We must have more!

Got very solemn over Saturday's DT over Monday's, that is to say this morning's, breakfast, springing to life over a quote from the General Secretary of the TUC: 'We need radical economic reform to give hard-working people the pay rises they deserve'.

My first thought was that, having got into a dreadful mess partly because President Clinton thought it would be a good idea to get people who could not afford to buy houses to buy houses, now being in the middle of a recovery in which both the government and the country at large continue to borrow an unhealthily large proportion of expenditure and observing the great swathes of once proud industry now being bought up by the Arabs, the Chinese and other foreigners (which is largely how all this borrowing gets paid for), it is a bit rum that the TUC thinks that workers should get more. Is it a throw back to the unhappy days when the unions were the wreckers and we were reduced to getting the Iron Lady in to cut them down to size? Probably not, but it is still a pity that the TUC can't think of a more sustainable line.

The DT also says that during the 1970s and 1980s real wages grew by around 3% a year, slowing to 1.5% in the 1999's and have now gone into decline. Which leads to the observation that while the let's get rich quick mentality has done us pretty well here in the UK over the last hundred years or so, it was never going to last for ever and I think those balmy days are probably over. We need to change our mind set, to learn that not everything we want needs to be bought and sold. To calm down the advertisers and to learn to spend more quality time on things that come for free.

All of which is all very well and good, but hard-working people at the bottom of the heap would find it a lot easier to swallow if the people at the top of the heap were to moderate their greed a bit, if we were to find a way to make the distribution of the cake which has stopped getting bigger a bit fairer. Maybe one of those rules whereby pretty much no-one earns more than 10 times what someone else earns would do the trick.

Into which one needs to work some kind of incentive for the self employed. It is not unreasonable that quiet and peaceful types like myself, content to be employees and sleep quietly at night, should not get the same rewards as those who want to spend their lives hustling and bustling, or at least as those of them who are good at it.