brexit – quite the reverse.
I wonder if the Remainers will ever admit they all got it terribly wrong?
UFO excitement
THE Pentagon is about to release a report on UFOs and people are getting very excited.
They are hoping there really is some kind of life out there.
Weird creatures, maybe, that look a bit like footie’s Luka Modric.
Ah, well, you can keep hoping.
But here’s a few questions for the believers.
How come we’ve only seen a UFO since we invented aeroplanes and rockets?
And science-fiction, for that matter?
And how come sightings have increased a lot since we invented drones?
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Bit of a coincidence?
And if these Modrics are so interested in Earth, why don’t they make contact?
Either to say hello, or eat us all?
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