Tax banker bonuses, cap exec salaries and use taxes to help those in need – says Alex Phillips

Let's crack out the champagne and celebrate because the number of people with jobs has gone up! Except of course, barely anybody can afford champagne, given the real value of pay has shrunk to the lowest level in two decades.

Nobody, that is, except all the fat cats and execs. Because something else has happened since the last time the economy hit the skids in the 70s.

Today, Chief execs in the UK are paid an average 759 percent more than their employees, making the wage gap in Britain the biggest in all major economies.

In fact, 90 percent of them pocket 165 times more than a nurse, 140 times more than a teacher and 132 times more than a copper. That is just immoral.

The people who will wipe their bums in old age and keep them safe are scrapping around to afford the supermarket shop while their bosses are living the sort of lives most people could never even dream of.

So I do actually have some sympathy with strikers when they are people who toil all day in laborious jobs to then barely be able to feed their kids while their bosses sit in air conditioned offices and get ferried to fancy dinners and are setting up trust funds for theirs.

And yet we've all been sold some kind of lie that it has to be this way.

That the brightest and the best wouldn't work here if that gap was closed to a more decent level.

Well the thing is, there are plenty of brilliant people around, whereas sheer greed in my mind makes you one of the worst.

Even halving that gap would still see the average exec take home two million quid a year.

Especially when people are in charge of services for the people, paid by the people, a bit of proportion and humility wouldn't go amiss.

I'm not saying we start paying execs a pittance, but when someone in charge of trains only knows first class everything, or a person running hospitals never has relatives stuck in deadly NHS queues, it's hard to imagine that they do really get what life is like at the sharp end.

And let's be straight, money corrupts. Unbridled wealth often imbues a sense of entitlement that sees overpaid yobs who kick a ball go about kicking cats, crashing cars and abusing women acting as though they are untouchable.

Ah but if the ludicrous sums weren't played all the best players would leave the Premiership. So what?

Maybe then the average fan could afford a ticket to the terraces and we'd have a better mettle of player.

When people are earning so much money they frankly don't know how to even spend it ensuring their kids will never have to lift a finger, while others are on the brink of suicide worrying how to even feed theirs, we have a problem.

So yes, tax the bonuses of bankers. Yes, cap the salaries of publicly paid execs as a ratio of their lowest paid worker.

Yes, throw a huge chunk of tax on the houses bought by foreigners pricing ordinary people out of the market, and yes, when using taxpayers money to bail out the country in a crisis, make sure it goes to those who need it and not those who don't.

Because I'd rather live in a country that values aspiration and humanity, rather than one that makes our nation a magnet to those who want to live in unfettered greed and the sordid backbone of our crumbling economy.