"The talented and hard-working have nothing to fear," according to Dominic Raab, backbench Conservative MP in the UK.
In a recent interview on BBC's HARDtalk he defends his book co-authored with four other Conservative MPs in which a more rightwing course for the Conservative party in the UK is outlined.
A leaked fragment from the book stated that "the British are among the worst idlers in the world.
[They] work among the lowest hours, retire early and [have low] productivity.
Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.
" The five MPs would have done everyone a service by first checking their facts.
In actual fact, Britons have amongst the longest working hours in Europe and retire later than people in most other European countries.
Besides, they clearly buy into the established dogma that longer working hours, later retirement and fewer holidays will get us all out of the financial crisis.
A quick look at the figures, however, shows a different picture.
Longest working hours: Austria, Greece and UK.
Data compiled in 2011 by the Office for National Statistics in the UK and Eurostat show that the UK comes third in terms of longest working hours for fulltime jobs amongst all EU member states.
Many people will also be surprised to find Greece in second place.
Germany only comes in 8th place after Portugal and Cyprus.
At the bottom of the list and quite far behind the EU average, we can find countries such as Denmark, Finland, Luxemburg, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Highest Productivity: Luxemburg, Netherlands and Belgium.
A different picture emerges when looking at productivity per hour worked.
The UK slides into 13th place and Greece edges towards the lower end of the list into 19th place.
Luxemburg, Netherlands, Belgium and France occupy the top 4 places and Germany comes 6th.
Lowest Retirement age: Austria, France and Luxemburg Similarly, when looking at the data collected on effective retirement age in OECD countries (compiled by the OECD and The Economist) Japan and Sweden had the highest effective retirement age in 2010, while Austria, France, Luxemburg and Belgium had the lowest effective retirement age.
Greece and Portugal both had a significantly higher retirement age than Germany.
The United Kingdom is far from being the country with the earliest effective retirement age.
So, is forcing people to work long hard hours until old age in mind-numbing jobs the way out of the crisis? Should we return to slave labour conditions such as in India and other countries Dominic Raab seems to hold in such high esteem? Facts and figures extracted from the Guardian Datablog and the OECD website.