Peter Mandelson famously proclaimed in 1998 that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. One decade later, the government’s mood is not just chilled out but positively euphoric. That’s the clear message in a speech that business and enterprise secretary John Hutton - pictured - will deliver tomorrow, anyhow:
‘Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country,’ he will tell a meeting of the pressure group Progress.
‘Rather than placing a cap on that success, we should be questioning why it is not available to more people. Our overarching goal that no one should get left behind must not become translated into a stultifying sense that no one should be allowed to get ahead.
‘I believe a key challenge for New Labour over the coming years is to recognise that, far from strengthening social justice, a version of equality that only gives you the opportunity to climb so far, actually subverts the values we should be representing.
‘Instead, any progressive party worth its name must enthusiastically advocate empowering people to climb without limits, free from any barrier holding them back.’
OK John, I’m convinced. I demand that the highest paid executive at HSBC – and the bank declines to reveal his name – should be paid even more than the £9.9m earned last year. The bloody Trotskyites are unfairly stopping him from getting ahead.
A scanty £14.4m in salary and bonus is simply not enough for a man of the calibre of RAB Capital’s Philip Richards. To hold back the man trying to blackmail the government over Northern Rock would indeed represent clear subversion of everything for which progressives ought to stand.
I insist – nay, demand! - that Reckitt Benckiser immediately grant chief executive Bart Becht a generous increase on his stultifying £22m wedge. This is obviously the politics of class envy, Old Labourism of the most toxic kind. Thank goodness we have Hutton to reinterpret basic democratic socialism in the language of today.
Then again, just before the Labour Party members among us joyously raise our glasses to toast the men – and perhaps the handful of women – who selflessly do so much to enhance social cohesion by pulling down eight-figure salaries, perhaps we ought to think through the logical consistency of what Hutton is saying.
Nobody – certainly not any government of the last three decades – has done anything whatsoever to restrict these people. To get rich has been glorious; Deng Xiaoping would certainly have approved.
There are no legal limits whatsoever on executive pay; some bosses earn more than their companies are worth. That leaves moral opprobrium as the last remaining sanction; it is one that is widely ignored.
Top executives earn more not just than the prime minister, but than the entire cabinet put together. Yet there is no objective evidence that corporate performance is enhanced as a result. This is wholesale looting, without any commercial, let alone moral, justification.
In a Britain where people are empowered to climb without limits, some 13m people - representing 22% of the population - were living in poverty as of 2007. Some of us would prefer to see a Labour government that regarded that as a key challenge, and stopped acting like fawning High School cheerleaders with an embarrassing crush on the super-rich.
Posted at 14:58, 10 March 2008
Comments (17)
Remind me again, why I should vote Labour.
My gut instinct is that this is just a shallow attempt at news management. The govt is taking a lot of flak from the CBI, City etc at the moment over its allegedly declining pro-business focus. This speech will probably get coverage because it flies in the face of public opinion at the moment, which braodly says 'woah why the fcuk are these people still getting paid millions when I'm being told there is a recession around the corner'.
Having said that, it's a really revolting sentiment to hear from a Labour politician. Especially when there are people to the Right of him, or simply apolitical business/City types, who think that exec pay is way to high both in itself and relative to others pay.
Very amusing today that the Vatican specified the accumulation of excessive wealth as one of the new seven deadly sins... the Pope is now to the left of Labour...
Hutton, recall, wants Labour to be the natural party of business (his words, not mine).
And please, don't insult school girls. They fancy members of boy bands and footballers - and often realise the absurdity of the crush. None of these super-rich scumbags are remotely good looking. (Although that Roman Abramovitch...)
So now we know why Hutton ditched the specs for contact lenses!
Yes, let's all attack people for being successful.
Of course, while we are attacking them, we have to ignore how many jobs their businesses create to keep our economy afloat.
Sorry LfaT, you're missing the basics of the socialist case; they don't provide jobs for us, we keep them in luxury.
"So now we know why Hutton ditched the specs for contact lenses!"
That usually means only one thing: future leadership challenge. ;-)
No, you don't keep them in luxury. The customers of their business keep them in luxury, and the only way they can make lots of money and earn such large salaries is by attracting lots of customers - which in my eyes counts as being very successful. People who earn lots of money for their employers deserve to get some of that money themselves.
And they provide a hell of a lot of jobs, even if you aren't one of their employees (I'm not either, for that matter). The more successful their business becomes, the more jobs they create, the more money there is in our economy, the more people spend....
Tory: "while we are attacking them, we have to ignore how many jobs their businesses create to keep our economy afloat."
Uh... and no-one would manufacture widgets (thus generating jobs) if the multi-millionaire chief exec of Widgets International were not doing so? You're saying such chief execs must have ultra-super-special skills worth bazillions (and critically required for the production of widgets) and found in no other human brain?
I'd put it to you that there could be more money in the production of widgets (and thus perhaps a more efficient business and thus a bigger share of the international market for widgets, and thus again more jobs) if the top brass were not busy being made super-rich in the process.
The moral problem here is not (as John Hutton clearly sees it) "no-one should be allowed to get richer than me cos I might get envious of their car".
The moral problem is that allowing a small number of people to trouser a giant proportion of the profits of a business (seemingly way out of proportion to their contribution in terms of skills) is fundamentally taking money away that could be used more effectively - and fairly - elsewhere.
Martin Wolf FT (Jan 2008) ~
"I now fear that the combination of the fragility of the financial system with the HUGE REWARDS it generates for insiders will destroy something even more important – the political legitimacy of the market economy itself – across the globe. So it is time to start thinking radical thoughts about how to fix the problems...
(but)...By paying huge bonuses on the basis of short-term performance in a system in which negative bonuses are IMPOSSIBLE, banks create gigantic incentives to disguise risk-taking as value-creation."
Now Playing : John Hutton ~ "Send in the Clowns"
New Labour are an abomination and a foul pest. Hutton will be strung up at the end of Rope Walk in the entrails of the Liberal-Tory Junta that crush Ipswich under their cruel jackboot.
However I'm suprised that Dave didn't post something on the Spanish elections.
It might have escaped the all-seeing eye of Dave-Green Lizards Inc that Blair was touting, or being touted, for Euro President. It was being said that he needed the vote of some 'marginal' countries, such as Espagne.
I seem to recall that ultra-right Blair openly backed Anzar (that is the ultra-catho scum in Spain) some time back.
I hear that this did not go down well with the comrades of the PSOE.
Who are back in power.
I also hear that people in the PSOE have even longer memories than us trots.
"It's no coincidence that ringing endorsements of greed began to be heard at the same time that the actual incomes of (America's) rich began to soar. In part, the new pro-greed ideology was a way of rationalizing what was already happening. But it was also, to an important extent, a cause of the phenomenon." - Paul Krugman 2006
BTW: I notice that Patrick Wintour (Guardian) was yet AGAIN the source for the Hutton story...this sewerage being his only "journalistic" role in life. And that Polly Toynbee asserts that Hutton is being "disloyal" to Brown's "core" beliefs.
Let us praise famous halfwits.
I suppose our Tory friend hasn't heard of surplus labour and surplus value.
I'm almost certain that all of your readers will have seen
Karl MarxCarl Marks' website, but if they haven't, it's here."The moral problem is that allowing a small number of people to trouser a giant proportion of the profits of a business (seemingly way out of proportion to their contribution in terms of skills) is fundamentally taking money away that could be used more effectively - and fairly - elsewhere." - Jungle
"Seemingly way out of proportion to their contribution in terms of skills?" What, the skill and drive to start the business in the first place, or to risk everything they have to keep it afloat? To work and worry far beyond anyone on the shop floor to ensure its continued success?
By what divine law must the spoils be distributed evenly?
Here's a thought for you socialists. Let's say you are about to sell your car and you pay a mechanic £200 to service and clean it in preparation for the sale. As a result it fetches £1000 more than expected. Would you then send the
mechanic £800 in gratitude, with a note asking him to "use the money more effectively - and fairly - elsewhere"?
Would you send him anything? No, you filthy capitalist, you wouldn't.
"What, the skill and drive to start the business in the first place, or to risk everything they have to keep it afloat? To work and worry far beyond anyone on the shop floor to ensure its continued success?"
Are all of the rich entrepreneurs then, or self-employed? None of them inherited businesses from relatives, or merely occupy bureaucratic positions in huge corporations with large pay-offs when they fail?
What you've said about work and worry applies to many conscientious workers at all levels of the economy.