Imagine this: you are given one dollar every second.

At that rate, after one minute, you would have 60 dollars. After twelve days, you would be a millionaire – something beyond the wildest dreams of most people on Earth.

But how long would it take to become a billionaire?

Well, at that rate, it would take almost 32 years.

I am grateful to Linda McQuaig, the celebrated Canadian journalist, for doing the sums.

She calls for a much more progressive tax system with a top rate of 70% for incomes over $2.5m (about £1,586,000). And she wants determined action to close the tax loopholes that almost exclusively benefit the rich.

She is talking about the Canadian system but there is a straight read across to the UK.

Our tax system is grotesquely distorted, rewarding the super rich and, too often, turning a blind eye to the tax cheats.

It its report last year (attached), the High Pay Commission tells us “top pay has spiraled alarmingly to stratospheric levels in some of our biggest companies”.

In BP, in 2011 the lead executive earned 63 times the amount of the average employee. In 1979 the multiple was 16.5. In Barclays, top pay is now 75 times that of the average worker. In 1979 it was 14.5. Over that period, the lead executive’s pay in Barclays has risen by 4,899.4% – from £87,323 to a staggering £4,365,636.

I see that Stephen Hester, the Chief Executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland (83% State owned) is to give up his bonus of just under £1 million.

That’s a start. It still leaves him with a base salary of £1.2 million so he should be able to get by.

Will Hutton has a nice piece in today’s Observer, making the point that Hester’s salary is reward enough for the work he does.

More than enough, I’d say.

We should get rid of bonuses in State owned banks. If Hester and the other top executives don’t like it they can move on.

It’s time to call their bluff.

Ashcroft and the Royal Yacht

The notorious tax cheat Michael Ashcroft is offering £5 million towards the cost of a new Royal yacht.

He says he wants to give away his fortune before he dies.

What does he expect?

A round of applause?

Before he gives his money away, perhaps he should settle first his account with HM Revenue and Customs.

William Hague famously told Tony Blair, that once Ashcroft received his peerage in 2000 he would become UK resident for tax purposes in the following financial year.

Hague told us: “This decision will cost him and benefit the Treasury tens of millions of pounds a year in tax.”

Hague subsequently corrected himself.

Not tens of millions. No. No. No.

“Zero” would have been more accurate.

Honour killings come to Canada

Stone age attitudes of “family honour” led Mohammad Shafia, a wealthy Afghan Canadian, to murder his first wife and three teenage daughters.

The girls' Western ways infuriated Shafia, a bullying foul mouthed controlling tyrant who believed family honour had been compromised.

For the past four months the Shafia trial in Kingston, Ontario, has transfixed Canadians who see the world through the lens of gender equality.

“Honour” crimes are a relatively new phenomenon here and the trial got wall-to-wall coverage in the press.

The jury of seven women and five men today found Mohammad Shafia, his second wife, Tooba, and his 21 year old son, Mohammad, guilty of first degree murder.

They will have 25 years in prison to reflect on it all.

In the UK there were almost 3,000 honour crimes last year.

Attachments:

High Pay Commission 2011.pdf

[High Pay Commission 2011]

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The BBC’s Nick Robinson tells us that Ed Miliband backs pay cuts.

Oh dear!

In his defence Miliband says “The priority has got to be to protect jobs.”

I am left wondering how far you can take this approach before people start to say no.

The most extreme example of wage cutting is happening here in Ontario where, on 1 January, the US multinational giant, Caterpillar, locked out nearly 500 workers at the plant in London, close to the American border.

The plant’s previous owner, Progress Rail, was bought last year by a wholly owned Canadian subsidiary of Caterpillar.

Now the company wants to slash their $35 hourly wages by half and significantly reduce their benefits. Caterpillar say they want to get wages and benefits in line with their US plants.

If you go down this road where does it all stop? $10 an hour?

This Saturday there will be a rally in the town and all the federal Party leaders have been invited.

They will be asked the age old question: whose side are you on?

With some politicians we already know the answer.

Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, looks the other way. He doesn’t want to get involved. But when Air Canada employees were on strike last year, Harper was the first to threaten back-to-work legislation.

We wait for other politicians to find their voice.

Goldman Sachs bonuses average £240,000

A world away from the picket line in London, Ontario, the 1% and their helpers continue to cash in.

As it happens, I’ve just seen the terrific film, Margin Call, which takes the audience into the heart of a US investment bank just as finance capitalism goes into meltdown.

Now, a few years later, and after humungous amounts of public money have baled out private banks, we realise little has changed.

Goldman Sachs’ 95 so-called “code staff” based in the UK share a staggering £175m topped up with additional millions in “Restricted Stock Units”.

Seems to me these stock options should be banned outright. And we should return to progressive taxation to make sure the wealthiest pay their fair share.

What does it take for people to feel outrage at what is happening?

Mitt Romney paying tax at 15%?

Birtwistle’s NHS deadline

Burnley’s Liberal Democrat MP, the boastful Gordon Birtwistle, says he has secured the cash for a brand new A&E department or Urgent Care Centre at Burnley General Hospital.

Never a man to sell himself short, Birtwistle tells the Lancashire Telegraph

I’ve got money approved down in London providing they (the hospital trust) get the bid in before April 4.

I’m not bothered about what it’s called as long as we get back what we had before.

Birtwistle’s bombshell takes everyone by surprise.

There is no mention of a £12m capital project in the East Lancashire Hospital’s 2011-12 business plan which covers the period 2011-2016 (see attached).

The Trust plans to incorporate the Royal Blackburn’s Urgent Care Centre into its Emergency Department. But there is no mention of any souped up UCC at Burnley.

If Birtwistle delivers the cash he promises, will the sparkling new building still be an Urgent Care Centre – a designation he likened previously to a “first aid post”?

Meanwhile, in the constituency next door, Pendle’s Conservative MP, Andrew Stephenson, is holding out for the A&E badge to be reinstated. He told readers of the local rag, the Nelson Leader:

Since my election, I am happy to say that the Urgent Care Centre at Burnley is now receiving more ambulances, however the majority of blue-light cases are still going to Blackburn. This is good news, but I still want to see Burnley General have its A&E designation reinstated in full.

I have been keeping up the pressure on the Department of Health, who are undertaking a national review into how urgent and emergency care services are categorised, the “nomenclature review”. Unfortunately, the review is taking a long time, but as ridiculous as it sounds there has never been a proper definition of what services an Urgent Care Centre or A&E Department should provide.

I dare say all will become clear in due course.

Attachments:

ELHT_Annual_Business_Plan_2011-12.pdf

[East Lancs NHS Trust Business Plan 2011-2012]

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