Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
How do you pay bigger wages?
Sir, Martin Vye is not the only one who considers it vital to up nurses’ pay [‘Vital to improve nurses’ wages’, letters January 19], but the one thing missing from his letter is any explanation of how we pay for the uprated
salaries they seek.
Nurses, ambulance staff, teachers, taxmen, railwaymen and others all make demands for increased pay. What they have in common is they are paid by the taxpayer, and we don’t have inexhaustibly deep pockets. These groups contribute nothing directly to the economy other than what they pay in taxes, and they, like many of us, are reliant on what the state can squeeze from employers and workers alike in taxes.
If you up the tax take the personally wealthy and highly profitable firms will either relocate or cut back on their activities.
I can still recall how I felt when after acting up as “manager” for some months I was awarded an honorarium for covering the job, only to find that the taxman got 40%ofit.
It wasn’t much of an incentive to do it again. We, as a nation overspent to get through Covid. We are where we are and we need a period of retrenchment and that means all of us personally and not just the state. Sadly the Conservative Party in parliament decided to defenestrate the leader elected by the country, the one person who actually saw that the answer was to grow the economy and not just manage decline.
I can’t help feeling we are revisiting my youth politically where all the parties more or less agreed on a kind of statefinanced social democracy, paid for by excessive taxation.
Perhaps I should vote for Rosie as PM, she seems to have a backbone.
Bob Britnell
Orchard Close, Canterbury