YOUR friends and mine, the teachers, are threatening strike action unless they get pay rises of more than £3,000 a year each - that's a 10 per cent increase, four times the rate of inflation, and £1,000 as well.

To be fair, it's the Lefty activists of the National Union of Teachers, not the rank and file, who have come up with this ridiculous demand and threat - when the evidence on educational standards suggests that what are actually merited are widespread pay cuts of this order.

But if they can contradict me, I'll be grateful if teachers moaning about being trapped under a £23,000 pay ceiling can explain why their trade unions are so opposed to the government's plans for performance-related pay which would pay those who merit it even more than this bolshie lot are demanding for all of them now.

It cannot be, surely, that they believe the drones in the staff room automatically deserve another £3,000 a year for indolence while the keen and industrious teachers are equally but, in effect, less well-rewarded for their work.

What's wrong with a system that identifies which teachers deserve up to £35,000 a year for coming up with good results - and which don't? Surely, only the plodders - and the socialist levellers in their trade unions - dread such so-called divisiveness.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.