Call the fat cats’ bluff and tax their preposterous pay fairly

September 2, 2007
Simon Jenkins

Prison officers last week went on strike over a pay rise of 2.5%, phased. The heads of Britain’s 100 biggest companies have had 37%, unphased, as presumably are its recipients. The bosses won 28% more last year, 16% the year before and 13% and 23% in the two preceding years, yielding an average pay of £2.8m a head or 20 times the rise in price inflation. Under Labour, these company directors have stretched their remuneration to almost 100 times average earnings, a gap unprecedented since the rise of modern taxation.

Is this a good or bad thing? Any pay package is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. But for an entire class of workers to receive sequential increases of 37%, 28% and 16% suggests a serious leakage of cash from businesses into the pockets of those at the top. Nor is there any noticeable relationship of pay to company size or success. Last week Eric Nicoli left as boss of EMI after eight years in which the company faltered and its share price fell by 40%. Yet he received £800,000 a year in salary and was given a leaving present of £2.8m.

Cash bonuses mostly in financial services are beyond the imaginings of wage slaves. Bob Diamond, who works at (but does not even run) the floundering Barclays Bank, took a bonus of £10.4m this year. Sir Fred Goodwin of the Royal Bank of Scotland took £2.7m. Last month’s Guardian/Office for National Statistics survey reported that bonuses overall increased 30% in 2007 to £14 billion, double last year’s rise. Readers may be tempted to ask how people contrive to dispose of such sensational winnings each year.

The apologists have been in full cry. A simple response is to play the comparisons game. These companies are the size of small states and their leaders have a right to tax their workers and shareholders accordingly. So implies Peter Newhouse, the survey’s author, and a consultant with Reward Technology Forum. He says we should publicise rewards as “an important message to able and aspirational young people”. The CBI adds that companies must pay “the going rate” or competitive talent will float offshore and something called UK plc will suffer. Britain now depends for a third of its income on financial services, so do not kill the geese that lay the golden eggs.

Nor is that all. As this money swills through the pockets of bonus recipients, say the apologists, it “trickles down”, finding an outlet not just in blue-chip properties but in cars, restaurants, holidays, nannies, clothes, hunting stables and Cotswold interiors, most with a high labour content. The incomes of the very rich allegedly redistribute to the poor faster through personal expenditure than through taxation. This is plausible given how much of the latter goes on white collar salaries, fees and subsidies.

But all this is special pleading. In allowing himself to be bluffed by the super-rich, that they will emigrate if he properly taxes their earnings, Gordon Brown falls for the Mandy Rice-Davies retort: they would say that, wouldn’t they. As for dangling £2m bonuses before the young, it is like Margaret Thatcher telling young women to find themselves rich husbands. Other proffered comparisons, such as between executives and Elton John and David Beckham, ignore the fact that such celebrities operate in a truly open market, do not determine their own incomes and, unlike City firms, receive no public money.

Anyone who has served on a corporate remuneration committee knows how it operates. It puts pay decisions out to consultants who, like the nonexecutives, the headhunters and senior management as a whole, have a vested interest in inflated incomes. Everyone scratches everyone’s back.

Discussion is not concerned with market forces but public relations. How will an outrageous bonus look to the press? Can shareholders and investors be fooled?

Apart from such rare company doctors as Stuart Rose of Marks & Spencer, who can add value out of proportion to their price, Britain is experiencing the same breakdown in top pay restraint that JK Galbraith noted in America. Corporate remuneration, he remarked, was nothing to do with the marketplace but was a heart-warming gift from executives and their friends to each other, a gift that had grown so large as to “verge on larceny”.

I suspect that wildly extravagant short-term “incentives” are as likely to distort performance as boost it, as is the case with Whitehall public service targets. As for the idea that a 37% pay rise will trickle down to help the poor, this might pass muster as an economics essay but it will get short shrift in the canteen where 2.5% is the norm. Why does trickle-down not apply to them?

The claim that executives with families well installed in London and country houses will suddenly vanish to Monaco or the Cayman Islands if not paid millions more each year (or if fully taxed on those millions) is absurd. It ignores the role of location, lifestyle and other nonpecuniary perks in a modern executive’s career package.

Being well regarded for running a successful company should be more satisfying than a reputation for greed, as BP’s Lord Browne and the privatisation “fat cats” of the 1980s found to their anguish. London’s financial preeminence is based primarily on its lax market regulation and its agreeable living conditions for those not reliant on public services. Businesses will leave Britain not when executives are properly taxed but when they start losing money.

I prefer to kick all this out of court. The rich, like the poor, are always with us. There is no morality in economics. The exponential rise in corporate pay is a hangover from the 1986 Big Bang phase of Thatcherite capitalism. If it had anything to do with free competition, there would have been a rush of talent into this market sector and a consequent fall in pay. That has not happened.

Two forces are influencing top people’s pay. The first is structural. The fortunes recently made in the City are largely due to a shift from lumbering corporate suppliers of financial services, such as banks and brokers, to fast-moving individuals and partnerships. I see no harm in this. More worrying is the new cartels, like those that the Big Bang supposedly smashed. Just four accountancy firms control large-scale audit and have spilt over into public/private finance. Half of management consultancy, again involving a small group of firms, relies on work from government. The rise in statutory regulation under Labour has sent legal and other professional bonuses soaring. As Adam Smith said, people of the same trade never meet “even in merriment” but to conspire to raise prices. This is government’s doing.

The other force is political. The widening of the pay gap, which has not occurred in continental Europe, followed the disempowering of organised labour by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, vigorously supported by Brown at the Treasury. This has released corporate Britain from any sense of self-restraint. Indulging tax loopholes for the rich while ordering workers to shoulder the fight against inflation may help Brown sound macho in the City, but it is high-risk politics.

A real sense of unfairness greeted the revelation that a number of the richest participants in economic success were, de facto, being subsidised by the rest through private equity tax evasion and/or nondomicilary status. The same anger was unleashed by the disclosure that a shift in the economy from manufacturing to financial services had led to a shift in profits to offshore tax havens.

Any lobbyist can cobble together special pleading for such antics, but they will not wash for millions of hardworking, tax-paying Britons. Low taxes for all are good, but tax breaks for a privileged few are wrong. The rising tide of wealth should float every boat, not just executive yachts.

As most people see their incomes slide ever further behind those about whom they read in the papers, they will be more inclined to cry halt. Democracy may not be the force it was, but it can deliver politicians an occasional kick, as can industrial relations. The prison officers may yet prove a straw in a wind that sweeps up others in its tail.

The days of statutory pay restraint are mercifully past, replaced in Britain by the most fluid labour market in Europe. But government vigilance is needed to retain that fluidity, and a regard for fairness to back it up.

Capital and labour will never coexist in a climate of equality, but some respect for equity must underpin the nation’s social contract. Otherwise we shall be back to the bitter divisions of the 1970s, where nobody wants to go.