What price the life of a British soldier?

What price the life of a British soldier?


The quite shocking disparity between City bosses and ordinary people has
never been better exemplified than by the case of Lance-Bombardier Ben
Parkinson

Will Hutton
Sunday September 2, 2007
The Observer

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2160694,00.html

Diane Dernie's son, Ben Parkinson, lost both his legs in Afghanistan. Last
week, she decided to challenge the Ministry of Defence's award of a mere
£152,000 as compensation as an impossibly small amount to pay for a
lifetime of decent care.

The same day, we learnt that average pay for Britain's leading chief
executives had risen by 37 per cent to £2.85m. I can imagine no more
eloquent commentary on today's values and the noxious impact that our
collective indifference to huge inequality is having.

The MoD's tariff for war wounds may seem to belong to one world and the
remuneration of Britain's allegedly high-performing chief executives to
another, but I don't agree. There is no circumstance in which any chief
executive officer who suffered a similar disability while discharging his
duties would be so poorly compensated.

If Eric Nicoli, the former chief of EMI, can leave with a pay-off of £3m,
as he did last week after failing to solve the company's problems, be sure
that if his job had led to him being disabled for life, the compensation
would have soared towards £10m.

Yet an honest-to-God lance-bombardier, whose 37 war wounds are so severe
that no other similarly injured soldier has survived, can expect a tiny
fraction of such riches. The reason why the story had such resonance when
The Observer first reported the offer a month ago is not just the low
value the MoD places on disablement. It is our own unease about the entire
cluster of values that sits behind the tariff - what its says about who
gets valued and why and how it is that we live in a society in which such
gross inequalities have become possible.

Last week was also when prison officers had an unofficial strike over pay
faced down by the government. Gordon Brown was unbending. The public
sector could not afford deals in excess of 2 per cent, he intoned, because
no risks could be taken with inflation.

In one way, he is right; the low inflation Britain has enjoyed for the
past decade has been a great boon and it would be irresponsible to pay
more. But when Britain tried to cap pay increases in both the private and
public sectors - the so-called incomes policies - 30 years ago, it was
seen as axiomatic that any pay norm should apply to everybody. Chief
executives in particular had to give a lead and take their share in the
suffering.

Not in 2007; now their pay can rise by nearly 20 times more than the
average, as revealed in the Guardian survey of FTSE 100 companies and,
apart from one or two trade union and church leaders, there is hardly a
public voice raised in complaint. The rich are considered, and consider
themselves, to be so special that they are excused from general
belt-tightening. Meanwhile, there is another rule for the rest, whether
ordinary worker, prison officer or a wounded soldier.

I am not arguing for a return to Sixties- and Seventies-style incomes
policies, but I am arguing that a belief in the common weal and the
necessity of shared suffering that underpinned the idea that income
restraint should apply to all was not some fuddy-duddy, Old Labour
corporatist idea which has rightly been dispatched. These are ideas that
are central to any conception of good, ethical and efficient economies and
societies. We abandon them at our peril.

In conversation with a farmer friend recently, I was pulled up short. He
waved towards the City skyline just visible from his farm and asked if
anybody else I knew felt as personally undermined as he did by the scale
of salaries that were now commonplace in the City. He felt it was
ridiculous, but the knowledge that nothing he could ever do would be
valued as highly as working for an investment bank left him feeling
dissatisfied and devalued; to be a farmer was to be worthless. City
salaries were making his chosen way of life feel third-rate.

I commiserated and told him that, far from being alone, there was vast
evidence that inequality acted as a toxic influence on society for exactly
the reasons he had expressed. Richard Wilkinson, professor of social
epidemiology at Nottingham University, has researched the links between
inequality and social dysfunctionality. People everywhere judge their
value and contribution to society in relation to others in society as a
whole, not just their immediate neighbours.

So it is that the more unequal a society (he measures the 50 states in the
US, along with individual countries), the greater the sense of
disaffection. Inequality always coexists with poor educational
achievement, worse health outcomes, greater homicide rates and even
shorter life expectancy.

Nor do the malign effects end there. As the University of Princeton's
Robert Frank argues, it sets up a futile race among the better off to
outdo each other in extravagance. Entrepreneurship is undermined as the
able chase easy routes to riches. House prices are made unaffordable in
the attractive parts of our cities for but the super-rich. High pay does
not come cost-free; it imposes very substantial mental and social costs on
the rest of us.

In fairness, New Labour can claim that it has halted the rise in
inequality since 1997, at least in terms of the ratio of the earnings of
the top 10 or 20 per cent compared with the rest. But in terms of
toxicity, that is beside the point. It is the explosion of pay of the top
0.1 per cent, and in particular in the City, which has become the
benchmark against which not just my farmer friend but every chief
executive in Britain now judges him or herself. And which causes of the
damage.

There is a laughable argument, peddled by the business lobby and their
outriders in the remuneration consultancies, that there is economic
justification for chief executive salaries to have climbed to 98 times
average workers' pay compared to a ratio of less than 50 just a decade
ago. Their performance, allegedly, has doubled in relation to the average
in just a few years, as has the intensity of the international competition
for their services.

The claims are poppy***. What has provoked such rises is the explosion of
remuneration in the City, itself the result of rigged markets, excessive
fees and a too easy capacity to force unjustifiable deals, takeovers and
mergers upon British public companies. Thus the Caligulan spectacle before
us.

But it even undermines the recipients. How do business leaders justify to
themselves being paid 98 times an average worker's pay? How do they look
their workforces in the eye? They have to pretend to themselves they
really have the special powers their pay indicates. They become mini
Napoleons like BP's Lord Browne, genuinely persuading himself that his
lionised status in his company, reflected in extraordinary pay, meant the
same standing would allow him to lie in court. The judge was outraged. In
this culture, everybody loses.

This is not an argument for a flat Earth world in which there is a
prohibition against riches. It is an argument for proportionality, for
more shared purpose and a recognition that society is built and sustained
by all of us. The rich want to enjoy their riches in a society that works,
even while disregarding that excess riches undermine it. It is not the
politics of envy to say so. It is the politics of social and human
reality, down to the very last wounded but meanly compensated lance-
bombardier.
.

Loading