All hail Adrian Beecroft

You may have heard of the Beecroft Report. It's a very thin, unsubstantiated paper on employment rights and business efficiency written for the Prime Minister by a private equity speculator who has contributed precisely zero to the economy, the culture or the country.

Beecroft's big idea to solve the worst depression in a hundred years is… (drum roll) … make it easier to sack workers. Never mind that that scumbag Blair used to boast that British employees are the least protected in the western world (sorry, 'most flexible') and that the crash was caused by people like Beecroft: the economy can only be fixed by sacking people on a whim.

But let's not rush to judgement. Mr. Beecroft has this to say:

A proportion of employees, secure in the knowledge that their employer will be reluctant to dismiss them, work at a level well below their true capacity: they coast along

He's right. Or rather, he's right if you apply this piercing aperçu to some very small groups of employees:

1. Bankers and allied trades
2. Politicians

Have any of them taken responsibility? Been sacked? Gone to prison?

No.

But Beecroft's determined to make sure that checkout operators, litter-pickers and fast-food servers have dragged us all down and need to have their gold-plated zero-hours contracts stripped away to liberate the wealth-creating genius of the corporate world.

Let me give you a couple of examples of these molly-coddled layabouts. I have a friend who was summarily fired a couple of days ago. Her crime? Paying for 2 tins of dog food while working on the till at a major supermarket. Receipted, recorded, done in front of managers. Another works at Pizza Hut. Their particular brand of evil works like this: all the staff are on zero-hours contracts: they're employed but don't have set hours. So they can't work anywhere else, in case they're called in. They go to work, but if there aren't enough customers, they have to sit around in case things get busy. But they're not paid for waiting around - they're compelled to be 'at work' but not paid for being they're because they're not actually working.

Lazy bastards. They've had it too easy for too long.