To Retain The Best Talent

Paying CEOs like footballers would not be a good idea from Michael Spencer's point of view, but it would be an improvement for the rest of us. By Statute, nothing should be permitted to pay any employee more than 10 times what it paid any other. That would be quite liberal; the noted Maoist, Aristotle, wanted no one to be three times richer than anyone else. Three. Subject to the Tenfold Rule, shareholders should have control over executive pay. How has that ever not been the case?

Likewise, never mind making the energy companies offer tariffs without the standing charges on gas and electricity. Just ban those charges from exceeding the cost of maintaining the networks. They are now 50 times higher than that. They are also supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, yet not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. The whole thing is a racket.

And it is a racket in a country that, while not necessarily the sunniest, is uniquely blessed with coal, oil, gas and tides, as well as getting plenty of wind, as well as having turned out to have lithium, and as well as having once led the world both in nuclear power and in clean coal technology. But that was in an age of meaningful common citizenship, which we have destroyed by means of vast economic inequality.