Businessmen on inflated salaries lecturing the rest of Britain on how to run the country are "utterly nauseating" and "being used" by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, says today.And it goes on to quote him as saying:
"I just find it utterly nauseating all these chairmen and chief executives of FTSE companies being paid 100 times the pay of their average employees lecturing us on how we should run the country. I find it barefaced cheek."No doubt the Tories will try to paint Vince as some kind of extremist. But I suspect this sort of talk will go down very well with the voters.
It was noticeable that, while Vince was careful to be evenhanded in his attacks on bosses and unions during the Ask the Chancellors debate, it was the attacks on the bosses that got more applause.
2 comments:
He's right. And the truth that apparently dare not speak its name is that it was the private sector that brought us to the brink of a second Depression by rewarding arrogance, greed and above all incompetence in the way it selects and rewards those Chairmen and CEOs. Good for him.
Pete - It wasn't the "private sector" that brought us to the brink of Depression, but the bloated and badly regulated banking sector underpinned by cheap-money policies that stoked the credit boom.
Using the proceeds from that sector (and the associated housing market boom) Labour built up a bloated and over-manned public sector, which has now left us with such a cavernous fiscal deficit.
Do you imagine that somehow the public sector is going to drive the recovery then? Where is it going to get the money from, if the private sector is not creating jobs and profits?
Jonathan - I agree that criticism of vested interests, in unions and management alike, should be even-handed. However, it is childish to compare high earners in general (as Vince did in the Chancellors' debate by scorning those who complained about the 50p tax rate) with the over-paid executives of semi-nationalised institutions that have received vast taxpayer handouts (RBS and Lloyds) - unless our position is now that we want to penalise wealth creators as a matter of principle, which doesn't strike me as either liberal or sensible.
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