Bloated public sector are encouraged to do 4 day weeks & watch TV at work – why are they paid 11% more than rest of us?

THE puffed-up outrage of Whitehall’s gilded mandarin class is magnificent to behold.

For reasons beyond understanding, “The Blob” has self-identified as a protected species.

It has decided it is exempt from such challenges as ­commuting to work or even worrying about work as a place worth commuting to.

In a fit of confected fury, civil service unions are threat-ening to strike over 90,000 phantom job losses through natural wastage, saving £3.5billion a year for cash-strapped taxpayers.

How will we spot the difference if they do?

Will it mean even longer queues for passports, driving licences or cancer care?

It is hard to imagine a more unpopular cause at this moment of economic crisis . . . a bloated public sector making life even more miserable for the taxpayers who pay its wages.

While the rest of us worry about heating homes, feeding families and — increasingly — keeping our jobs, the over-inflated Blob floats serenely above in rose-coloured clouds.

Public sector unions have been spoiling for a fight ever since Boris Johnson became PM.

They are encouraged by a Covid explosion in perks and power — working from home or a sun-kissed foreign beach, four-day weekends, watching TV, putting on weight.

Union bosses, like conquering armies, will never surrender the territorial gains that cost the country a fortune.

So it is the duty of this government to fight back on behalf of the rest of us.

Militants have inadvertently focused voters’ minds on the grotesque disparities between state and private employment.

WHY should those whose jobs and mortgages are now at risk subsidise civil servants whose terms of employment make them almost unsackable?

WHY are state employees paid an average 11 PER CENT more than the rest of the workforce?

WHY — the biggest question of all — are taxpayers on peanuts pensions subsidising gold-plated retirements worth £2.4TRILLION, more than the entire UK national debt?

Those are the ever-expanding pension liabilities threatening our children and grandchildren for generations to come.

Privileged civil servants might ask themselves the same questions before they begin dancing to the militants’ tune.

The public sector pension scandal has been ignored for decades.

Now it is firmly back on the table, provoked by the civil service union preposterously named the First Division Association, and the TUC.

Together they are challenging a democratically elected government.

Their pension perk, un-available anywhere else in the real world, offers six million government pen-pushers — one in five of the total UK workforce — the sort of comfy old age other workers can only dream of.

MAFIA GANGSTERS

The NHS alone has more than 20,000 retirees on pensions above £50,000 a year — double average earnings.

The state pension, by comparison, is £9,628.

The value of such inflation-proof goodies is mind-boggling.

It adds 50 per cent to the face value of a salary — so £30,000 is actually worth £45,000.

The real cost is almost certainly higher, concealed by Treasury smoke and mirrors.

Civil servants contribute to their pensions, of course, but nowhere near the level the rest of us would pay for such a prize.

And I am not talking about hard-working care workers, prison guards, nurses and other low-paid staff.

That £50,000 a year would require savings of £1million at pre-inflation interest rates — way beyond most people’s wildest fantasies.

In an age when we are obsessed with equality and fairness, this is shockingly unfair.

Public-sector unions are behaving like Mafia gangsters.

It would be a brave Prime Minister who abolished this eye-watering scam outright.

But as a senior Cabinet minister said last night: “Nobody outside the state sector provides benefits like these.

“It would be difficult to do anything about existing pension rights. But looking at new recruits would be sensible.”

In the meantime, we will be paying out of taxed income, from one month to the next, for this ever-expanding bonanza.

For there isn’t a penny in the public-sector pension pot to pay a bill already running at more than £2.5billion a year — or £89 for every household in the land.

Which leaves the average punter — struggling to make ends meet in a cost-of-living explosion and lucky to have savings of £500 — without a pension pot to p**s in.