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This is interesting, isn’t it?

When the elderly shareholder stood up at Barclays annual meeting a couple of years ago and called the bank’s top brass ‘greedy b******s’, she was merely expressing what many people had felt for a very long time.
Over the past 15 years or so, we have witnessed astonishing corporate greed.
There was, for example, the outrage over the U.S. executive with HSBC who was receiving more for his annual dental care than a cleaner in the bank’s City headquarters was given in annual salary.
Talk about a kick in the teeth!

Remember, too, the aptly-named Barclays boss Bob Diamond, whose perks included a £5.7 million contribution towards his U.S. tax bill.
Then there was former Burberry chief Angela Ahrendts, whose total pay of almost £17 million was topped up with a £25,000 clothing allowance.

This corporate greed is not limited to a few one-offs: the fact is that there is an epidemic of excess at the top.
This week, the High Pay Centre, a think-tank that tracks executive pay, revealed that the average pay of chiefs in the FTSE 100 index rose to almost £5 million last year —183 times the pay of the average UK worker.
Inexorably, the gap between the shopfloor and the boardroom has got wider and wider. While workers have had to put up with minimal pay increases, or even freezes, over the past four years, the FTSE 100 bosses have seen their take-home pay rise by an average of £800,000.

So that’s the Mail shouting about the new report from the High Pay Centre.

Hmm:

Ruth Sunderland is the Associate City Editor of the Daily Mail. Previously she was Business Editor of The Observer, and Banking Editor of The Mail on Sunday. She has been described as ‘One of Britain’s leading financial commentators’.

An editor at the Mail is on the advisory board of the High Pay Centre.

Gosh, that article was easy to place, wasn’t it?

4 thoughts on “This is interesting, isn’t it?”

  1. Like so much of public, political and media life these days, this is just positioning.

    The Mail is acutely aware of its reputation as the house journal of smug Tories, so it runs this sort of bollocks to balance that.

    Same with their Stephen Lawrence campaign – designed to show that they’re not racists.

    Same Tony Seldon describing the obese, £90k-a-year fraudster Camila Batmanghelidjh as ‘a saint’, and Corbyn as a breath of fresh idea on Any Questions the other day (‘Please don’t close down Wellington if you actually get into fucking power, Corbs!’), and a hundred other similar cases.

    The one thing I like about the left is that they don’t engage in quite so much of this shite. They’re batshit insane, but they don’t care who knows it.

  2. I know the report isn’t the point here, but lol. If the HTC or Mail can convince me that even just a significant minority of ‘average UK workers’ would refuse a pay rise to £5m, then we can talk about ‘greed’.

    It seems like the HTC is struggling to understand the scale and productivity of modern business. Maybe Ms Sunderland can advise them how the MailOnline business model generates millions from bored commuters browsing free celebrity gossip?

  3. @interested: you think so? To me it feels like it’s all just posturing and signalling, once the perpetrator gains enough distance from the subject and/or the people they’re trying to convince: journos, politicians, SJWs, large charities, any business claiming to be unlike their competitors, or green or whatever.

  4. this is just positioning.

    Not to mention that the Mail and its umbrella group employ some of the best paid UK media executives, from Paul Dacre’s £1.8m salary (plus £600k pension) to Rothermere and the other DMGT executives pocketing £2.5m salary apiece.

    Perhaps not in the same league, but still a factor or two above average joe.

    At least the banks are looking after my pension, whereas the Mail is just providing a more expensive alternative to toilet paper with the sh*t already on it.

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