IT'S called the living wage, a somewhat flattering description.
Working about 30 hours a week on it will bring you in just over £12,000 a year, or rather less than half the country's median income. Nevertheless, for a fifth of the UK's full time workforce, that would represent a pay rise. Yesterday brought us the shocking news that the number of people not even paid the notional £7.45 an hour outside London had risen from 3.4 million to 4.8m in the last four years.
Yesterday also brought us the latest less than joined up thinking from the Taxpayers Alliance. It suggested the long-term unemployed should do 30 hours unpaid community work or lose their Jobseeker's Allowance altogether.
It omitted to mention what the children of the suddenly disenfranchised might be expected to eat. But then the Alliance has not a great track record of worrying about other folks' children. It campaigned against Sure Start and child benefit.
It also omitted to acknowledge that anyone not able to prove they were spending their days actively seeking work would likely have their benefit cut anyway.
The Taxpayers Alliance is a cute title. Sounds like all the little people ranged against nasty big government. In fact, it is a high-profile lobbying group set up by a former Tory party researcher and principally bankrolled by a group of businessmen irritated by any suggestion their workforce should get a half decent return for their labour. One of the founding directors lives in France, which gets round that annoying business of having to pay any UK tax at all.
But they are emblematic of a Britain that now does not so much live on different planets as in different solar systems.
The Britain of 2013 finds an explosion in food banks often used by families who never in their wildest nightmares envisaged having to need that kind of humiliating assistance to put food on their own table. But it finds an explosion, too, in high end restaurants, where the diners are prepared to pay the equivalent of the weekly Jobseeker's Allowance to sample the skills of the culinary maestro.
The Britain of 2013 finds some Londoners fretting about damage to their house foundations as the oligarch next door drills down to create additional basement accommodation for his swimming pool, spa, and cinema. And it finds other Londoners wondering how to explain to their children they will be decanted 70 miles and more away from schools and friends when their housing benefit is cut and their local authority moves them on out.
Private renting is now a more expensive form of housing than a mortgage in many areas, but nobody wringing their hands over the housing benefit bill seems able to turn their attention to the extortionate rents now demanded by inner city landlords.
And for those in any form of social rented housing, welcome to the new joys of the 'bedroom tax', since it is surely self evident that the lower paid would not want their kids to have their own bedroom or have their friends and relatives to visit. Or have a room where anyone can study, or have a private space, or store things not in everyday use.
The cost of living is rising for everyone, but the people noticing most are those whose budget, of necessity, is a matter of detailed calculation - a budget that can get thrown out of kilter by the facts of everyday life, such as your children's feet having the temerity to keep growing.
Meanwhile, for most people, the pay packet remains stubbornly frozen or rising less significantly than the price of staple purchases. It is a small but telling irony that the only recent month registering an overall increase in income was the one where the delayed bonuses were paid out in the financial services sector. And all the while part-time workers trying to up their hours jostle with redundant workers trying to get back on a payroll.
The dangers of a society becoming more and more unequal, living more and more in different worlds, have been well documented. And nobody, not even the Taxpayers Alliance, will be immune from the consequences.
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