If regional pay rates are good for teachers, nurses etc.. why not MP, Doctors, tesco, M & S, John Lewis and many more?

Basically, the kind of people who stopped Fabrice Muamba dying on the pitch today either only exist in the south or else only deserve the same pay if they are in the south.

Low blow

Can my kids have a reduction in their university fees because i am a northener and cannot pay £9k a year

Is he saying that national pay rates are keeping public sector pay down? Not only that but also that he thinks this is a good thing?

If they come to London they can recieve additional support, yes.

I'll tell you what would be an unforseen by-product of regional wage rates, the long held desire that all governments have had to de-London-ise the civil service, to move various departments out of London and the south east to the provinces.

A dozen or twenty years ago the Dept of Health & Social Security (as was) built The Kremlin at the bottom of The Headrow in central Leeds - an impressive Stalin-esque new location for a huge wedge of London based civil servants who were given incentives to move "oop north", swap their one bed flats in Tower Hamlets for four bed detached properties in Alwoodley and stroll the Yorkshire Dales every weekend rather than cower behind barricaded doors or throw petrol bombs off your communal balcony.

It was a godsend for me at the time because we had a property for sale and the estate agents were racking up the house prices on a daily basis "the London DHSS house buyers will love your house" they gushed, and they did, we doubled the price of our house in the five years that we lived in it and then sold it to a Yorkshire immigrant for ten grand more then we had initially asked for it.

Can you imagine what would happen now ?

Would you relocate to another part of the country for less money on the flimsiest of excuses that your shopping won't cost as much every week (it still will) ?

I don't know - it sounds like it though, even if he didn't mean it

A related point is that the current mess with public sector pensions is an indicator of what could happen. There's a huge variation in schemes across the public sector (I forget the number), which are having to be negotiated individually with the government, hence some of the delay in resolving last year's dispute. It will be interesting to see the administrative cost of handling regionalised or zonal pay structures.

Feel free to disagree on a factual basis.

The last few decades have seen a steady drip, drip of a nasty attitude that public service workers are lazy, poor, overpaid, doing non-jobs, wouldn't survive in the 'real world' of the private sector - which itself is the only legitimate form of work.

Decent people don't need services and the people working in them should, for the reasons stated earlier and because only scummy chavs need services and are benefit dependent, be paid poorly etc etc. Plus, of course, that they're to blame for the financial crisis.

It is entirely and absolutely legitimate to use current affairs to point out the errant nonsense of this attack. And also since there is another attack taking place, with much of the same sort of lies, on the NHS itself - indeed, a massive lie told by Cameron in his election campaign.

As someone noted elsewhere, when a 23 year old collapses, I don't want the paramedics treating them to be employed on the basis of what's cheapest.

No, actually it won't.

Can't comment on the major Supermarkets as don't deal with them, but in dealing with all the major national coverage symbol groups and C&C wholesalers I can say that the vast majority of them have regionalised price books which used to be based upon the TV regions, now it's a bit more sophisticated with the data retrieval and analysis available.