Britain is unhappier at work than since records began. The British Social Attitudes survey, the nation’s long-running annual pulse-taker, finds growing job dissatisfaction in its report, published today. People complain of a lack of flexibility in working hours, a lack of career advancement – and, of course, a lack of pay rises.

Who is surprised? Pay stagnation over the last decade is unprecedented since Napoleonic times, the economist Paul Johnson told me, but then corrected himself: “You might as well say ever.” Worse, over the last year pay inequality has jumped up for the first time in a decade, says the Resolution Foundation’s Mike Brewer. Pay for the top 10% rose by 7.3% but only by 1.1% for the bottom 10%. Why? The national living wage has stopped rising faster than median pay, and top pay has taken off again.

This gap in pay rises is the highest ever recorded. As ever, the wealth gap is even wider, the top 1% owning more than the whole bottom half. When incomes are rising, people may forget Britain’s extreme inequality, the highest in western Europe, which has never fallen after taking off stratospherically in the 1980s. But in these moribund times, most see no upturn on the horizon. In high-growth 2006, only 25% of people told the BSA survey the government should shrink the gap between rich and poor; now it’s 53%.

Let’s have no more politicians’ pieties about working hard and playing by the rules when “hard-working” people feel under-rewarded, with their expectation of career advancement having fallen from 35% to........

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