Pendle Labour Party Blog

I have just read Gordon Prentice’s blog - The trouble with Billionaires.

Gordon lays out the extent to which the ratio of pay between the highest and lowest is out of control. According to Gordon, the High Pay Commission tells us “top pay has spiralled alarmingly to stratospheric levels in some of our biggest companies”.

Bankers and company directors are currently in the spotlight and quite rightly so, but what about the excessive salaries paid to football players, film and TV personalities? It is not just the bankers and company directors who are doing very nicely.

Coincidentally the latest TUC Touchstone Extra pamphlet “All In this Together?” looks at how the recession and ongoing economic weakness has had an impact on different parts of the workforce. According to the report “the falling proportion of national output that goes on wages has meant that UK workers today are taking home £60bn a year less (in today's money) than workers did 30 years ago”.

Therefore it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that the yawning pay gap has arisen from the combination of increases at the top and decreases at the bottom. The theory of the market being that to maximise performance you pay the wealthy more and the poor less!

Pay is only part of the picture; the accrued national wealth is in the hands of a tiny majority. Should we dare to put this under the microscope, we are accused of “The Politics of Envy”. We should be vigorous in redefining this as the “Politics of Fairness”.

The Coalition Government is compounding this problem with their attacks on the benefit and welfare system. I guess that not many of us support benefit cheats and it is right that they are dealt with properly, but most of would want to retain the existing benefits that we have paid our taxes for in case we or our families need assistance.

Whilst other colleagues within the Labour Party seek a new utopia of “Responsible Capitalism” and pay restraint for the public sector, my view is that current thinking falls a long way short of achieving the “Dynamic Economy” set out in Clause Four of the Constitutional Rules of the Labour Party.

Of course we need growth, but it needs to be sustainable and we must plan which areas of the economy need to grow to deliver higher pay for the workers, and also consider who else should benefit from the proceeds of that growth.

Fairness means redistributing wealth through a just taxation system rather than the one that is currently tipped in favour of the rich.

We need that revenue to invest in our children’s education and training. We need it to invest in everyone’s future. We need it to get the country back to work.