There are circumstances which excuse a pay-rise bonanza: if the country is booming, companies are thriving, and lots of wealth is being produced.

At present, though, Britain's mini-boom (such as it was) is fading fast. Manufacturing orders are falling. Jobs galore are being shed. Exports are in sharp decline. Share prices are sliding downhill. We're in a right old mess.

Yet still, it seems, according to the Treasury too many of the country's bosses have been giving themselves fat rises, with the chiefs of the large privatised utilities among the worst of the lot.

These are the very same people who are keen enough to support the Government's appeals for pay restraint when it comes to the claims put in by their workforces. Yet they are either too stupid or too blinded by greed to see that their big rises are one of the chief reasons why those they employ believe they should have more, too.

Why should a shop-floor worker settle for an inflation-linked rise on his or her modest wage when the man at the top is getting ten times that percentage on a salary most of us will only ever be able to dream of?

You don't have to be a red-hot raving socialist to believe that something is wrong with a system which allows that sort of thing to happen - and for it to be justified by the old clich that "you have to pay that sort of money if you want someone of the right quality for the job".

Rubbish! Anyone who was the "right quality for the job" would have more sense than be seen to be stoking up huge personal wealth while keeping the workers down. It's the way to create a thoroughly disgruntled workforce determined to do their best not to co-operate.

No-one would deny that the people at the top of any business, carrying the ultimate responsibility for its success or failure, should be handsomely rewarded.

But if they then add an extra 20, 30 or 40 per cent to that handsome reward at a time of general restraint, they are insulting their workers and brandishing a couple of fingers at the Government.

I hate the idea of legally-enforceable limits on wage rises, but it might be the only way of bringing a sense of restraint into the boardrooms of Britain.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.