THREE names: Mick Davis, Bart Becht, Michael Spencer.
Added up, their most recently recorded annual remuneration amounts to almost £50 million. This makes them just a little better-paid than top footballers; it also makes them, suddenly and unjustifiably, the most reviled group around.
Abuse is glibly hurled at “fat cat” City bosses. “Elite greedy pigs”, the phrase of Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, is one of the gentler jibes.
Few have heard of these men. Few could name the companies they run, and fewer still have any idea of how well or badly these companies are being led.
The ongoing visceral attacks on corporate greed and the City of London, make me uneasy because they don’t seem rooted in any structured moral response, or any detailed economic case. There are, and always have been, hideous disparities in our society, but suddenly it’s fashionable to bash rich “city slickers” in very bitter terms.
Does it matter that most folk in today’s Britain are rich, when measured against the standards by which most human beings on our planet still have to live? Many millions -- probably billions -- of workers around the world earn less than £1000 a year for toiling very hard.
A lot of those who attack “fat cats” are themselves comparative fat cats. They exploit the labour of poor people in poor countries by consuming the products these workers are paid a pittance for producing.
Further, many in today’s Britain enjoy a prosperity that was handed down through the efforts of previous generations, rather than one that has been earned by themselves in an increasingly competitive global market.
Some of the attacks on greed -- especially when they come from relatively well paid politicians, clerics and indeed journalists -- are highly selective. In England a lot of Barclay’s League footballers earn well over £10 million a year.
Chat show hosts are paid mind-boggling sums. Grand prix drivers receive enormous salaries. Nobody seems to mind. Even elite golfers, who unlike footballers and racing drivers are rarely faced with career- threatening physical injury, can earn £10 million a year and more.
So why are the protesters so selective in their targets? Is it okay to earn vast sums if you are a celebrity, constantly in the public eye? Is it wrong to earn similar sums if you work hard high in a tower of glass and steel, insulated from public scrutiny?
Even though you may have built a business and created many jobs? And anyway is it not up to the politicians, journalists and shareholders to provide scrutiny?
Incoherence appears to be built into the current protests. The folk who are encamped outside St Paul’s in London manage to be both articulate and incoherent at once.
They speak fluently and sound well educated, yet they don’t tell us why their anger is so selectively targeted, and why they have little idea of what they can do constructively to eliminate the ills of inequity and unfairness at which they gripe so fluently.
The same syndrome applies, less loudly, in Scotland’s capital. Many young people in Edinburgh now routinely revile bankers, fund managers and the like, though very few of these people are Fred Goodwins.
Much of the current discontent might, deep down, be based on the growing awareness that in Britain, and indeed in Europe, more and more of our inherited economic and financial power will soon seep away from us, not just to emerging superpowers like China, India and Brazil, but to smaller, shining countries of the future, like Vietnam, México and Turkey.
Meanwhile here is a brief and partial defence of the City “fat cats”. The City of London provided the UK exchequer with well over £50 billion in tax receipts last year. That’s a lot of health care, a lot of education.
Could it be that some of that splendid tax take was provided on the back of the efforts of, dare I suggest it, people like Mick Davis and Bart Becht?
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