In Saturday’s Guardian, Polly Toynbee writes a good article about the expenses fiasco that has been an everyday reality for all MP’s regardless of party.
‘Only in a vastly divided society can leaders think such perks normal’ writes Toynbee and I think she is correct. She points out how inequality has been allowed to widen.
I found some interesting statistics
only 10% of the country earn more than £40 000
only 1% earn enough to be in the new higher tax bracket of over £150 000
90% of the population earn far less than our MP’s, bankers, financiers and so on. In light of high salaries we hear in the news I wondered what the average wage was in this country as I would have guessed that it would have been around the £40 000 mark knowing that in the Christian world we earn little.
Actually, the average salary in the UK is £24 000 although, a this report points out, many earn a lot less. Equally surprising is that in the last 10 years of boom the average salary has not changed that much.
Some of the amounts we have seen spoken of in these expenses claims dwarf the average annual salary of most people. That is shocking.
Toynbee hits the nail on the head – despite what the leader of the house says today the issue is not that information was leaked (although it is important to plug this) – the real issue and question is to ask ‘how has society become so divided. How, in the last decade of boom have we allowed top salaries for the very few to hit rocket levels while the average salary has stayed roughly the same.
When the minority lose touch with the majority and see their privilege as the norm abuses become commonplace.
The Shiny Headed Prophet 
Purely looking at average salaries is slightly misleading Rob as it ignores the effects of the Tax Credit system that has been put in place. This can in a number of instances make a real effective difference in increasing the purchasing power of the average salary by effectively crediting back some of the tax that would have been paid. As for the last ten years of boom this has largely been financed by debt, both personal and corporate, and therefoe those who work in the fincial services industry which raises, processes, values and invests the money raised from debt have profited from this. As an industry this does not require anywhere near the number of people that manufacturing does and therefore there is a larger pool of money to be shared amongst a smaller group of highly mobile people. This leads to rising salaries in the good times and falling ones or no job at all in the bad times. It is not all teh fault of teh banks, though some of them have been close to criminally irresponsible (and i use those words advisably, but also down to each one of us who used easy finance terms, credit cards adn expanding our mortgages to spend more than we earned. I sincerely hope that people relearn the value of thrift from this but I’m not sure that it will happen.