IT must truly feel like Christmas for County Hall queen Hazel Harding and her colleagues on Lancashire County Council, now that they have voted themselves pay rises of more than 23 per cent.

Even the ordinary foot-soldier county councillors, with little power or responsibility, are now among the best-paid local government politicians in the country while their leader, Mrs Harding, pocketing a 51 per cent increase taking her up to £34,000 a year, gets paid £9,000 more than the person running Birmingham with more than twice Lancashire's population.

What excuse can there be for these huge increases? Has no-one told these 23 per cent people -- most of whom are completely unknown to the people they tax and represent -- that inflation is now less than one per cent?

Ah, well, they'll tell you, they didn't decide the amounts. No, that was done by an independent panel which they selected -- evidently from a different planet if it imagines that pay rises of this magnitude give value for money to council tax payers who are on virtual pay freezes themselves.

And, even so, though they did not recommend these outrageous rises, county councillors still readily approved them, did they not?

From Ms Harding, however, by way of justification, we are given a day-by-day account of how much work she puts in -- 12-hour days of meetings, presentations and attendance at events. She's worth the extra, she insists.

Oh, really? Perhaps, then she -- and the rest of her newly better-off, value-for-money colleagues -- might tell us whether whatever work they do outside local government commands anywhere near the same earning power or entails anywhere near the expertise and responsibility that they and this remuneration panel imagine is involved in their running Lancashire under the guidance of full-time officials.

In other words, are they paying themselves a darned sight more than they could earn in the real world outside County Hall?

And as for the onerous duties of Ms Harding, will she tell me how much her equally-industrious predecessor, Louise Ellman, got for doing the same job? If it is more than half as much as she's now going to get, I'll toast her restraint in socialist champagne.