While Labour turning it’s back on Keynes is a bigger story, the coalition’s attempt to act as ‘responsible capitalists’ is easier to write about.
A coalition government appointed commission reports that executive pay is out of control (really?) and that there should be trade union and/or workers representatives on board pay committees, and that shareholder votes on pay should be binding. (You mean they’re not!) However the government decides that allowing workers to vote on the bosses pay would be ‘tokenism’. Hardly! Shareholders can sell up, Trade Unionists might actually fuck things up! Since Labour introduced the shareholder advisory vote in 2003, only 18 companies have rejected board pay agreements. Assuming that, its FTSE 250, over 9 years, that’s under 1% of company AGM’s have rejected a pay committee recommendation. Shareholders that think a company is badly run, sell up, they do not hang on for the AGM and vote against the pay board recommendation, they don’t even hang on and replace the board. They sell up; that’s what Equity Liquidity means.
This’ll make a huge difference. Not!
In case you hadn’t noticed, there was a banking crisis four years ago, and in the UK two failing banks were nationalised and a third was merged with a successful bank to prove the old adage, “What happens when you hit a duck with a failing bank?”, “You get two dead ducks!”. Despite, that anyone saving with Nat. West., Halifax, Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland, or whose savings banks and pension funds had been lent to them should be bloody grateful to Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the Labour Government; they saved the UK banking system and everyone’s savings! Despite the catastrophe, no one has been prosecuted, no-one’s in gaol and all the current government is talking about is taking Fred “the Shred” Goodwin’s knighthood away from him. I bet he’s worried about that. Ed Balls took Sharon Shoesmith’s pension from her; not that I approve of that really, but allowing the government to focus on the Fred’s gong is taking the piss. Who’s going to gaol?
The coalition’s campaign for responsible capitalism is all camouflage.
And while I don’t really believe there can be a responsible capitalism, the right are running scared of Ed Miliband who first reminded us of the idea that the corporate private sector was ripping us off; it’s just a surprise that people needed reminding.
No government with the Tories in it are going to help. …
