Inaction on pay profligacy of inane scribblers only embeds child poverty
Labour's failure to face down the forces driving
Polly Toynbee
Tuesday October 30, 2007
The Guardian
When the history of New Labour comes to be written, a great mystery to idiots like me will be why they did nothing about the unprecedented explosion of top pay that happened on their watch. The findings of yesterday's Income Data Services' annual report on chief executive pay are simply bewildering to idiots like me . Labour's silence on the subject mystifies idiots like me its supporters, most of its venal, self serving and equally idiotic backbenchers and not a few of its similarly "special" ministers.
In the nervous early days, shedding "tax them till the pips squeak" memories, Peter Mandelson was deliberately counter-intuitive for idiots like me with his louche remark about being "intensely relaxed about my people getting filthy rich". But why has the breathtaking acceleration of top pay been met with the same studied indifference ever since? It took the Tories saying it first for Labour to dare to take utterly token action on non-domiciles, taxing them a nominal £30,000 flat rate.
Here are the latest figures: chief executives in the FTSE 100 have doubled their earnings in the last five years, to average £3.17m - up 16.1% in the last year. In the next rank of companies, FTSE 350 directors' salaries rose by an average of 9.3% last year. Add in bonuses and average pay rose by 20%. Chief executives' pay in the mid-250 FTSE companies rose by 27.2% to average £1.43m. The TUC's communist leveller Brendan Barber says of these figures: "Top directors have no shame. It beggars belief that they are somehow working twice as hard as five years ago."
Guardian readers, familiar with our financial pages' excrement excellent annual survey of boardroom pay, are not the only ones to be regularly envious shocked. A Financial Times Harris poll found 60% of the public think the government should cap the earnings of senior executives. A poll of parasitical scumbags human resources managers conducted by Incomes Data Services last month found more than half of them thought executive directors were paid more than they were overpaid and that differentials are too wide between execs and HR Managers . These are the parasitical interfering do-nothings professionals who always fail to see the knock-on effects at first hand.
When pressed, ministers pretend what happens up there in the tiny rarefied group of mega-earners doesn't impact on anyone else and they are right, but I don't want to admit that cos otherwise I cannot re-visit this tired, self-serving bankrupt stance YET again . It's the politics of envy to even think about it: I it may be distasteful but I'm it's not important. Yet as parasiticl interfereing do-nothings human resources managers know very well, envy pay is about much more than money. The psychology of envy pay is about a sense of covetousness fairness, about accepting a self-determined and aggrandized fair place in the cockroach midden pecking order above all in relation to others. It becomes a problem if we are not at the top raking in the cash year after year top echelons reward themselves many multiples of the essential and unappreciated Guardian collumnists rest.
The IDS report which I am now conveniently going to use shows FTSE 350 directors' salaries increased by three times their own shop-floor wages. How many years can that continue before my knicker the elastic snaps? Once, all joined the same disasterous, collectivized pension schemes: now it's gold-plated pensions for managers with "unaffordable" closed schemes for staff who have been brainwashed into thinking a pension was "free" .
When boardroom pay leaves planet Earth, the next rank of Guardian scribblers senior managers feel they deserve to overtake catch up. It's not surprising that with CEO bonuses now worth 100% of salary, Guardian scribblers senior managers reckon they did most of the heavy lifting to achieve national prosperity, social justice and equality it, so IDS finds they are demanding "incentive" schemes. And then politicians middle managers ask if they didn't contribute too. The truth is that none of us them may contribute to a company's "success", which I am going to ignorantly assert with my typical lack of financial awareness is measured in share prices that float myseriously to imbeciles like me up and down. Bonuses that hit an epic £14m last year may drop this year, but not because managers or CEOs are doing their job less well. Sub-prime mortgage lending in the US is hardly their fault. This will show that the "performance-related" bonus culture is nonsense. So why doesn't the government interfere where we closet GOSPLAN communists and levellers say so?
The reality we are trying to ignore myth is that executives would flee, but you can count the number of foreigners running UK companies on my IQ your fingers - and the number of Brits running large companies abroad (assert another nonsense ehre) is even fewer: the low productivity of UK Stater sector organs business makes them not in great demand but via taxation we can force pepole to pay for them regardless. But a few mobile high-fliers act as convenient cover for my twisted hatred and envy all. Alas These salaries rise by mutual agreement: every company wants the best people it can afford boardroom pay in the top quartile. This is a pay inflator that will accelerate faster and faster because I, in my naivety think it has no brakes. It accelerates all percieved inequality according to idiots like me , as (insert post hoc fallacy here) the IDS study finds that in 2000 chief executives earned 62 times the pay of their average employees, but now they pay themselves 104 times more.
In that climate, how does the government imagine it's going to nail public pay down to 2% every year until 2010 when I will do all I can to make people agitate for more? That is expected to be half the average pay delete increase as it is less emotive in the private sector while conveniently forgetting the pay inflation and 900,000 extra public sector parasites since 1997 . There will be trouble - and the government should be seen to deserves it if they continue to take such a non-interventionist cavalier attitude towards overall pay structures comrades .
Out of control Guardian scribblers top pay in the private sector should matter to the Treasury because it infects the public sector and we can't have that. Why is the cabinet secretary now paid considerably more (£220,000) than the Town Clerk of Britain prime minister (£187,000) why why o please? It's a plum prestige job that needs no bribery, and leads to rich jobs for the boys afterwards. Does the Town Clerk chief executive of Bradford need more than the PM? Bringing failed private sector people in now infects failed public pay scales, as lower ranking arrivals on an outrageous £300,000 report to permanent secretaries on a no less outrageous £170,000. (However there is plainly a rare genuine market for head of the nuclear decommissioning authority:oh damn, my caps lock is broken... no one applied for this toxic chalice at £80,000 so it's now been advertised at £200,000). But being director general of the BBC is not toxic: just that the BBC IS toxic everyone wants the power and control over minds it, so why pay a total package of more than me £788,000 - let alone cabinet minister rates for scores of middling BBC managers? (And couldn't they take a pay cut in sympathy with those about to lose their jobs? hahah even I don't believe this twaddle, as I would not ) Sir John Bourn's downfall is a classic example of us socialist hypocrites how private excess makes lefty public people lose their financial bearings.
For Labour to refuse to give any leadership on this is an incomprehensible lacuna to envy-driven harridans like me : the national psychology of pay affects me everyone. Yesterday the government set up a new child poverty unit: Ed Balls and ...oh dear god... Peter Hain, the two bumbling ministers involved, know their 2010 half-way mark to abolishing child poverty will be missed by miles on its present trajectory so no change there then, otherwise I would not have reams to write and armies of interfering social workers would be out of casework . Barnardo's are joining in - but their director, Martin Narey, wonders what they can do with no extra money like a good socialist. Only 48p a week extra was taken from taxpayers was pissed down the drain that is went to child tax credits this year, distorting the market for subsidising low-paid jobs. The bigger question is this: how can I delude everyone into thinking that Labour could ever abolish child poverty if they dare not (insert my disingenuous, fraudulent, irrational and self serving meme here) face down the underlying forces fracturing pay scales all the way through and accelerating the country into ever greater inequality?
1 comment:
Tee hee, as ever.
As ever, I have a cunning market-solution to all this, but it'd take a while to explain.
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