It is easy to view the dramatic measures announced this week by Chancellor Alistair Darling as a confused knee-jerk reaction by a government that feels the need to do something, but has no real idea what.

I’ll leave it to others to argue over whether the package will ultimately help get us out of recession or drop us further in it.

I just want to praise one piece of it – the penalties on higher earners. Adding 5p to tax rates, increasing National Insurance contributions and scrapping personal allowance for those earning serious amounts of cash does not go far enough in my opinion.

The disparity in incomes in this country is obscene and growing worse. Imposing measures that will help to redistribute that income even slightly are a moral necessity and don’t need to be justified on economic grounds.

We all of us, rich and poor, are on this earth for roughly the same length of time.

The guy who spends 35 hours a week cleaning the public toilets is sacrificing just as much of his life as the one who sits in a boardroom for 35 hours.

Of course, we need pay differentials to incentivise people. Those who have unusual skills or work extra hard should be paid more than the average (£25,000 a year). But 10 times more? Twenty times more? Fifty times more? The director general of the BBC gets a pay package worth £816,000 a year, more than four times that of the Prime Minister. What justification is there for that?

It’s not as though most of these people really do have any special talent.

We have just seen for ourselves how the wide boys in the City, with all their million-pound bonuses, were in fact just a bunch of chancers.

We have allowed ourselves to be duped. Because it is just possible for some kid from Croxteth with a talent for football to become a multi-millionaire, or for someone with a minor singing talent to be plucked off the street and made a superstar via the X Factor, we imagine that it is all somehow fair and democratic.

Wake up! It is not going to happen to you or your child! We should be taking to the streets in protest, not playing with the remote.