Signs of the times

by Gadgie, 28 August 2007

Almost a third of the UK’s 700 biggest businesses paid no corporation tax in the 2005-06 financial year while another 30 per cent paid less than £10m each, an official study has found.

City bonuses have increased by 30% to a record £14bn this year. The rise is twice as big as in 2006 and likely to exacerbate the widening gap between executive and shop-floor pay.

Despite this, there is real suffering out there - ‘The waiting list for a new Rolls-Royce is now five years and there is a shortage of crew members for superyachts’.

Comments

Will
Tuesday 28 August 2007 at 23:00

Where do you apply for a job as a member of crew for a ’superyacht’?

What’s the pay like? I’ve got experience of cleaning up after Finnish drunks on ferry Booze cruises — you reckon that counts in my CV favour?

And — don’t you know that according to the Rawlsian theory of justice, that the gap between rich and poor is irrelevant anyway?*

*(Yes I know — disgusting liberal claptrap).
Gadgie
Wednesday 29 August 2007 at 9:22

I would have thought Rawl’s argument would be that the ‘original position’ would favour greater equality and certainly comprehensive social welfare. That is why right libertarians attacked him on their extended notion of ‘coercion’.

The real shit as far as I am concerned is Third Way crap like Anthony Giddens’. It pays lip service to equality and then backs away from it with weasel words. I quote - “…recent discussions amongst social democrats has quite rightly shifted the emphasis towards ‘redistribution of possibilities’. The cultivation of human potential should as far as possible replace ‘after the event’ redistribution.”

So what do you fucking live on while getting your NVQ in superyacht crewing?

I think that you would be great at it myself. You would get the boat loaded with egotistical billionaire tossers and head straight for that iceberg.
Terry Collmann
Wednesday 29 August 2007 at 20:50

“The rise is … likely to exacerbate the widening gap between executive and shop-floor pay”

How? What have City bonuses got to do with executive pay or shop floor pay?

This is typical Guardian writing-news-stories-to-an-agenda, which is worse than the constant Daily Mail/Evening Standard/Daily Telegraph writing-news-stories-to-an-agenda because one expects better of the Guardian than displaying its prejudices via illogicisms so blatantly.

The whole “executive pay” debate is so boring anyway - it’s conducted as if anybody in business or commerce earning over £100,000 a year sits at home like Smaug on a huge pile of treasure. The money is spent, on goods and services that employ other people; or banked, and lent by banks to other people. And I am fed up with people who try to bring pseudo-morality into the debate, asserting that it’s harmful to have huge gaps between top earners and bottom earners. Teenagers aren’t shooting each other because City bonuses are at record highs …
Gadgie
Wednesday 29 August 2007 at 21:35

Teenagers aren’t shooting each other because City bonuses are at record highs …

A complete non-sequitor. No one said they were.

There is a huge amount of academic research on the social, economic and individual effects of inequality (Richard Wilkinson on health for example).

This is not pseudo-morality either. It is a concept of social justice - allied to a different model of political economy to the one you espouse, on which we will never agree.

PS the first article appeared in the Financial Times.
unaha-closp
Wednesday 29 August 2007 at 23:19

PS the first article appeared in the Financial Times.

The first article is an appeal to the middle class on greed posing as morality. They are not being taxed, but we are - we demand social justice and tax cuts to match.
Will
Thursday 30 August 2007 at 0:23

Re commenter ‘Terry Collmann’:

A commodity and money fetishist — always good for a laugh.
Gadgie
Thursday 30 August 2007 at 11:08

unaha-closp

Perhaps, but it can be read another way too, even with a low tax hobby horse. That is that business is not paying for the benefits it receives through public transport, roads, and educated workforce, subsidies etc., and that it should pay more so that we can pay less. I read the intention this way.

Will

Dead right mate. Also what matters is not spending and lending per se but what it is spent on and for what purpose it is lent. Wealth polarisation can thereby massively distort economies.
Terry Collmann
Thursday 30 August 2007 at 20:04

Teenagers aren’t shooting each other because City bonuses are at record highs …

A complete non-sequitor. Nobody said they were

Well, Richard Wilkinson says so:
“Increasing social inequality in Britain is at the root of rising levels of anti-social behaviour, teenage pregnancy, violence and obesity, according to a University of Nottingham academic …” (press release from 2005 about The Impact of Inequality)

Gadgie, your ability to leap to erroneous conclusions about the model of political economy I espouse (not the one you think - what makes you believe you know, yopu’ve never asked me) is matched only by your lack of understanding of how business and actually operates. As for Will, your “commodity fetishist” remark is also far off the mark - nothing false about my consciousness, matey …

Wealth polarisation can indeed massively distort economies, but the inequality of wealth we see in the UK is not going to distort an economy the size of the UK’s …
Gadgie
Thursday 30 August 2007 at 20:44

Well, Richard Wilkinson says so:

But I bloody didn’t - and wouldn’t. Anyway that sort of murder is not typical but exceptional. (never trust a press release by the way)

leap to erroneous conclusions about the model of political economy

Hey, you are the one leaping to conclusions here. It is obvious that we don’t agree - I seem to be right about that. I was making no judgements about you merely stating the obvious and avoiding a pointless dispute. You also don’t know where I am coming from and if you did …

the inequality of wealth we see in the UK is not going to distort an economy the size of the UK’s

House prices?
Terry Collmann
Friday 31 August 2007 at 20:52

“It is obvious we don’t agree …”

Well, I’d say I agree with 90 to 95 per cent of what is written on this site, that’s why I enjoy reading it. I just don’t agree with analyses that contrast one person’s wealth with another person’s poverty as if wealth and poverty were both bad … or am I reading too much into the phrase “billionaire tossers”?

On house prices, you shouldn’t accept the easy newspaper analysis that it’s all down to City bonuses pushing them up (which, incidentally, would surely rely on the “trickle down effect” no one in the Left is supposed to believe in?) It’s actually the mortgage companies’ willingness to lend (ordinary) people much larger multiples of their income, knowing that rapidly rising prices (caused by the very availability of easy money they are creating) will mean the loan becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of the market value of the house …