Differential

There go all those seats in the Midlands, the North West and Yorkshire, plus a couple in the North East, the failure to win which denied David Cameron an overall majority. The gap in the South West, where the battle between the two Coalition parties has made the difference between a majority Government and a hung Parliament at every General Election for many years, is now so glaring that even the London media and their approved political parties might finally notice that part of the country.

Two Armed Forces personnel of the same rank but based, or with home addresses, in different parts of the country: will they be paid differently? Two police officers or two firemen, also putting their lives at risk? How on earth would a school be supposed to recruit the right calibre of head teacher, or a hospital the right calibre of consultant, on this basis? For make no mistake, once this principle had been conceded, then there would be no end to its implementation.

We need a ban on anything paying any of its employees more than 10 times what it paid any of its other employees, with the whole public sector functioning as a single entity for this purpose, and with its median wage fixed at the median wage in the private sector, to which manual jobs would no longer be outsourced. MPs and Ministers would be included in that, and there would be a statutory ban on anything, anywhere in the economy, paying anyone more than the Prime Minister. The trick with the Conservatives is to make them think that it was their idea. Buy the book here.

And an extension to regional, and if possible even local, of the principle of median wage parity between the two sectors? It is certainly worth exploring. The way to tackle low pay in the private sector is to bring it up, not to bring public sector pay down. If the private sector had more unions, as it used to have, then it would have far less, if any, of this undeniable problem.

Will MPs for Northern seats have to take a pay cut? With an economy larger than that of may European countries, and with a population considerably larger than that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined, the Labour MPs from the three Northern regions are now meeting and acting as a single Group. A sleeping giant is awaking, within the parliamentary system rather than in the form of costly regional assemblies.

The North of England already accounts for three quarters of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Ed Miliband is a Doncaster MP. If the Blairite media were to stage their vaunted coup against him, then the beneficiary would not now be his semi-retired brother any more than it was Michael Heseltine, but the Shadow Cabinet member of the moment, who is no carpetbagger in the North.