WHEN Alistair Darling delivers his first Budget next month, there will be the usual stern warnings about the need to cap the pay of public sector workers.
But, on two issues – the explosion in the pay of the richest in our society and their growing success in avoiding tax on it – the Chancellor will breathe not a word.

The FTSE 100 chief executives enjoyed a 16% pay rise last year, and have doubled their earnings in the last five years to £3.17m, but Mr Darling will not demand “discipline� from them.

His position is that the stratospheric salaries of the mega-rich is a matter for them alone – despite all the evidence that the gross unfairness triggers growing anger in the workplace.

It also blows out of the water that flagship pledge to end child poverty.

Such poverty is measured against other incomes – incomes that are becoming more unequal – but still ministers are silent.

It would not be so depressing if these multi-millionaires flooded the nation’s coffers with their taxes for better public services but, alas, the truth is dramatically different.

Earlier this month, a study commissioned by the trade unions found that tax avoidance by the very wealthy cost the Treasury a staggering £13bn a year.

That sum – enough to boost the education budget by 9%, or NHS spending by 5% –
dwarfs the amount lost to benefit fraud, but receives next-to-no attention.

Tax avoidance by the largest companies costs a further £12bn.

Now, I have given up on ever hearing Gordon Brown, or his lieutenants, utter a word of criticism about boardroom pay. That’s “Old Labour�, they shiver.

But, surely, they want the privileged few to pay their taxes?

If only because, if they don’t, the burden falls on the all-important middle-classes, who decide elections.

So three cheers for Birkenhead MP Frank Field, a Labour MP who has more good ideas before breakfast than the entire Cabinet achieves in a month of slap-up dinners.

Yesterday, Mr Field proposed a 10% tax hike on those earning more than £150,000 a year unless – like the richest in America – they pay back society for their good fortune by giving generously to charity.

That, surely, is a message Mr Brown can sell to the middle-classes – or the “coping classes�, as I saw them described the other day – without sounding like an evil tax-and-spend socialist?

Sadly, despite meeting Mr Field six times recently to explore ways to “make full use of his talents�, there is zero chance of the Prime Minister adopting any ideas from his old enemy in Birkenhead.

There is no sign of hell freezing over yet.

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