The Labour Leader of North East Derbyshire District Council seems to expect us to suspend belief in normal logic and mathematice in a letter to the Derbyshire Timeson June 12th
All staff are being given an extra weeks holiday this year. I can accept that it costs the same to pay them when they are on holiday as it does when they are at work. I cannot accept that having 1 in every 47 members of staff off, on average for every week of the year, will not have any impact on services – however flexible their working practices are – unless of course he is saying more than 2% of the workforce are normally surplus to requirements and doing nothing.
He is perhaps in good company – the leader of the Labour Party, Gordon Brown seemed to be convinced that abolishing the 10p tax rate would not leave anybody worse off – in spite of very simple arithmetic which showed that about 5 million people were worse off . A tax package of £2.7 billion was eventually whistled up to mitigate the effects for some of this 5 million.
