These wage increases are tasteless

This riche is too Nouveau

I want you to imagine two people.

The first, a woman called Aleema.

Aleema was born in the Red Wall. As a little girl, she dreamed of escaping the Radical Islam preached by her father.

Every day, after comprehensive school, she would risk life and limb to get on a public bus full of ex-miners to the library.

Where she would read.

Monday might be Plato’s Republic. On Tuesday, she’d tuck in to ‘Gerrard: My autobiography’.  She’d save the Amis brothers for the weekends.

One day, she came across that book. That book that would change her life forever.

Well worn, well thumbed, with a bit of the paper curling on the front cover:

‘The Liar’ by Stephen Fry.

This book, about a dashing wealthy homosexual, romping through the weathered quads of Cambridge colleges, did what all good books do.

It planted a seed.

From that day on, Aleema worked harder.

Forced to study for her A-Levels while spending hours cooking elaborate ethnic cuisines for her presumably enormous extended family after school, while her father barked passages of the Quran at her, the odds were stacked against her.

Then, interviews. How the pin-striped Eton Toffs laughed at her when she tried to talk about Football with them!

But that magical day came.

And with it, that letter.

And while the Grammar School boys doomed to spend three years at glorified polytechnics cried their eyes out, Aleema smiled.

Because come October, she would be going up to Cambridge (One of the aspirational colleges, Caius at a stretch, Robinson realistically).

The Second, Connor

Connor was born in Kent.

As a foetus, Connor knew two things: shouting and alcohol.

Born half-drunk, and already able to swear, he took like a fish to water in the sea of filth that is white working-class life.

When social services came round, managed to step over the abandoned sofas and discarded children’s bikes in the front garden, and forced his indolent, obese mother to send the little tyke to school, misery ensued.

With his far too large blazer (‘you’ll grow into it you little bastard’), clip-on tie and spiky gelled hair, Connor was a terror.

Spraying lighters with deodorant cans at the back of Geography. Pinging girl’s bra straps in English. Then writing ‘Mr Eichmann is a Nonce’ on the tables in German.

Aging, as the poor do, like milk, by Sixteen Connor was already tiring of the Mayfair cigarettes behind the bike shed and ‘heavy petting’ on freezing park benches with fleshy pale women and bottles of Teachers Whiskey.

So, in spite of Blair, he left school before Sixth Form, and got a ‘trade’, unblocking toilets but mostly trying to scam defenceless middle-class women out of their husband’s substantial rental income.

Now I ask you, dear reader, to consider this:

In a society built on decency. In an economy that is compassionate, and fair.

In a world that makes sense.

Which of these two young people would be on higher salaries?

The next time some paint-flecked tradie swaggers in to your smart Gastropub, the spiritual descendant of a Vandal in Rome, some Barbarian looter drunk in the death throes of a civilisation in decline.

Know that you are not the only one who has seen the banks of the River Thames foam with much blood.