How complicating the maths might help industrial relations.

Listening to the row about the meagre pay rise being floated for NHS staff, and thinking about the fiscal balancing act that the Chancellor is undertaking to pay back more money than there are numbers in the world, it occurred to me that perhaps the problem lies in successive governments determination to dumb down the maths that run our systems to the point where any creature with a decimal number of digits to work with can understand it.

I was born into a society without a metric nerve in its body. We were avoirdupois, l.s.d. and imperial to our roots. We had stones, shillings and chains to consider using intricate mathematical relationships that seemed to have no logical relationship  and operated independently of each other. It was complex and challenging - but it taught us how to think outside the binary world and consider different ways that arithmetical systems could solve problems.

When I started work in my father’s print works in the early 70s, I was tasked with learning every aspect of the business, including the accounts department. For a number of years I had to grapple with the purchase and sales ledgers and the weekly payroll. All manually. This was both pre-decimalisation and pre-VAT and when calculators weighed about the same as a sack of coal. I remember two important lessons from that time. Firstly, the personal needs and the amount of tax and National Insurance of each member of our staff was adjusted regularly by use of their code numbers. Similarly, the amount of purchase tax everybody’s products carried was variable and adjusted at the point of sale. There were, from memory, something like five or six rates ranging from 0% for necessities to 50% for luxuries. All of the rates and data  for both these systems was available to me in HMRC published rate bibles, which were nailed both to the top of my desk and my brain.

This kind of system was necessary back then because we were still, just about, in an age of reconstruction, when the visions of statesmen like Attlee, Bevin and Bevan - old age pensions, social security, world peace and security and, of course, the NHS were a source of popularity and pride. That generation of war hardened post war politicians recognised that “equal” and “fair” was not always the same thing, that a working family whose earnings passed straight from their hands to their mouths might need a bit more help and that whilst some products were necessities, others were luxuries and the rate of tax they carried could reflect that without seeming unequal. Once we stopped believing in that we moved into the age of discontent and the flat caps sat on one side of the room and threw insults at the bowler hats on the other side who accused them of being traitors. Negotiations that resulted in the rest of us working three days out of five in unheated offices and going to bed at 10pm when the lights and the tv was switched off by the government.

One of the positive things we might take from our last pandemic filled year is the opportunity to reset our society’s values to those standards and realise what is really important to us. By thinking outside the blinkered economic policies of the recent past, policies of ambition fuelled acquisition that have brought riches beyond dreams for some and recession and austerity for others, policies which have brought us to a place where both our micro and macro economic decisions have been dumbed down to knee jerk binary instances that just benefit individual sustainability rather than society and growth. With the bravery to take a chance to make things a little more complicated to fit with our little more complex lives we could turn those policies on their head to a people who get that the legacy of a nurse is more than that of a bond salesmen and although a bicycle and a Lamborghini are both modes of transport, only one will be unchanged in a hundred years time. If either are still around.

If the treasury / ministry of health is seriously thinking of rewarding the NHS with the kind of meagre uplift that was floated yesterday they should lose their jobs on grounds of humanity. Their miserly mantra that after the cost of the last year they have nothing left in the tank is simply not good enough to use on the people without whom there would be no tank. 

Personally, for the past year I’ve done little but beat my breast and moan about my first world problems. Other than try to protect my family the best I can, I’ve done little of benefit. Accepted, the government has done more than it might. A lot more. Many people have received gratis payments to stay at home or have been paid 80% of their salary to save their jobs. But in many cases of public service life has gone on unchanged. The front line staff of the NHS have just gone to work every day as they always have. But they’ve had to work far harder than normal. They haven’t had the chance to think about anything other than working flat out trying to save others lives at the risk of losing their own. In many cases surrounded by the grief of their impossible task. They have done way more for the country than most of us. It seems to me that as a nation we should certainly reward that. My suggestion is that if the government can’t or isn’t prepared to simply giving NHS - or any other vital public service workers - any more, then by complicating the maths a little they could take less from them. An increase in the tax-free allowances of essential workers would certainly value them more - and a one year tax free holiday would be a good, grown-up, way of saying thanks. And if that’s too scary for the government to consider then perhaps greed shaming might be in order. Consider the two million reportedly spent on Allegra Stratton’s new Downing Street communications’ centre. Consider the budget for Carrie Symonds redecoration of her new house to get it away from Thereasa May’s “John Lewis style”. And of course consider the £350m a week Boris promised the NHS from Brexit savings. If it really is impossible to stop the government wasting enough money to ensure our most valuable workers comfort and security - then perhaps those of us who can afford it could  lower our tax threshold a little for a while to cover the slack.

Similarly we could look a little harder into the inequality of indirect taxation to fund more on public spending or reduce the cost of living. When we were in the EU for compliance reasons we had to comply with their rates, including a caveat that goods that could not have less than a 5% VAT charge on them - but we’re not in it anymore so we can abolish all rates and re classify goods according to necessity - and those really necessary to zero. Similarly we could take a serious look at products which, although desirable are clearly luxury and add a small increase - say up from 20% to 25% to generate a lot more revenue and no loss in sales. Yes I know certain right wing loving car tv programme farming presenters won’t like it - but their  lifestyles are so far removed from reality, does that really matter to the rest of us?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to pay more tax - especially not to a government I didn’t vote for, that ran on a platform that wiped out a big chunk of my export business. But I don’t want to see a return to old school, adversarial, arms-folded, fuck you wage negotiations and I certainly also don’t want to see the most vital section of my country go unhappy and unappreciated for the sacrifices they have made for me. I can honestly say that I owe my life to the NHS. That was at the age of nine. That means every success I’ve had, every smile I’ve enjoyed, every iota of happiness that I have enjoyed with my wife, my kids and, soon to be grandkids is also due to the NHS. That has to be worth complicating my maths a little.