WAGE CUTS

The share of national wealth spent on wages has been in sharp decline. Two-thirds of national wealth was spent on wages in 1975, but the figure had slumped to 53% now, said the TUC.

The wages of middle income earners had increased by 1.6% a year since 1980, while productivity had grown by 1.9% annually, it was found.Those at the top have seen their earnings grow by as much as 56 per cent.

"The truth is that ordinary families have had their wages squeezed and have had to borrow money which should have been part of the wage packet instead.While the super-rich secured themselves a personal wealth boom on a scale not seen since Dickensian times - a direct result of the rising profits share - those on middle incomes slipped behind in wages and living standards."

As wages fell relative to prices, people have borrowed more to maintain their standard of living, with average household debt growing from 45 per cent in 1980 to 157 per cent in 2007.

Stewart Lansley, author of the study, said: "For the last 30 years Britain's low and middle earners have seen their pay and living conditions stall while the incomes of the affluent, the rich and super-rich have vastly outpaced them.We now have an increasingly unequal society with growing income, wealth and opportunity gaps."

"It is not any amelioration of the conditions of the most miserable that will satisfy us: it is justice to all that we demand. It is not the mere improvement of the social life of our class that we seek, but the abolition of classes and the destruction of those wicked distinctions which have divided the human race into princes and paupers , landlords and labourers , masters and slaves . It is not any patching and cobbling up of the present system we aspire to accomplish , but the annihilation of the system and the substitution , in its stead , of an order of things in which all shall labour and all enjoy , and the happiness of each guarantee the welfare of the entire community."
George Julian Harney , 1850 , Red Republican