Good enough for politics

Musicians have a phrase, “Good enough for jazz.” Of course, that’s ironic as jazz is the most difficult of musical forms to perform. You can’t get away with just blurting out the notes already written down for you — you’ve got to add something, bring that certain extra to the party.

In jazz, you’ve got to have talent, that is, as well as mere skill. We need to start using something similar in public policy. “Good enough for politics” perhaps. That politics is difficult — requiring perhaps talent as well as mere application — is proven by the dog’s breakfast the minds of our generation are making of it. 

The ambition here is to get acceptance that a specific problem is solved — or, at least, that the political process, or any large scale intervention, is going to be able to get that problem solved. Sure, sure, there’s a little bit left that we’d like to clear up, if we could, but that’s good enough for politics. 

The tax gap for example. Leave aside the bleating about tax avoidance — that’s just obeying tax law as it has been written down even if that’s not what the writing meant — and concentrate upon tax evasion. This is, almost exclusively, an output of the small business, sole trader and cash in hand economy. There’s really no contribution, at all, to this from big business, or billionaires etc. But truly killing tax evasion would require such an interventionist state that we’re around and about at a good enough for politics solution.

Or groceries and supermarkets. Tesco makes 3 per cent on turnover these days — others in the marketplace somewhat less. 3 per cent profit margins are, pretty much, something that is solved. This used not to be true — a generation back Tesco made 6 per cent and the British supermarket industry had the fattest margins globally. There were vast reports measuring local market control, how far was a specific consumer from a competitor and so on. The problem actually got solved by Lidl and Aldi. Being good — therefore greedy — capitalists they looked at these profit margins and decided they would go get them some of that cash, which they did — the competition halving UK supermarket margins.

We might still want to whinge about UPFs, as that man who used to sell us fish finger wraps does, or wimble about how some cannot afford groceries. The correct answer is, well, give them some money then. Because at a 3 per cent profit margin, supermarkets — the structure of that segment of the whole farm to fork industry — are solved. Contrary to the ideas of Mr. Mamdami over in New York, we’re just not going to do better by changing who owns these astonishingly efficient organisations. Not even excising the capitalists is going to do that — the one workers’ cooperative in this space, Waitrose, is rather famous for its location at the higher end of the price spectrum, no? 

Good enough for politics — tax evasion, supermarket efficiency, we’re about there. Any further consideration is just job creation for lanyards.

This is also true of the gender pay gap in Britain. It certainly used to be that there was a large pay gap and it was also unfair. It was the result of direct discrimination against women — hey, sorry, that’s just how Gramps and his society rolled. We’ve changed that, radically, and for the better too. Far, far, more than most seem to realise, the biggest societal change of the past century and more has been the economic liberation of women. That I tend to think it’s all more about the mechanisation of running a household is probably me, but however it came about it’s one heck of a civilisational change. 

But we’re now at that stage where it’s all good enough for politics. We’re done, that is — anything more we try to do is just job creation for the lanyards.

Here’s the Office for National Statistics’ number on that gender pay gap:

The gender pay gap has been decreasing slowly over time; over the last decade it has fallen by more than a quarter among full-time employees, and in April 2025, it stood at 6.9%, down from 7.1% in April 2024.

No, we cannot go around shrieking about how the total gap is still larger than this across everyone. The Statistics Ombudsman told Harriet Harman to stop being so silly about this nearly two decades back. We must compare full time male to full time female, part time to part time (where women earn more than men). The fact that more women work part-time biases the all-to-all comparisons and makes them misleading

So, the UK gender pay gap is about 7 per cent. This is good enough for politics.

For we have analyses of pay gaps when there is no possibility of any bias at all. Well, no bias other than differences in what the individuals doing the jobs themselves desire. For example, a look at wages for bus and train operators in the Boston area (that’s the colonial one, not the Fens one). It’s such a unionised shop that no one at all is able to discriminate in what the men and the women do — only the individual employee is able to do that. By deciding on their schedule, their overtime and so on. The finding is that the women prefer predictability and controllability of hours more than men do. Given that this effect is greater among those women with children, it’s obvious why this is so. But it is so and it leads to an 11 per cent gender pay gap. From the choices of the individual workers, not from the impositions of bastard capitalists nor a patriarchal society. 

Or there’s that paper about Uber. Where there is no gender discrimination at all we still get a 7 per cent gender pay gap because: “in a ‘gig’ economy setting with no gender discrimination and highly flexible labor markets, women’s relatively high opportunity cost of non-paid-work time and gender-based differences in preferences and constraints can sustain a gender pay gap.”

Well, OK. 7 per cent is about the gender pay gap we get when it’s the women making all the choices — with no impositions at all from capitalism, patriarchy, discrimination and the rest — or perhaps it’s the 11 per cent of the bus drivers. That means that the 7 per cent here in the UK is good enough for politics. 

Anything else we do from here on in is simply to produce jobs for the lanyards

Agreed, entirely, that British society used to be vilely discriminatory about female incomes and wages. We’ve all done rather a lot of work about it over the decades. Now we’re done. We’ve arrived at that position where the remaining gap is purely about the choices of women, not the impositions forced upon women. This is as good a solution as politics — or anything else — is going to get to.  

Anything else we do from here on in is simply to produce jobs for the lanyards. This is not — other than for the lanyards — the way to a happy, productive and richer society. Therefore the gender pay gap is another of those problems we should declare solved. 

Since we are talking about jobs and pay here, may I apply — and I’ll charge nothing to do it — for the employment of issuing all those P45s? I’d even throw in the personal interview with each firee for free. The joy of that “Begone, foul, useless fiend” would be enough.