I’ve done some simple sums to clarify the enormous problems caused by the wealth gap.

I have obtained the following figures from recognised sources but have rounded them off for simplicity: About 29,000,000 adults are employed in the UK. The average worker is paid £26,500 per annum so the total UK ‘wage bill’ is about £769 billion.

Total income tax receipts are about £154billion per annum which is roughly 20% or £5,310 per average worker.

 0.1% of the 29,000,000 get 5% of all earnings. Put another way 29,000 of us receive about £38billion per annum an average of £1.3million per annum. Apparently, the average FTSE director earns £2.7million per annum and executive pay in the UK rose last year by 50% (nice work if you can get it!).

Incidentally, the top 1% of earners (290,000) receive 14.3% of total earnings (£110billion) an average of £380,000 per annum, another indictment of the double standards of our society.

I can only hope these figures include bank bonuses.

Speculating on the inherent generosity of spirit of the privileged 29,000, I would like to publicly persuade them to take a cut of 33% gross taking them back only 12 months in the greed race.

With a 45% tax rate (that is if they don’t use a tax avoidance scheme) this will only effectively reduce their incomes by a mere 18%. ‘saving’ the country about £13billion per annum.

This could be used either as a tax cut of 2% for the remaining 28,971,000 ‘slaves’ or more effectively used to raise the minimum hourly rate by 30 pence per hour to benefit only the less-well paid.

An injection of £13billion per annum into our economy right now would work wonders.

I want to avoid being accused of inciting rioting on the streets if you publish my findings.

If this occurs, I shall claim in mitigation that my only wish was to persuade electors to vote only for politicians from a humble background who genuinely believe we should “all be in this together”.

Mike Joslin Garfield Avenue Dorchester