To: dtletters@telegraph.co.uk
Re: A sustainable, fair-market and fair-trade economy
Date: Saturday, 6 August 05

Dear Editor,
 
I was touched by the concern you express in today's editorial, "Fruits of labour", for the state of professional gardening in our green and pleasant land. But the solution you propose is depressingly familiar: inviting cheap labour into the country to do the jobs that any self-respecting Englishman or woman must decline because of the insultingly low salaries on offer. And when some of that cheap foreign labour has familiarised itself with conditions here and decides to live off state benefits instead or to supplement its income through petty crime, you will be indignant and in despair of what the world is coming to!
 
What the world is coming to is where it is being driven by market forces, rooted in our animal (rather than our human) nature.
 
We need to create a fair-market and fair-trade economy, rooted in man's more enlightened, human nature, in which, among other things, income differentials are fair and proportionate (with the maximum wage being, say, no more then 10 times the minimum wage).
 
What do you say? If I set out to establish such an economy - which, unlike our present economy, would also have to be sustainable, of course - could I count on the Telegraph's support?