A packet of wine gums at a provincial cinema; a large cappuccino at Starbucks; or maybe 10 minutes of Premier League football.

That’s what a trainee will be able to buy for an hour’s work when the Solicitors Regulation Authority does away with the minimum wage.

The news that trainees would be classed as apprentices within the national minimum wage regulations broke on Wednesday - just as George Osborne handed a hefty bung to the Armani-wearing classes by ditching the 50p tax rate. It was an apposite conjunction of events. A City partner on £1m a year will benefit from the chancellor’s largesse to the tune of £42,500 - enough to buy an entry-level Porsche, as the Guardian’s Patrick Collinson waspishly observed.

The politics of envy? The politics of righteous indignation more like.

Let’s look at what's on offer if you are an aspiring solicitor in this dubious position. The government describes apprenticeships as work-based training programmes ‘designed around the needs of employers’, which lead to national recognised qualifications. It is especially keen that they be offered to unskilled 16-18-year-olds.

But don’t fret, £2.60 an hour is a minimum! Some employers pay more. The average is £170 a week - about what a pokey bedsit will cost in a scruffy metropolitan suburb. Sorry, there’s nothing left for your bus fare to the office. You'll have to walk.

So there you are: already qualified; in your early to mid-twenties; groaning under the weight of £50,000 in undergraduate debt, after successfully negotiating several years of academic study; and your reward is to be paid less than half what a teenage burger-flipper earns at McDonald’s. Get on the starting blocks for the race to the bottom.

Bare facts such as this make a mockery of Nick Clegg’s hand-wringing platitudes about social mobility in the professions, and the deluded nostrums of identity politics (which state that discrimination can’t exist if employers are blind to gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity). If you want to become a lawyer, it will soon matter more than it has for decades how much loot resides in the Bank of Mum and Dad - regardless of your personal characteristics. The paradox is that a move trumpeted as aiding access to the profession, by creating more jobs, will in fact have the opposite effect by acting as another powerful deterrent to those who might be considering embarking on the long and expensive journey to qualification.

‘I'm really looking forward to graduating in July,’ one Gazette online commenter has vouchsafed. ‘Every time I read an article like this I find myself going "la la la" as a kind of coping mechanism.’

Unimprovably put.

So here’s an idea. How generous it would be if the seven-figure earners were to forego the Porsche this year (how many cars does one need?) and fund a trainee’s salary instead, thereby safeguarding the heterogeneity of this great profession. Or two-and-a-half trainee salaries to be precise. Who's going to be the Gazette's Alan Sugar?

Meanwhile, perhaps an SRA board member would care to show willing and live on £170 a week for a year, pour encourager les autres.

Paul Rogerson is Gazette editor-in-chief

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