Divide and conquer?

Tweet

There might, somewhere, be a satirist who had a fleeting thought that having a minister, whose utter incompetence led to care workers being obliged to risk their lives daily by working without PPE, suggest that those workers should be given a badge instead of a decent salary and proper PPE might raise a smile.  But he or she would probably have dismissed the idea almost immediately as lacking the scintilla of plausibility which makes for good satire. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint, the Health Minister doesn’t employ any satirists to help him decide whether something is funny or not.  It also appears that he doesn’t employ any advisors with enough sense to warn him when he’s had a particularly silly idea which will make him and the government of which he is a part appear stupid and callous as well as incompetent.

We shouldn’t, though, judge this particular idea in isolation; it is part of a pattern of thinking coming from the conservative part of the political spectrum which thinks that it can ‘reward’ people with tokens, gestures, and clapping, pass the costs of the crisis onto those who can least afford it, and continue to treat many of those who are taking the risk as unwelcome temporary visitors who can be encouraged to return ‘home’ when they’re no longer required. There are plenty of voices arguing that things cannot return to ‘normal’ when this is all over but reinforcing that old ‘normal’ is what the political ‘right’ are busily trying to do, day in and day out. The idea that the financial racketeers at the heart of the UK economy will willingly agree to doing anything differently in the future is one for the birds.

A fortnight ago, the Low Pay Commission (which I had mistakenly thought existed to try and deal with low pay rather than justify it) suggested that the crisis means that the government “could be forced to abandon targets for ending low pay in Britain by raising the legal minimum wage”.  Yes, that’s right – the lowest paid in our society should continue to be paid very low wages in order to cover the costs of dealing with the virus pandemic.

Earlier this week, the Social Market Foundation called for an end to the ‘triple-lock’ on the state pension, effectively meaning that the poorest pensioners (those dependent solely on the state pension) would see future rises in what is one of the lowest state pensions in Europe be set at a lower level. Their argument is that “…the economic costs of responding to the crisis shared fairly across the generations”, which sounds reasonable enough until one tries to define what ‘fairly’ actually means. (Clue: the paper, available here, does not define the term, but merely asserts that intergenerational fairness requires that older people should repay the kindness shown to them by working age people who have protected them during the pandemic by forgoing an element of future pension increases.)

At the same time, the UK Government has made clear that it is pushing ahead, even during the pandemic, with plans for immigration controls which would exclude many of the NHS  and care workers on whom we are currently reliant, branding them ‘low-skilled’, and oblige even those who are accepted to pay a much higher price for using the NHS services which they are themselves providing.

Taken together, it’s a classic strategy, which reminds me of this cartoon which often does the rounds on social media:

If working people can be persuaded that the enemies are the low-paid, pensioners and immigrants, they will pick on them instead of looking at where the real inequalities lie. Instead of looking at other people who are also losing, we should be looking at who gains. And who might that be, I wonder? Oh look – it’s the same people who always come out on top; how surprising! Tory donors, hedge fund managers, and those who speculate at our expense. Those who argue that things must be different after the pandemic need to start by recognising the real enemies and not allow them to divide us amongst ourselves.

Who's really overpaid?

Tweet

It’s unclear whether the Chancellor actually used the word ‘overpaid’ in relation to the salaries of public sector employees, but there’s a lot less doubt that he and many of his Tory colleagues really do believe it to be true.  (At least, they believe it to be true of some public sector workers – as I understand it, Ministers and MPs are also public sector workers, and I’ve never heard any Tory suggesting that they are overpaid.)  I’m more interested, though, in how they have reached this conclusion.

It seems to be based on a very simplistic comparison of public and private sector average earnings, as though the mere fact of a difference between the two means that one group are ‘overpaid’.  I’m not convinced that it is based on any sort of like-for-like comparison, and it’s worth bearing in mind that decades of Labour-Tory government have seen many low-paid public sector jobs outsourced to the private sector.  In simple mathematical terms, moving low-paid employees from the public sector to the private sector increases the average salary in the former and decreases it in the latter.  That tells us nothing about the relative value of either.

Even supposing that the comparison is properly conducted and compares work of ‘equal value’ (a phrase which itself could be the subject of extensive debate), the mere appearance of a difference in averages is as likely to mean that one group are underpaid as that the other are overpaid.  It all comes down to one’s perspective.  And that question of perspective is key – from the Tory perspective (with the obvious exception of work done by really important public sector workers like Ministers and MPs, i.e. themselves) the value of work in the public sector is inherently lower than the value of work in the private sector.  That’s not about assessing value added, or contribution made to society or the economy, it’s about a simplistic axiomatic belief that work done in the public sector is a bad thing per se.

More generally, some of the other comments made expose a belief that salaries should be determined with no regard to the cost of living or the needs of employees but solely on the basis of any recruitment difficulties.  From that viewpoint, if there are no difficulties recruiting enough people to do the job, then there is no need for any salary increase, regardless of whether the living standards of those recruited, as well as those already doing the job, are falling year on year.  (Again, this rule doesn’t apply to themselves, whose salaries obviously need to be increased regularly – despite the oversupply of willing candidates.)  The best bit of all is that they get to call this ‘an economy which works for all’ without being challenged.

The select few and the toiling masses

Tweet I’ve never had really had a great deal of time for this self-appointed organisation calling itself the “Taxpayers’ Alliance”.  I can’t argue with their right to put forward their views, but their name implies – entirely deliberately – that they somehow represent the views of taxpayers in general.  And the media seem to have fallen for it in a big way, giving them a platform for their views on just about anything, without ever seeming to question for whom they actually speak.

They certainly don’t speak for me, and I’m a taxpayer – according to my payslips anyway.  They’ve never asked this taxpayer what I think, nor any other taxpayer of my acquaintance.  And to hear them talk, one would conclude that the only matter of any interest to taxpayers is paying less tax; the services which those taxes pay for what all appear to be superfluous.

They excelled even themselves last week in their comments in response to Gwynedd Council’s proposal to move towards a living wage. Their Campaign Director said “The best way for politicians to help the low paid, whether they work for a council or in the private sector, is to cut their taxes, not increase taxes on low and middle earners to fund a pay rise for a select few”.

The paper’s lack of challenge to this statement was disappointing to say the least.  In essence, the Alliance seems to be saying that the best way to help those who are so low paid that they pay little tax anyway is to reduce the tax of those on middle and higher incomes rather than increasing the pay of those at the bottom.  Worse, they went as far as to describe the low paid as “a select few” (as opposed, presumably, to the millionaire masses who inhabit their world).

As I say, I can’t oppose anyone’s right to express a view.  I just wish that before reporting it as though it was a general statement on behalf of all taxpayers, our fearless reporters would do a little more to make it clear who this organisation is and for whom they actually speak.