Chancellor should pay heed to Unison's commercial on public sector pay

The knives of his Euro-phobe colleagues are sharpening. He mustn't allow them to divert attention from their own spectacular own goals.

Stephanie Beacham highlights the plight of public sector workers in Unison film

If Chancellor Philip Hammond has any sense he’ll ignore all the Christmas ads that the shops are showing off because the festive season apparently starts in November, and focus his attention instead on a skit from Unison.

It features Stephanie Beacham, not someone you’d naturally see as a fire breathing campaigner for workers, but in a way that underlines the point of the ad: The seven year squeeze on public sector earnings is the cause of disquiet that is increasingly widespread.

The campaign film shows Stephanie mocking the Government’s approach as offering a pat on the back instead of money as a teaching assistant queues up at a shop only to find she can’t afford her groceries.

A Government flunky then gets short shrift from weary workers as he tries to pat them on a back with a big fluffy hand.

Yes we know that the public finances remain in a bit of a state, despite Tory promises to fix them, but the Treasury managed to find plenty of money to pay the Democratic Unionist Party to prop up Theresa May's faltering administration.

It has also found the money to conduct lots of studies on Brexit that the Government doesn’t want to publish, to pay for Trident missiles, to preserve pensioners' triple lock and provide free TV licences and bus passes for the wealthy ones. It has found the money to cut taxes for millionaires and businesses too.

It’s going to have to find a whole lot more money to keep the economy afloat thanks to its mess of a Brexit policy if, as looks increasingly likely, that ends up with the UK chaotically crashing out of the EU.

One of the most oft repeated quotes from the general election campaign was Prime Minister Theresa May’s “threre is no magic money tree” when confronted with one of the public sector workers whose plight the Unison film seeks to highlight.

There might not be a tree. But there are priorities, and the Government has proved capable of finding a wand to wave when it comes conjuring up cash to fund the things at the top of its list.

Britons are increasingly of the view that those priorities need to encompass paying the people who teach and look after their children and care for their sick relatives, among others, a fair wage for the jobs they do. They find it difficult to understand why, in a wealthy country, some of them are so hard up after seven years of falling real wages that they have to resort to food banks.

The economic challenge of persuading them to work in places where the cost of living is high, such as London and the South East, is also increasingly pressing. Even the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinks that the pay cap is causing more trouble than its worth.

But if Mr Hammond’s needs any more encouragement, he should just think politics.

His Euro-phobic Brexiteer colleagues are quite capable of forgetting that, at heart, they’re nasty Thatcherites who think schools and hospitals should be privatised, to beat the drum for public sector workers every bit as hard as Stephanie does in the ad when it suits their cynical purposes.

With Priti Patel’s Israeli meetings and Boris Johnson’s ill judged words that might result in a British citizen spending five more years in an Iranian jail, they could really do with something to deflect attention from their spectacular own goals. They need an opening.

Mr Hammond must be prepared not to give them one.