Dear Rishi

Dear Rishi

First of all, thank you for my furlough cheques. To be honest, I normally thank myself each time one turns up, on the basis that I like to think I’m being paid out of tax receipts that came from me in the first place, but it’s your idea, and I must give you the credit, too. Thank you, too, for always seeming to smile. In an unsmiling world, I like that. You have a skill that could make even the arrival of Vladimir Putin in London look like a wonderful opportunity for us all.

I suspect that you will quite shortly be my Prime Minister, so here’s an idea for you to mull over as you while away those intervening months, and are rolling your eyes at Priti Patel banging on about quarantine and immigrants on the cabinet Zoom call.

Unemployment is going to be eye-wateringly high, a coming fact that I hope your civil servants are not hiding that from you any more. It is going to make even broader the groaning divide between those who have plenty, and those that don’t.

I’m not a big researcher, but I think now is the time to come out with a firm pledge to work towards a national four day working week. Here’s why.

1. The economy will have shrunk by between 11- 15% by the end of the year. There simply isn’t enough work to go around, and won’t be for years. We need to share it out.

2. Over the last 25 years, we have all become used to consuming far too much ‘stuff’, most of which finds its way in short order to landfill sites that we haven’t got enough room to expand. This stuff, especially the electronic stuff, is mainly making us feel inadequate, sometimes miserable.

If all of us in work above a certain income level are paid a logical 20% less, and buy 25% less stuff, we will have what we need, and not what we don’t. A clever use of the level of living wage, income support and tax breaks, will protect those on lower incomes.

We will have an extra day of leisure each week, which, in my case, I will use partly to perfect my cover drive, and partly to make honey.

It’s not surprising that 65% of people polled generally support this prospect when asked. It’s not that they are idle, so much as they already work longer hours, more inefficiently, than anyone else in Europe. A four day week will make us all more productive (because we will have to be), and narrow the inequality between men and women, as it will be less of a deal for the latter to go back to work after childbirth. Microsoft tried it in Japan, and their productivity went up 40%; Sweden and New Zealand, happier countries than our own, one could argue, are building it into their plans. Finally, mental health will improve as stress reduces, and people will have more time to get fit.

Clearly, there will have to be exceptions. But this is the case with everything in life, with the exception of the front foot no ball rule.

The concept of the weekend can be played around with to cover four days, so that attractions and hostelries spread their busy days out over double the time.

People on the right will complain that it smacks of nanny state, and prevents nice people becoming obscenely rich, and giving out her hours contracts. People on the left will complain that any drop in our inalienable right to buy more complete rubbish is unacceptable, and what would Marx think? The civil servants will tell you it can’t be done, because all change is ghastly, until they realise it includes they themselves, too. My advice is to ignore them all, and the others will help you make it work.

Wonderful things will happen. Burger chains will have to think twice about giving foul plastic toys as bribes to children; pubs, if we are allowed back in them, will have tables available at weekends; important jobs in the garden will actually get completed. And far, far more people will be in work, rather than on the scrap heap. You are too young to remember what mass unemployment looked like in the early 1980’s. I can, and it looked horrible.

I am prepared to come and work for you on this, on the basis of a four day week. It would be fun, even if you found yourself rolling your eyes in cabinet as I tell you my latest tedious bee stories.

Thanks again for the furlough

Yours truly,

Roger

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