mentator for the Guardian newspaper. Quite why this should be so is a mystery. Her articles are generally pompous and unreadable and I've never managed to get beyond the second paragraph of one.
There's usually something more interesting to do in a lunch break. Despite this she has written a very important book.
She was invited by the charity Church Action on Poverty to spend six weeks living on the New Labour minimum wage of £4.10 an hour: She accepted the challenge and the book she has produced should be whelmingly agency staff.
They are paid poverty wages, are superexploited while at work and have seen their pension and holiday entitlements shredded. This is what New Labour means when it talks of bringing the efficiencies of the market into the public sector.
The most harrowing chapter describes her time working in an old people's home for £4.85 an hour, on shifts that included weekends and evenings. The company director she interviewed put no spin on matters. He was able to pay his shareholdviding dignified care to senile and doubly incontinent old people is much less important work than working as an accountant on a PFl project.
The reader can find the weaknesses in this book for themselves. She was on the right of the Labour Party which split to join the SDP.
And yet the book that she has produced could be reproduced wholesale in a Socialist Alliance pamphlet summing up why we hate New Labour. It's a book to make you angry and make you active. Local government staff - not just angry about pay but fighting for more B
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