My heart bled for ‘celebrity chef’ Jamie Oliver when his Jamie’s Italian restaurant chain went to the wall. 1000 people lost their jobs, 1000 personal tragedies, 1001 if you include Mr Oliver. On a brighter note, the great man paid himself £5.2 million last year.
What on earth is going on? Only last week, Thomas Cook drowned in £3 billion of debt after it’s head honchos paid themselves millions in bonuses. I can understand people being generously rewarded for success. But these are examples of people being rewarded for failure. Does anyone care?
To listen to Sajid Javid, the chancer of the exchequer, and Boris Johnson, you’d think they did. Adding that the Tories were now the “workers party” of Britain, Javid said he would raise the national minimum wage to £10.50 an hour. His announcement, which he described as an “aspiration”, left Labour “clueless”, added the Daily Express. To be fair, Jeremy Corbyn’s revamped 1980s Labour Party is perfectly hopeless without Javid’s “aspiration” but even the Magic Grandpa himself might spot the catch here. Javid says he aims to raise the minimum wage to £10.50 by 2024. Now excuse me. That’s five years away, just about at the time when the government of the day – Javid hopes it will be his – will be launching the next general election campaign. It’s not jam tomorrow: it’s him telling us he might tell us tomorrow that it’s jam tomorrow, but tomorrow, like someday, never comes.
We all just sit back and accept this, as if it’s fair, as if it’s normal. Poor people struggling to put bread on the table, having to wait five years to get an extra couple of quid an hour, whilst Jamie Oliver and the directors of Thomas Cook line their own pockets on the back of the now unemployed workers. It’s not just Oliver or the Thomas Cook millionaires. Other greedy bastards are available.
I don’t ask for everyone to get the same. I don’t want Communist-type equality. I just want a fairer country, where everyone has a chance, where no one has to choose between heating and eating. The worst thing is that these examples are not extreme examples; they are what passes for the norm these days.
