Hopeless Bank of England boss puts the Pill in pillock – he’s wrong to blame ordinary people
IT’S always nice, in this complex world of ours, to get advice from an expert, isn’t it?
So a big thank you this week then to Huw Pill, the chief economist of the Bank of England.
Mr Pill — they ran out of ink at the register office when he was born and missed the final three letters from his surname — thinks we had better get used to being poor. And so stop asking for more money.
He said: “What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that yes, we’re all worse off, we all have to take our share.”
Constant wage demands are fuelling inflation, he said. So we must sacrifice our desires for a better standard of living, in order to help bring inflation down.
You know, I think that’s the sort of thing that’s kind of easy to say when you’ve got as much money as Mr Pill.
He is effectively saying: “Look, you bloody oiks. Stop demanding more money or my shares will be worthless.”
In other words, he hasn’t read the mood of the country very well.
Mind you, that’s probably because he works for the Bank of England. I sometimes think that institution is secretly run by the Russians or the Chinese, so utterly hopeless is it from time to time.
Of course, Pill is right about inflation. But where he is wrong is to place the blame on the shoulders of ordinary people.
The truth is that UK wages have been disastrously low for far too long. This is a far more serious problem for our country than inflation.
We have low wages for a number of reasons.
For a long while earnings were depressed by cheap labour from overseas. Especially in the hospitality sector. Successive governments have also been too slow and conservative in raising the minimum wage.
The result we have today is that millions struggle to get by on earnings that are only a fraction of what they were in real terms in the early years of the century.
Since 2008, wages have stalled, meaning that low to middle-income workers have £11,000 less per year than they did 15 years ago. But the same squeeze has not affected those at the top of the pile. Wages for chief execs, company directors and so on have continued to rise and rise without cessation.
So, for example, the average pay for company directors listed in the FTSE index jumped by 39 per cent in 2022. That’s not bad, is it?
Bear that in mind if you think the nurses are getting a bit greedy in asking for eight per cent.
The consequence has been that the UK is a much more divided nation now than it has been for about 200 years when it comes to pay levels. The rich are much richer, the poor are getting poorer.
This has led to another one of our problems. A shortage of labour.
It is not that there are too few people to do the jobs (well, there are in engineering, but that’s another story). It’s that people won’t work for the lousy wages that many companies are paying. And you can’t blame them.
The truth is, until we sort out our low wages, the country won’t thrive. The economy will stagnate. People won’t be buying stuff.
And that’s the truth, Huw — even if it’s a bitter pill for you to swallow.
SOW 'N' REAP
THE Labour Party plans to teach boys how to be respectful to women.
Fair enough.
But it was the Labour Party and the rest of the Left – and indeed feminism – that STOPPED males from being respectful to women.
This was a thing called “chivalry”. Those over the age of 60 might have a distant memory of it.
Men should hold open doors for women. And wait for them to be seated. And buy them dinner. That sort of stuff.
Old-fashioned it may have been, but it did ensure that men treated women with reserve and respect.
But the Left couldn’t get rid of it all fast enough. And so we are where we are today.
Gig’s no crowning glory
I HOPE you have failed to get tickets for King Charles’s Coronation concert.
I mean that in the nicest possible way.
I mean, Katy Perry, Lionel Richie and Take That? I’d rather buy a ticket to an insurance seminar. Incidentally, have you felt the Coronation excitement mounting in your area?
Will you even glance at the TV?
It’s all a little bit sad, I’m afraid to say.
Maybe they should have forced Meghan to come, just so there was the chance of a punch-up.
WRONG ABBOTT SO MUCH
IT’S great to see Diane Abbott back in the news, isn’t it?
Has any woman given so much entertainment to the public?
This time she has suggested that Jews have been no more the victims of racism than red-haired people.
A remarkable assertion which would come as a surprise to, for example, Adolf Hitler.
Diane seems to think the only people who can suffer racism are black.
It is an odious point of view.
Sir Keir Starmer was right to suspend the woman.
Raab’s rout is not on
DOMINIC RAAB has been forced to resign from his job as Deputy Prime Minister.
He was accused of “bullying” civil servants. But in the 47-page investigation into his behaviour, I couldn’t see a single instance of what any sane person would call bullying.
He was just trying to get these overpaid functionaries to do their jobs properly.
The dim-witted brief who drew up the report, Adam Tolley, said that Raab was “aggressive” and “curt”.
Oh, dear me! How shocking!
There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that senior civil servants have got it in for the Government.
And will do everything they possibly can to undermine the ministers for whom they work.
Raab’s resignation sets a terrible precedent.
TODGER PUZZLE
A MAN is in court in London for conspiring to have his penis removed.
Marius Gustavson is the supposed ringleader of nine defendants in what has become known as the “eunuch” case.
These castrations were live-streamed for public enjoyment. Well, it’s probably more fun than Ross Kemp in The Bridge Of Lies.
Anyway, Gustavson had his old fella chopped off and later also had a nipple partially removed, for good measure, allegedly.
The charge is that the men performed “extreme body modifications”, not that they were unqualified to do so.
Where does this leave our various gender realignment clinics, then?
Sudan rescue a must
I’M glad the Government has got its act together and rescued British civilians from Sudan.
The country is in the midst of a civil war. Again.
Sudan has a reasonably good shout for being the world’s worst country.
Although, of course, there are plenty of contenders, mostly from the same continent.
Isn’t there a case for saying that if you decide to live in Sudan, you ought to know what you’re getting into?
Like those Brits who decide to go on holiday to somewhere like Beirut, ’cos its cheap, and are then most upset when the rockets start raining down.