Summing-up and Down
In '53, as you recall, they raised the Judges' pay Not by tax-free " expenses," but the regulation way.
ach got five thousand more -a year—a thousand net, in brief; It came to forty thousand in the case of the Lord Chief.
In 1967, let me refresh your mind,
The rising cost of living left these salaries behind; A further fifteen-hundred (net), as everyone agreed, Was, at the very minimum, the worthy Judges' need.
There was the same proposal (which the Government withdrew);
There was the same decision, i.e., raise the normal screw. So Judges now advanced to roughly sixty thousand (gross) And the Lord Chief to a hundred thousand—that, or some- thing close.
By 1996, if I may take your memory back, A quarter of a million was a Judge's annual whack. And still he was comparatively really badly off, Unable to afford the outward trappings of a toff. ,
At last the thing was solved, as from the first should have been clear,
By cutting down their wages to four thousand pounds a year And letting them donate their earnings wholly to the nation While getting from the nation, in exchange, their whole taxation.
Of course, everyone followed them. The Chancellor got stacks Of freely-offered incomes to be traded in for tax.
So soon it paid him handsomely to halve the Standard Rate And all of us lived happy ever after—from that date.
JUSTIN RICHARDSON.
Previous page
