Wages ‘would rise by £8,640 if we worked like Americans’
Feuding Simon and Garfunkel ‘were set to stab each other’
WAGES would go up by £8,640 a year if British employees worked as hard as the Americans do, according to new research.
UK productivity lags 32 per cent behind the US and 18 per cent below the average across the G7 group of industrialised nations.
Improving it would increase average earnings from £26,707 to £35,247 a year, a report from the TaxPayers’ Alliance claims.
Chief executive John O’Connell said: “As Britain prepares to leave the EU, we need to ensure that our country is ready to meet the risks and take the opportunities that lie ahead. Our nation’s productivity is lagging behind other G7 countries such as America and we are simply not living up to our potential.
“By scrapping burdensome regulations and lowering the tax burden on families and businesses the UK could significantly increase productivity and give everyone a much deserved pay rise.”
The author of the report, Rory Meakin, pinpoints the changes in policy needed to improve the nation’s output per worker.
“Too strict a planning policy cuts the number of taller office buildings and more commercial premises in high demand areas,” he says. “Relaxing them would raise productivity among office, retail and logistics workers.
“Meanwhile cutting motoring taxes and subsidies while switching infrastructure spending to better value schemes would reduce congestion, enabling labour markets to function more effectively and reducing the cost of business travel and goods transport.
“Stamp duty should be scrapped so we can make better use of housing stock. Reforming energy, childcare and trade policy can help people escape the low-wage welfare trap and cutting national insurance will boost wages and improve incentives to earn more.” A BITTER rivalry between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel ran so deep that their managers at one point feared they could stab each other.
A new book has laid bare the troubled relationship between the Bridge Over Troubled Water singers with each man “envying the other’s place in the team”.
An authorised biography, Paul Simon: The Life, details a particularly bitter backstage clash in 1993 when the duo had reunited for a lucrative comeback tour.
Decades of pent-up resentment led to fury after a reviewer claimed Garfunkel was “just one of a large supporting cast of Mr Simon’s collaborators”.
Paul Simon’s manager Joseph Rascoff had to stand between the men’s two dressing rooms to ensure violence did not break out during a New York show.
He said: “I genuinely believed that if there had been a knife on the table one of them would have used it.
“They never came to blows but there was shoving, and I had to step between them.”
The book claims that resentment grew on both sides of the partnership back from their early days in the 1950s when they first performed as a group called Tom & Jerry. Art Garfunkel was said to be “crushed” that he was not included in recordings of new songs and felt in danger of being “tossed aside”.
Meanwhile Paul Simon was “sensitive” about his 5ft 3in height and told how he remembered comments from Art 60 years ago in which he said: “I’ll always be taller than you”.
The explosive book by Robert Hilburn also details Paul Simon’s depressive tendencies despite his meteoric success.
Questioned over what he saw as “bad news”, Simon said: “Being short. Not having a voice that you want. Not looking the way you want to look. Having a bad relationship.”
Manager Mort Lewis said: “They both envied the other’s place in the team. Paul often thought the audience saw Artie as the star because he was the featured singer, and some people probably thought Artie even wrote the songs. But Artie knew Paul wrote the songs and thus controlled the future of the pair.”
The pair split in 1970 but later teamed up in 1981, 1993 and last played together in 2010.