Professionals

Following on from the previous post, the story in the Western Mail that UK taxpayers fund the salaries of ‘29,000 professional politicians’ to the tune of £500 million every year is either a sobering thought or one to send you screaming to your hotel room mini-bar.

“Professional” in the context applied is of course a technical description, i.e. they do it for money, and yet - if you can manage to resist the call for a debate over a growing elite of politicians and advisers who have little experience of actual life beyond the campaign trail - it is a phenomenal growth which adds new life to the (very) old joke that politicians have now replaced rats as the preferred subjects among scientists for laboratory experiments.

There are apparently several reasons for this trend: Firstly, there are now officially more politicians on the planet than rats. Secondly, there is far less likelihood of scientists ever forming an emotional attachment with a politician. But the overriding factor is that there are some things that rats just won’t do.