Wealth Gap, Red Tape, Shylock

Almost a quarter of all household wealth in the UK is held by the richest 1% of the population, according to alarming new research that reveals a historic underestimation of inequality in the country.

The study found that the top 1% had almost £800bn more wealth than suggested by official statistics, meaning that inequality has been far higher than previously thought...

The revelation comes amid calls for ministers to consider a new wealth tax or substantial reforms to existing levies on the rich, so that they play a bigger role in helping the country deal with the Covid fallout and the costs of an ageing population. Demand for a mansion tax are also being revised...

The foundation [The independent Office of Tax Simplification] is calling on the chancellor to embark on the biggest reforms to wealth taxation in a generation - including via the restriction of capital gains and inheritance tax reliefs (together raising several billion), and adding a council tax supplement of 1% on properties worth over £2m (raising over £1bn)...

(Michael Savage, The Observer, 2021)

A wealth and mansion tax are all very well but do they get to the heart of the matter? Surely there must be a radical reform of how people's wages are determined. Isn't the gap in salary, for example, between a care worker and a £1,000 a day junior management consultant symbolic of the gross inequality prevalent in our society. There is always talk of a job being underpaid but not of a job being overpaid.

*The Home Office has been paying consultants up to twice as much as the prime minister, raising concerns about the amount received by external experts hired by the government.

A freedom of information request by The Times revealed that one consultant was paid £1,400 a day to provide advice on revamping the technology behind the UK's border security.

Another contractor was paid nearly £1,000 a day and £200,000 in the year to last October to bring the department's IT infrastructure into the 21st century by "digitising core services" and to help "convert IT contractors into permanent staff".

Ten consultants were paid more than £800 per day and the department spent nearly £1 million for just over 1,000 days of the ten contractors' time between October 2019 and October 2020. Pro rata the consultants would earn an average of about £240,000 a year, 50 per cent more than the £160,000 Boris Johnson earned as prime minister. Two earned about twice the daily pay of the prime minister...

(George Greenwood, Dominic Kennedy, The Times, 2021)

*Sir, You report that female QCs are significantly underpaid compared with their male colleagues. Could it not be seen that male QCs (like male accountancy partners, senior bankers and consultants, etc) are significantly overpaid compared with their female counterparts and the rest of society?

(Lord Wallace of Saltaire, House of Lords, The Times, 2021)

(See Consultants, Dec 18,)

Red Tape

Sir, Your report "Bureaucracy baffles retired doctors" highlights a failing that besets the nation: the triumph of administrative obscurantism over common sense. There is a national crisis; vaccination is the way out of it. We need all the medically trained volunteers we can get to accelerate the programme.

Such people are applying in numbers but are being held back by a process that requires a range of documentary evidence defying belief; why is it necessary to show evidence of training in conflict resolution, equality, diversity and human rights in order to stand with others and vaccinate the population? It seems the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

(Sir Michael Graydon, London, SW1, The Times, 2021)

(Indeed they have. An excellent letter and don't doubt you will be attacked, by some, for your last sentence.)

Sir, Recently I was discharged the day after an operation. I left with a carrier bag of drugs and dressings and a pack of 30 loaded syringes. These were for a daily self-administered injection of a precautionary anticoagulant. With not one of the 21 training courses required by the NHS, my wife and I found this all quite straightforward. The same no doubt applies to the many tens of thousands of insulin injectors and others for whom this is a little task done daily.

(Vaughan Hammond, Braco, Perth and Kinross, The Times, 2021)

Shylock

Arthur Bourchier (1863-1927) as Shylock
Charles A. Buchel  (1872-1950)
Photo Credit: Royal Shakespeare Company Collection [CC  BY-NC-ND]

Sir Michael Morpurgo, the acclaimed author of War Horse, thinks that children should not be exposed to the ideas and prejudices in The Merchant of Venice. That is why he has excised it from his new book retelling ten of Shakespeare's plays, aimed at children aged six to eighteen. Morpurgo said that when he reread the work, "I felt... do not go there, it is too raw to write about for children". It is hard to see this as anything other than moral cowardice...

It is a play with an antisemitic theme but that's quite different from saying it is an antisemitic play. Shylock's famous speech:

"Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?... if you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?", is one of the greatest arguments for tolerance and compassion in any literature in any language. 

Why should children be denied reading this?... Simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of the play is a dangerous and slippery slope; what about the sexism in The Taming of the Shrew? Is Romeo and Juliet guilty of glorifying suicide? What about incestuous feelings in Hamlet... even children's classics such as Grimms' Fairy Tales features stories involving mutilation, cannibalism and infanticide.

No one doubts that The Merchant of Venice is a problematic play. Plenty of people believe, wrongly, that it should not be staged...

Morpurgo's attempt to steer young readers away from The Merchant of Venice is, however well meant, censorship of the worst kind.

(Jawad Iqbal, The Times, 2021)