Maths whizz Diane Abbott has piled pressure on the government by demanding public sector pay is raised by a negative quantity of a number that doesn’t exist.
The Shadow Foreign Secretary weighed into the public pay debate, insisting no public sector worker could afford to live on the square root of minus one in those big houses in Islington.
Abbott said, “The public sector, which is things like schools and hospitals, but only some schools and some hospitals. So that’s the deficit halved already.
“Umm….bear with me.
“Well, anyway, the current pay cap is one percent. So a nurse on a salary of twenty thousand can expect fifty back for every hundred-teen thousand that he or she earns.
“And a teacher earning thirty grand is sixty-five better off under Labour, depending on a class size of thirty three and a third, if the third of a pupil is just some arms and legs.
“That can happen, for instance, if the school is full of asbestos.”
Simon Williams of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said, “Assuming that by eleventy hundred she means eleven hundred, this would mean hard-pressed nurses handing their entire salaries back to the NHS and then some.
“With the stroke of a pen, she has solved the NHS funding crisis overnight.”
Abbott added, “And I’ve factored in the winter fool allowance.”