Finance and Industry
How many millionaires
When the Inland Revenue Report for the year 1960-61 was published in January it showed that while in the previous year there had been 66 individuals with incomes above £100,000 a year, the number has now dropped to 60. The Evening News called it “Britain’s Vanishing Millionaires.”
It is not the Inland Revenue officials who are responsible for calling these people millionaires, but the newspapers nave long worked on the assumption that when a man’s income, before payment of tax, gets above the £100,000 mark (roughly £2,000 a week) his property of all kinds is probably above £1,000,000.
The number has varied a great deal. In 1938 it was 99. Then it dropped more or less steadily till it touched 38 in 1949 and 37 in 1952. Then it started rising again and reached 67 in 1958 before declining to 66 and now to 60.
In this century the peak seems to have been reached in 1921 when they numbered 208. As taxation is much higher and the purchasing power of each pound is much less than it was then, the very rich must find that things aren’t what they used to be. Even so, taking the official figures for 1958-9, the 2,700 people who had incomes over £20,000 had an average income of about £34,400 before paying tax and were left with an average of about £5,550 after paying tax —about £100 a week.
But Mr. Bernard Harris, city editor of the Sunday Express (5/11/62) gave it as his view that the number of people in the millionaire class as regards ownership of property far exceeds the number with incomes above £100,000 a year. His explanation is that in order avoid high death duties most of the very rich take steps in time to hand over the bulk of their property to their heirs.
“. . . for every one who died a millionaire there were probably 10 who divested themselves of part of their wealth in order to lose that distinction and qualify for smaller death duties. So it is a pretty safe conjecture that the number of millionaires and tax-conscious ex-millionaires ill Britain today is well over a thousand.”
As an example of this business of transferring property to escape heavy death duties the Daily Express (8/2/62) had the following:
“The Earl of St. Germans, 48, who has had a remarkable success with a London bookmaking firm called Nicholas Eliot, is to make over all his family estates, worth around £1,000,000, to his 21 year old son and heir Lord Eliot.”
The estates to be transferred include 6,000 acres in Cornwall, but not the turf accounting business.
A nice job
In the House of Commons on January 30 the Assistant Postmaser General, Miss Mervin Pike, was asked what is the weekly wage of Post Office men, Cleaners, Doorkeepers and Liftmen. She replied: “£8 16s. a week. The rates in outer and inner London are greater by 10s. to £1 respectively. This is the same as is paid to non-industrial male cleaners in the Civil Service generally.”
“. . . Asked if this wage is not ridiculously low” Miss Pike,, who clearly lacked the inclination to attempt lo justify it, took refuge in the argument that inquiry had shown Post Office cleaners to be getting more than is paid in industry generally.
These cleaners and others are among the Post Office workers whose claim for higher pay the Government rejected last year.
Accidents
This century has witnessed a great increase in the number of industrial accidents, that is to say, in the number of accidents that have to be reported and become recorded in official publications. But what of those that do not have to be reported?
The reportable accidents are those which are fatal or which disable the worker for more than three days from earning full wages for the work at which he is employed.
Within this definition the Ministry of Labour reported 217 deaths and 16,934 accidents in the building trades in the year 1960 (Labour Gazette, April, 1961).
But, according to a building trade employer, Mr. Peter Trench, the total number of accidents is enormously greater.
Writing in the Financial Times Building and Contracting Supplement recently, Mr. Trench, who is Director of the National Federation of Building Trades Employers, estimates that for every reported accident there are 30 or 40 that do not have to be reported. And he puts the total number of accidents in the building trades at 500,000 a year or nearly 10,000 a week.
He records that accidents have been increasing in spite of propaganda designed to lessen the number. He gave his opinion as to the reason:
“Despite all the publicity and propaganda there are still far too many building firms in which little or no direct responsibility is accepted for seeing that accidents are prevented from happening; and there are still two many operatives adopting the metaphorically fatal attitude of ‘couldn’t care less’ which all too often becomes fatal in reality.”
He records the opinion of others that one of the causes is the greater size and complexity of modern buildings.
The New Men in Russian Industry
The emergence of a new social group is not necessarily dramatic or even at first obvious, but there are clear signs that new men are entering on to the political stage in Russia. In an article “New Pressures are growing up in Russia,” the Soviet Correspondent of the Financial Times recently noted that among the people who backed and to some extent forced Kruschev’s denunciation of Stalinist Terror at last year’s Party Congress in Moscow are “the younger professional managers.”
“These Party Professionals have as their principal job, the supervision of the running of the economy in their respective areas of the country. Like other young educated people in the Soviet Union, they enjoy a good standard of living, and are in a position to know that the country’s economic position can be improved much further still if sensible policies are assured. An obvious prerequisite of stable life for everyone is that there should be no repetition of the police rule, with arbitrary arrests and executions of Stalin’s time.”
David Floyd, in the Sunday Telegraph (26/11/61), expressing a similar view, quoted from a recent book on the history of the Russian Security Services, by Boris Lewytzkyj:
“The worker or technician responsible with the aid of the most up-to-date machinery for the whole industrial process, cannot carry out his duties properly unless he has considerable freedom of decision. No scientist can make progress with his terribly difficult intellectual work if he is constantly aware that the failure of an experiment may be labelled as an act of sabotage by some primitive policeman.
The ‘historical role’ of the terror in the Soviet Union is finished. At the present time the Soviet leaders could achieve nothing by terror, at the best they could destroy the foundations of their own power.”
The Manager’s Life
On the same subject, interesting details about the life of a factory manager were given some time ago in articles written by a Russian factory manager and his English-born wife who recently left Russia.
He and his wife had no complaint about their financial position in Russia, though the husband, Ignat Ovsyannikov, did remark that sometimes a skilled worker in the factory might take home more pay than he did as manager.
As a manager he had
“the very comfortable living of 6,000 roubles per month, six times a Soviet working man’s wage, and as much as the salary paid to a Minister of a Soviet Republic.”
One of the features of the life of the factory manager and other people “in authority” is the way they are cut off from contact with the ordinary workers outside the factory:
“Anyone who has any authority at all in the Soviet Union is cut off from the ordinary people. it is, for example, impossible for a factory manager or party secretary to use the ordinary restaurants in his town. He would be likely to meet his employees on equal terms and that would not do. The managerial class is isolated from the rest of society. If a man is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party he will ever have a personal bodyguard to accompany him everywhere.”
Arrangements are made for the manager’s family to buy food at special stores, and to eat in closed restaurants They also have special medical services “for the upper class of Soviet society. They have their own clinics and sanatoria where they get the best of treatment. Members of the Central Committee and the Government have luxurious rest homes on the Black Sea coast.” (Sunday Telegraph, 13/7/61).
It is all remarkably like life as it is lived by the favoured few here or anywhere else in the world.
H.