Market? What market?

Needless to say, dear old Sir Digby Jones has had fits of the vapours at a modest call for pay restraint at the practically tax-exempt upper end of the scale, exemptions the bill for which is footed by the middle and working classes, with one of the great cities of the world now functioning as a tax haven for the super-rich as if it were a Channel Island or a smaller West Indy.

Anyway, Sir Digby cites, as such people always do, "the market". What "market"? Most of these people have only ever worked for one company in their lives. Almost none is a foreign national, and most of those who are are Irish. Many are related to the founders of their respective companies. This "market" simply does not exist.

As for the scaremongering talk of withdrawal of investment and of "brain drains", the real British market, sixty million strong, is sufficiently large that people are always going to want to sell to it, and if they are told that they just have to make the goods here and employ our people from top to bottom within our pay restraint regime, then they will do it rather than forego a market this size.

And a "brain drain"? See above as to the sort of people we're actually talking about. Anyway, even assuming that anywhere else would take them, where would they go? Only America springs to mind, a country which most of them visit frequently and where many of them even have permanent residences. They have explicitly decided against actually living there, rather than just having houses there, on a permanent basis, simply because most people do not wish to live permanently in a foreign country.