LAST week Alexis Sanchez became the highest paid footballer, on £600,000 a week, when he signed for Manchester United. A tidy £32.2 million a year, for being very good at kicking a ball around. But, before you huff and puff, he’s just small fry. Plenty of earners in other areas top him. Take Denise Coates, co-founder and CEO of Bet365 gambling firm, who became the highest-paid boss in Britain last year, earning £199 million.
Look at the news on any day, and you’ll find someone whose earnings seem vastly out of proportion to what you feel they contribute to the world. Surely no-one should be earning £14,000 a post, for instance for being an Instagrammer? And do Tom Cruise’s movie appearances really mean he deserves £30 million a year?
When we hear of the biggest earners we can’t help wondering: how do their earnings square what they do? And do the real fat cats know – or care – that for many of us, they are symbols of gross wealth inequality? A new Oxfam report tells us that 82 per cent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one per cent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the world's poorest saw no increase in their wealth. How do the one per cent feel about that?
Possibly they square it in the same way most of us square the fact that we, in the UK, earn on average £19,000 per year, while in the Democratic Republic of the Congo they earn £280 per capita. Perhaps they think it's a fundamental element of life’s unfairness that they can’t do much about, and just get on with it, trying to avoid paying too much in tax, and giving a bit to charity. The rest of us might get angry. We might blame the capitalist system.
But it’s sometimes hard to know at what level inequality outrage should kick in. Should it be when someone earns £127,000 a year, which is what Oxfam's CEO Mark Goldring gets for running a charity that is about helping the poor? Should it be when someone, like me, earns more than the £19,000 average – just for writing some words?
One of the reasons many people struggle to drum up enthusiasm for the gender pay gap battles taking place across the entertainment and media industries today, is because they look at the earnings of the high-profile figures involved, and find everyone, male or female, is raking it in. It was hard back in 2015 to get worked up about the fact that Jennifer Lawrence was earning £20 million less than Robert Downey Jr when she was already banking £37 million.
Still, you’ve got to admire the BBC correspondent Carrie Gracie, who refused to put up with being paid less than her equivalent male colleagues and pushed the issue. Now, six male presenters – including John Humphrys and Jon Sopel – have agreed to take pay cuts.
It was hard not to revel in this, especially if you had listened to a leaked recorded conversation between Humphrys and Jon Sopel, in which the Humphrys joked on air: “I could volunteer that I’ve handed over already more than you f***ing earn but I’m still left with more than anybody else and that seems to me to be entirely just.”
Just? We all know it's anything but.
NUTELLA: C'EST LA GUERRE
I LOVE the French. But sometimes we in the UK get too caught up in how great they are at everything. French women are so much more chic than us. They are superior parents. They eat better and know how to cook from scratch. You know the drill. There’s a whole genre of books marketed to this feeling of cultural inferiority. French Women Don’t Get Fat. French Children Don’t Throw Food. French Parents Don’t Give In. Until last week, I wouldn’t have been surprised if we’d had a title saying, Why French Parents Never Fight Over Sweet Processed Food Products In Intermarché Supermarket Aisles. Then came the Nutella riot. According to reports, last week, following a 70 per cent price reduction on the chocolate spread in the supermarket chain, crowds gathered outside to grab the bargains, and, yes, there were occasional fights. "They are like animals," one customer told French media. "A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a bloody hand."
Describing the scene in Moselle, an Intermarché employee said: “People rushed in, knocked things over, broke jars. It was an orgy!”
Of course, I’m suspicious that this may all be hype. The French, surely, could never lose their minds over a hazelnut paste which contains 58 per cent sugar, some nuts, cocoa and vegetable oil. But this is what the reports say. Mais oui, the French are not so very different from us. We have our Irn Bru, and go into a meltdown when its recipe changes, our hummus whose shortages last year drove the middle-classes insane, and they have a breakfast chocolate spread which can turn them from role models of perfect conduct to animals like the rest of us.
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