OUR ruling elite has shown itself to be completely out of touch throughout this crisis — from the PM’s rule-breaking parties to VIP fast-lanes dishing out corrupt Covid contracts and MPs earning millions in second jobs.  

But perhaps nothing has been as tone-deaf as the recent remarks from the Bank of England boss for workers to show pay restraint to prevent runaway inflation.  

“We do need to see restraint in pay bargaining, otherwise it will get out of control,” bank chief Andrew Bailey warned.

Bailey gets paid £575,000 per year — about 20 times more than the average full-time worker and putting him in around the top 0.1 per cent of earners.  

This is a clear ideological statement that is part of a push from the top to make working people pay for this crisis.

It’s no one-off but is part of a package of measures — from cuts to universal credit, to National Insurance hikes, to real-terms cuts to pensions voted through this week by Tory MPs.

The overwhelming majority of people are facing an all-out assault on living standards.  

Bailey’s remark ignored the realities of inflation — which is being driven by global energy spikes.

This month BP and Shell announced they are making £85 million in profits every single day.

Their super-profits are why your bills are so high. So why didn’t Bailey call for restraint on the energy company profits? Why didn’t he back calls for a windfall tax on their profits?  

Those are not some pie-in-the-sky set of policies. The French government forced EDF, the state-owned energy company, to sell energy below the current high market rates to protect households from rocketing energy costs. Spain has introduced a windfall tax on the major energy companies.  

Bailey’s remarks also ignore the realities of pay. Soaring inflation means real-terms pay cuts for millions of people.

Figures published by the Office for National Statistics in January show real pay — that is once inflation has been taken into account — fell by 1 per cent in the year to last November. It will be falling further now as inflation soars. 

Workers’ wages certainly aren’t driving inflation. In fact, workers have faced the tightest squeeze on living standards in 200 years over the last decade.

Average wages were only just getting back to their 2008 pre-crash peak when this latest crisis hit meaning that the Tories have overseen a decade of lost pay.  

Of course, for many workers, salaries have fallen over the last decade. The TUC says that nurses’ real wages are down more than £2,700 per year since 2010.  

Nothing highlights the wage squeeze more than this startling statistic: average incomes are now £9,000 per person below the levels they would have been had growth since 2008 matched the pre-crash trend.  

That is why people are increasingly struggling to get through to the end of the month with enough to cover rent, food and energy costs and the other basics.  

Without a fight, it won’t get any better soon. The government’s own figures at last November’s Budget showed average pay would increase by just 0.3 per cent a year from 2022-25 — and that already looks like an exaggeration. 

The political aim since the 2008 banking crisis — through austerity, through cuts, and now through below-inflation rises in pay and social security — has been to shift wealth from workers to capital.  

We now have the grotesque spectacle of the super-wealthy telling NHS workers, carers, shopworkers and others who got us through the pandemic to shoulder the burden of it while they exploit the crisis for all it’s worth.  

During the Covid crisis, British billionaires increased their wealth by £290m per day. They are now over £100 billion richer than they were before the pandemic began. Their wealth, not workers’ pay, is what should be curtailed.  

For example, if we put a 10 per cent tax on the wealth of those with over £100m, we would raise £69bn.

That could fund a huge package to tackle energy and food poverty and address the NHS backlog. 

Even more modest approaches could make a real difference to people. I have put down a motion in Parliament, now backed by over 35 MPs from six parties, calling on the government to replace the proposed National Insurance increase with a wealth tax on the richest 1 per cent.

A small 1.5 per cent levy on those with wealth of over £5m would raise the same as the proposed National Insurance hike.  

There is no shortage of progressive alternatives like that. But we will only win them if we fight this government in every community and mobilise against every attack.  

The 99 per cent are being hit on all fronts — so our response has to be on all fronts. We need a political response demanding the windfall taxes on super-profits, public ownership of energy, increases in the minimum wage to £15 per hour and benefits that give people security and dignity.  

Alongside that we need an industrial response — with action demanding that bosses give workers proper pay increases and we also need a response on the streets.  

The excellent Strike Map website shows all the workers taking action at the moment and we need to be offering solidarity to each and every worker forced into industrial action to defend their living standards.  

I recently visited the Great Ormond Street Hospital outsourced security guards as they began six weeks of strike action with an energetic rally which filled me with hope.  

This weekend’s People’s Assembly protests all across the country also give me hope that we can stave off these Tory attacks.

They have my full support. They need to be just the start of all our mobilisations to defend living standards.   

The deepening political crisis for Boris Johnson shouldn’t end with him being replaced with another Tory set on carrying out the same attacks on the vast majority of people.  

We need to use the widespread anger against the government to push for real change — in Parliament, in workplaces and on the streets. 

Richard Burgon is the Labour MP for Leeds East.