ROD LIDDLE
Hopeless Bank of England boss puts the Pill in pillock – he's wrong to blame ordinary people
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22171675/bank-of-england-boss-puts-the-pill-in-pillock/?
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.
Bank of England's Huw Pill sparked fury by saying Brits must 'accept they’re worse off' and stop demanding pay rises
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.
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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.
Huw Pill didn't read the mood of the country very well - mind you, that's probably because he works for the Bank of EnglandCredit: Getty
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.
