Days Without Alcohol - 17

I love coming up with idealistic new ways of running society, that have no chances of working in the unpleasant real world, but would make life better if everyone would just agree to come along. I am sure you love doing this too - you know the kind of thing, a world with no war, a world where everyone was just decent and polite to each other and maybe helped each other out even if it took them slightly out of their way. It would be lovely wouldn't it, but it wouldn't work, so don't even bother trying to make it happen.

My current political system is about pay structures between professions. It seems to me that the world would be better if the people who did the shittest, most demeaning, manual jobs ( eg. cleaning toilets, working in a sewer or, worst of all serving in Chicken Cottage) would get paid the most money, whilst people in cushy fun and rewarding jobs should be on minimum wage. Wouldn't this entirely impractical proposal make the world a lot fairer? How did it even happen that someone who works as a film actor can make millions of pounds in a few months, whilst someone who cleans the London Underground tunnels at night would have to work for about 600 years to earn anything approaching the same amount? What I propose is that pay structures are essentially flipped over, so that JK Rowling has to live on benefits and paperboys get multi-million pound bonuses. I can see no drawback with this. Why isn't it happening already?

One of the main advantages of such an idea would be that those people who are desperate just to make money for money's sake - the boys working in the City, advertising executives and everyone who works in PR - would be forced to clean up sick and faeces in order to get the riches they coveted. They'd still be rich and obnoxious and hateful, but at least the rest of us would look at them as they splashed their money around knowing they would have had to do something actually physically (rather than spiritually) degrading to get it. The nice thing about this system and why it might actually get implemented in a democratic society is that the people in the middle earning an average amount would still get the same money for what they do, whilst the rich became poor and the poor became rich. People with above average earnings would take a bit of a pay cut, but I think knowing that footballers were getting nothing for their enjoyable job, whilst tramps were being traded on the open market for millions, would make up for the loss of wages.

So come on Gordon Brown. Make my idea law. It would be the thing that made you popular again, though less well off, though I am sure a man who sells pegs door to door would give you a bung.

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