Week 51 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

Sauce for the goose – workhouse gruel for the gander!

            It was ironic that the news that members of parliament were to get an eleven percent rise in their salaries after the next general election, broke on the same day that we learned that thirteen million of our fellow countrymen and women are living in poverty.  What’s more most of them aren’t skivers and layabouts who enjoy living on state benefits, nor even honest willing-to-work unemployed people making every effort to get a job.  Over 50 percent, something like six million people who are officially ‘in poverty’ are also in work.  Some of them are in part time jobs, others on zero time contracts that mean they are expected to be constantly available for work but their ‘employers’ are under no obligation to provide it for them or to pay them a ‘retainer’ for time when they are through no fault of their own, idle.  Yet others are on the minimum wage with no possibility of an increase and no other source of income.

            It would be nice to think that the government that is eager to keep its promise that no-one on benefit must be better off than those working, would take steps to raise the income of those six million people ‘the working poor’.  I fear though that they are rather more likely to fulfil their promise by cutting benefits even further.  Perhaps it’s all part of a long-term strategy.  There’s no hope of Britain competing effectively on a global market until our workers are content with the wages paid for the same jobs in Bangladesh, India and Brazil – and prepared to put up with the same standard of health care, housing and transport as exists in those countries.

            That is, I think, why some politicians and newspaper proprietors are so eager to depart from the European Union and its health and safety and other Europe-wide regulations that protect working people’s safety and prevent their exploitation.  Once they’ve ‘broken off the shackles of Europe’ they’ll be free to chip away at the Public Health Acts, the Housing Acts and the Factory Acts and ‘make Britain great again’ like it was the early Victorian age when little children and women worked 12 to 14 hour days in factories and mines, for a pittance. It gave children valuable work experience and taught them the values of obedience and punctuality and was an early example of eliminating sex discrimination, until liberal do-gooders forbade it all and laid the foundations of the nanny-state! Within half a century we could restore those ‘traditional values’, effectively deter immigration, and create a truly competitive business-friendly Britain.   I thank God that I won’t live to see it!

            The eleven percent pay rise for Members of Parliament has been deplored by the leaders of all three of the main political parties (they can see there would be no votes in it!) but sadly there is, so they say, not a thing they can do about it.  They have given the power to an independent body and have no power to change it.  That, I am quite sure, is rubbish!  Parliament gave that power to an independent body and they can, if they have the will to do so, claim it back again.  There are a substantial number of existing MPs who feel they deserve every penny of that pay increase and a few, presumably in safe seats, who are prepared to say so.  One I heard trot out that old ever-ready excuse for paying ridiculously high salaries to those who are already wealthy.  ‘If you want the best candidates you have to offer them the best salaries’.  I think that that is rubbish too. MPs are already well paid, have long holidays and generous expenses (even if, due to the greed of some MPs, they now have to account for every penny of them!)  I have no doubt that some MPs do work hard, genuinely  have their constituents’ concerns at heart and earn every penny of their pay  - but so do nurses, ambulance drivers, air traffic controllers and a great many others.  We need the best postmen, the best bus drivers and the best refuse collectors.   We get them to work by threatening them with unemployment if they don’t.  Why should things be different at the other end of the salary scale?  If you offer ridiculously high salaries you don’t necessarily get the best – but you will attract those who are interested only in the salary and don’t give two hoots about how they earn it

            I was pleased to see that both Bob Russell, Lib.Dem. M.P. for Colchester and Douglas Carswell, our Clacton Conservative M.P, oppose the recommended pay rise.  Douglas Carswell described it as offensive, absurd and uncalled for.  However I don’t think that Tim Young, Clacton’s prospective Labour Candidate was very clever in suggesting that Mr Carswell should donate his pay rise to charity.  The proposed MPs’ pay rise isn’t scheduled to take place until after the next General Election.   Has Mr Young already given up hope that he will win the election and that it would therefore be he and not Mr Carswell who would have to make the decision?

               With a Prime Minister and Chancellor so enthusiastic for the free market and eager to reduce that deficit even though it means making difficult decisions, I am surprised that they haven’t thought of letting market forces decide. Try halving MPs present pay.  They‘d survive well enough on £35,000 a year (about £673 a week) plus their present generous expenses. My guess is that there would still be plenty of candidates at the next election. Predominant among them would be those who really want to serve the public and are not just in it for the prestige and the money.   

It's greed makes the world go round!’

        Boris Johnson, London’s always-in-the-headlines mayor, claimed as much in his recent Margaret Thatcher Memorial Address.  It is, he said, greed and envy that motivate those who operate successfully in the ‘free market economy’ that everyone (except perhaps a few starry eyed idealists and some closet-Marxists!) realizes is the best possible economic system for a civilised society.  We should celebrate and be grateful for those who become billionaires.  We should welcome the enormous gap between rich and poor though he did, rather reluctantly, concede that in Britain today that gap was perhaps just a shade too great. Think of the vast sums of money that the rich pay in taxes, he said, and be thankful.   I recall once again Jesus’s parable of the ‘widow’s mite’.  The wealthy Pharisees paid large sums into the Temple Treasury but those large sums were a small fraction of their total wealth.  The poor widow’s mite was everything she possessed.

           I was more impressed with an article I read recently in the Church Times, not a publication usually associated with wild and irresponsible journalism. The author claimed that if the seriously wealthy were to be content with £100,000 a year (that’s not far short of £2,000 a week) it would be possible for four million more people to enjoy a salary of £25,000.   Furthermore he stated that the top fifth of income tax payers actually pay less in total than the bottom fifth.  I believe that reducing that yawning gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in society should be a top priority  of any responsible government. Not just the poorest, but all of us, would benefit!