The Critical Commentator

  Here's a couple of good questions for an election year: while we may talk about minimum wages, why don't we ever discuss maximum wages? And while our politicians may argue about how little a family can survive on, why do they never address the other end of the inequality scale: just how much accumulated wealth might be too much... Are electorates and politicians across the world prepared just to shrug for ever about that widening wealth gap. It can seem as they are. Our own shameful government, led by a man worth £529m at the last count, seems to be pinning its slim chances of re-election on drastically reducing or abolishing inheritance tax, the single policy that most benefits the vanishingly small number of families as rich as the prime minister's. At what point does the question arise: enough is enough. For Ingrid Robeyns, a professor of philosophy and economics at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands the urgency of that question is long overdue. Not only does...

It is the very worst of taxes. Council tax is, as it stands, "indefensible" says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Brutally regressive, it lets mansion owners off with a negligible contribution to their local authority, while those in cheaper homes - those least able to afford it - pay far too much. It acts as a kind of anti-wealth tax. At long last, we have a government brave enough to reform it. Not in England, of course, but the Welsh government, as so often before, dares to go where others fear to tread. Its consultation on proposals to redistribute the tax burden so that the broadest shoulders bear a fairer share ends next week, with three options for degrees of redistribution being considered. Arenig, North Wales James Dixon Innes (1887-1914) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] This is real levelling up - not something the Tories ever backed. Under the most ambitious plan, it would increase the number of council tax bands to 12, better reflecting actual values at top...

  Inspired by social media, particularly TikTok, it appears children are adopting strict anti-ageing skincare regimes. It's mainly girls, and they're all shockingly young. Generation Z, younger teenagers, pre-teens and children, sometimes as young as eight, according to the British Association for Dermatologists. The buzzword is "preventive", as the young slap on moisturisers, peels and elixirs intended (and priced) for older people. They're using the old favourite pester power. Shocked mothers received Christmas wish-lists pleading for creams and serums from brands like Drunk Elephant and others. Products sometimes cost upwards of £50 or £60. Head of an Old Woman Percy Bigland (1858-1926) Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery [CC  BY-NC] It's no surprise that social media is heavily implicated. Influencers are cited as the cause of this anti-ageing obsession and the consumer power of children is growing... It's all a galaxy away from my own gen X childhood ...

  Raving Madness Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700) Photo Credit: Bethlem Museum of the Mind [CC BY-NC] The boss of British Gas owner Centrica has said it is "impossible to justify" his £4.5m pay packet. Chris O'Shea said there was "no point" trying to justify his huge salary when millions of his customers were struggling to pay their heating bills due to soaring energy costs.  O'Shea, who has been chief executive of Centrica since 2020, received bonuses totalling £3.7m in 2022 on top of his £790,000 salary. The bonuses were paid out as Centrica made record profits of £3.3bn after oil and gas prices jumped following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "You can't justify a salary of that size," O'Shea told the BBC yesterday. "It's a huge amount of money. I am incredibly fortunate. I don't set my own pay. That's set by our remuneration committee."... Asked for the second time by the BBC Breakfast host Charlie Stayt to justif...

 "I am not a role model. I'm not paid to be a role model. I'm paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids." 'Old birds are not caught by chaff' John Arthur Lomax ( 1857-1923) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC  BY-NC-ND]  So said Charles Barkley, the brilliant NBA player, in a commercial in 1993. I've been reflecting on it with the news that Jordan Henderson is leaving Saudi Arabia after a six-month stint, presumably disappointed that his main objective of "growing the game" and "aiding understanding" between our two cultures didn't quite work out. You see, Henderson wanted to be a role model and not just a footballer... talking about his conscience, his "real" feelings about social justice, his commitment to minority rights... This public image, though, was found to be somewhat wanting when an offer came in fro...

  In an advert that is currently pursuing me around YouTube, a young woman who is holding an iPhone and a heavily customised iced coffee sits alone in her car in an empty car park somewhere and urges me to download a therapy app so I can unburden myself of my woes... The obligatory response to the cultural dominance of therapy is to laud the new atmosphere of "awareness" about mental illness and the destigmatisation of its treatment. And I duly laud it. But I am also compelled to register my scepticism that a lonely young woman confessing her unhappiest thoughts to her smartphone in a vacant car park is a vision of mental health utopia. Ours is at once a rigorously therapised society and an unprecedently lonely one. Therapy has boomed in the 21st  per cent century: between 2017 and 2021 participation increased by 25% in Britain. At the same time the number of people reporting that they have no friends has risen consistently. The last time the public was polled, one in ten rep...

  More  than 250 billionaires and millionaires are demanding that the political elite meeting for the World Economic Forum in Davos introduce wealth taxes to help pay for better public services around the world. "Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society... This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nation's economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future." Duty Paid Ralph Hedley (1848-1913) Photo Credit: Sunderland Museum &Winter Gardens [CC BY-NC]  Among those to have signed the open letter, and who hail from 17 countries, include Abigail Disney, the Disney heir; Brian Cox, who played the fictional billionaire Logan Roy in Succession; Simon Pegg, the actor and screenwriter and Valerie Rockefeller, an heir to the US dynasty. "We are also the people who benefit most from the status quo," they said ...

  The present scandal concerning the Post Office has highlighted many injustices in the UK. Basically, a Fujitsu computer system named Horizon was installed into the majority of the post offices in the UK to deal with the accounts and before long many postmasters were being charged with theft and some were jailed. This went on for many years. Eventually one postmaster - namely Alan Bates - led a group of postmasters to challenge the company arguing that there was a glitch in the software that had been installed and that was causing all the problems. The Post Office, who had known about the glitch for many years, continued to insist that there wasn't a problem with the software. There have now been calls for Alan Bates to be knighted . Please don't accept it, Mr Bates. Just say no. When members of the honours committee come knocking with a knighthood... tell them - with the requisite courtesy - to shove it. For it is the honours system, and the wider cancer of patronage and priv...

  It is a feeling that must surely be familiar to many in Britain now: the tax burden has never felt heavier, yet the public services they are meant to fund have rarely been worse. At its heart, the tax system relies on public consent for a social contract: each of us pools our resources in exchange for the benefit of collective goods, from roads to hospitals, with those who have the most contributing more. It is not hard to see why that contract has come unstuck in recent years. Ministers waste millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on doomed asylum schemes and unusable PPE, while public services and the poorest communities are starved of cash. At the same time, a wealthy minority of people - who are able, notably to buy their way out of a crumbling public health system and schools - have been permitted to hoard an increasing amount of resources for themselves. While workers have been hit by a decade of low wages and the highest tax burden in 70 years, all during a cost of living ...

  The bosses of Britain's biggest companies will have made more money in 2024 by lunchtime today than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year, according to analysis of vast pay gaps amid strike action and the cost of living crisis. The High Pay Centre, a think-tank that campaigns for fairer pay for workers, said that by 1pm on the third working day of the year, a FTSE 100 chief executive will have been paid more on a hourly basis than a UK worker's annual salary of £34,963, based on median average remuneration figures for both groups. Industry and Greed George Frederick Watts (1817-1904) Photo Credit: Watts Gallery - Artists' Village [CC BY-NC-SA]  Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, the umbrella body for UK trade unions said: "While working people have been forced to suffer the longest wage squeeze in modern history, City bosses have been allowed to pocket bumper rises and bankers have been given unlimited bonuses." Nowak blamed politicians f...

Almost half of British teenagers say they feel addicted to social media, according to findings that come amid mounting pressure for big tech companies to be held accountable for the impact of their platforms on users. The findings, from  the Millennium Cohort study, adds to the evidence that many people feel they have lost control over their use of digital inter-active media... The research, by Dr Amy Orben's team at the University of Cambridge used data... which is tracking the lives of about 19,000 people born in 2000-2002 across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. When the cohort were aged between 16-18 they were asked, for the first time, about social media use. 'Anxiety', Head of a Girl Jean-Baptist Greuze (1725-1805) Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] Of the 7,000 who responded, 48% said they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: "I think I am addicted to social media."... Scientists said this did not mean these people were a...