Why are we paying for this?

Seems every time I look at the activities of those involved in the maintaining of public services from management to unions I keep finding stories of corruption and waste. At one time the UK ran an empire that controlled about a quarter of the globe and managed it with about 1500 civil servants, I know times have moved on and life is a tad more complex now but the over-manning, waste and general corruption is truly shameful especially as it comes out of the pockets of the taxpayer. This is one of the little scams that the unions have to get paid for doing their job out of the public purse rather than out of their members subs.

Telegraph.

More than 360 civil servants are working full-time on trade union duties, figures obtained by The Daily Telegraph show.

The cost of the officials to the taxpayer is estimated to be nearly £19 million, an increase of more than £2 million in the past year.

The Ministry of Defence employs 66 full-time civil servants working on trade union duties and 321 working part-time for unions, the figures released under freedom of information laws show.

The figures were obtained by Dominic Raab, the Conservative MP for Esher and Walton in Surrey, amid concern among ministers over the spread of militant trade unions in the public sector.

The civil servants are entitled to work full-time on trade union business, including representing workers’ grievances and negotiating over pay and other perks. Some ministers suspect they are privately building support for strikes.

There is simply no justification for this, if people want to be involved in union activities, then it's not the job of the taxpayer to be paying for them to do so, that should be down to the union members to pay for any full time officials. There is no way such practices would happen anywhere other than the public services with their magic money trees, even if (predictably) the unions have the nerve to blame it on Tory reform laws.
I expect as the public services go on strike over the next few weeks that a lot of these stories will come out of the woodwork as the government lays the ground to gut the public service unions.I also think the unions are going to be quite surprised at the low level of public support they will get too, those of us who work in private industry having little or no sympathy with those who want to keep their perks and gold plated pension at our expense and that at the end of the day is the crux of the matter, the public services do what they do at our expense, no-one expects them to do without necessities, but we do expect them not to take the piss either and using the public purse to pay for your union reps rather than doing the job they are supposed too is seriously taking the piss!