INDEFENSIBLE as British soldiers die in Afghanistan for lack of vital equipment

[Ford Jellymoulds]

DAILY MAIL REPORTS...

While our under-equipped troops lay down their lives in Afghanistan, it's bonanza time for the civilian bureaucrats at the Ministry of Defence.

 

Astonishingly, they've received more than £47million in bonuses over the past six months - already almost double the total awarded for the whole financial year in 2003/04.

 

This brings the sum of 'good performance' payments at the MoD since our invasion of Iraq to a spectacular £300million - enough to pay the annual wages of 15,000 front-line squaddies.

 

What conceivable justification can there be for payments on this colossal scale?

 

 

Even if the MoD were efficiently run, many would question why its pen-pushers should get any bonuses. It's not as if they're working for subsistence basic wages in a cut-throat private business.

 

 

 

In fact, the hugely overstaffed ministry, whose 89,000 employees enjoy handsome salaries and enviable job security and pension rights, is notorious as one of the least efficient in Whitehall.

 

 

One official report after another has castigated its civil servants for putting soldiers' lives needlessly at risk by presiding over massive cost overruns and endless delays in procuring equipment.

 

 

Only last month, an inquiry attributed the deaths of 14 servicemen in an air crash to the 'incompetence, complacency and cynicism' of the MoD and its suppliers.

 

 

Meanwhile, these same bureaucrats fight tooth and nail to cut compensation to soldiers hideously wounded in Afghanistan, often for want of vital equipment.

 

 

Aren't there 1,001 ways the MoD could better spend its spare money than on lining the pen-pushers' pockets?

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