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THE GUARDIAN |
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COMMENT
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A cringing
appeasement of the rich and
the powerful
Tony Blair's championing of corporate greed may be his final undoing Polly
Toynbee This was flagged up as a major moment: Tony Blair gives his first speech on the economy in years. The venue was Goldman Sachs, the American investment bank where he addressed a select gathering of the mightiest City panjandrums. What an opportunity - and what an opportunity missed. The Financial Times' front page had just splashed on executive pay figures for 2003. Hank Paulson, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was one of those fingered: he earned $21.4m in cash and shares. Executive pay rose 17% last year and was now reaching boom-time levels again. UK executive pay had been "undeterred" by shareholder revolt. If pay moderation was the acid test of the government's boardroom reforms, then they had failed miserably. Another report this week revealed that while most people's pensions were stripped bare, pensions at the top have risen richly at shareholders' expense. The chief executive of Aviva (Norwich Union) saw his pension pot rise to £5.6m; the top man at Legal & General saw his rise to £8.2m - on top of their £1m salaries. Calls for restraint have fallen on deaf ears: naming and shaming doesn't work. A blush-making AGM once a year seems to be a price well worth paying. Did Tony Blair have anything to say about this? Not a word. We are weary of the Blair mantra on "rights and responsibilities", administered in finger-wagging tone to anyone at the lower end of the scale. But it doesn't seem to apply at the top. With a toe-curling bow and scrape, he thanked Goldman Sachs for making their staff every year contribute "a day of their time to charitable and community activities". "What is being done here at Goldman Sachs, indeed the emphasis placed by more and more companies on corporate social responsibility, symbolises the recognition that prosperity is best achieved in an inclusive society." So never mind the pay. He had every right to crow about the economy, with inflation, unemployment and interest rates lower than for decades. He did explain to them that "enterprise and fairness go together". He did talk of the need to spread education, skills and opportunity beyond the few for the sake of productivity; but what he did not say is that "fairness" means greater equality. That means rewards at top and bottom drawing closer together. It means telling them that among the most productive and successful economies are the most equal - the Nordic nations. But no, he used another Blairian mantra: "Investment must be accompanied by reform". Reform in the City, perhaps? No, he meant reform in schools, of course. He boasted of the World Bank's praise for Britain as being among the most "lightly regulated" countries in the world. He vowed to fight against European regulation, especially the working time and agency workers directives. Alone in the EU, 4 million British workers are forced to sign away their right not to work beyond 48 hours, ensuring we work the longest, most anti-social hours of all. Agency workers are denied basic employment rights as a way around troublesome "regulation". Britain's huge contracted-out workforce, much of it agency-employed and excluded from all skills training, is what "flexibility" means. Seven years on, Labour has made the country no more equal, because it salutes a "flexibility" that exploits the poorest while never touching the soaraway wealth at the top. All parties genuflect to the City, just as they kowtow to Murdoch: realpolitik demands that fealty is paid to higher sovereign powers. But what this shows is that Tony Blair cannot, or will not, face what needs to be done for that third term. Even this Tory-voting City audience might have respected him for admonishment for greed. He should have warned how their pay now corrupts pay scales further down, causing discontent and lessening social cohesion. Instead he boasted of how little tax they pay - "Lower than in most of Mrs Thatcher's years" - with no talk of their responsibility not to push inequality ever wider. Often he enjoys walloping his audiences: no Labour or public sector audience escapes his chastisement with unpalatable truths. But not here in this insulated, gold-wrapped world. How many in that room would know what's normal? How many knew that half the population earns under £21,000, or that only 1% earn over what they would think a paltry £100,000? What a chance missed to put to them what they may never hear - the better alternatives to the economic and social dysfunction of gross inequality. Tony Blair continues shadow-boxing with long-vanquished foes. Business and the City may vote Tory but, revelling in Labour's era of prosperity, they pose no threat. To keep Labour's grip on power, he needs to worry less about those few floating voters in marginal seats - that dismal, non-political sliver that our pernicious electoral system forces all parties to court. The people he needs most now are his own voters - but he can not, will not, woo them. Often accused of crowd-pleasing, now he stands more like Coriolanus before the tribunes, too proud to bend to those who would be content with a few signs that he belongs to them. But he will not. It's no longer political stratagem or third-way policy, but sheer obstinacy. This may do him in if Labour voters sulk in their tents or abscond to the Lib Dems. The penance he owes for the terrible error of Iraq is now to bow to them a little. Which of his cabinet will tell him to? Many say so in private. There is a greater, more intangible foe - cynicism itself, the MRSA of politics which once caught is not easily cured. Since the war, cynicism has turned to a nihilism that poisons everything. It festers in a defeated Tory press, whose only power in exile is to spread corrosive messages that nothing works, all tax is always wasted, all government is a vain endeavour, and the public sector is a bone-idle wastrel. Once inhaled, the germs of cynicism are breathed out wherever people congregate. It smothers the unprecedented economic well-being. It forgets the past and suggests, against all the evidence, that things always get worse. It is an alarmingly short time to the general election. Meanwhile, a June annihilation at the polls beckons, followed by storms over ratifying the new EU constitution. To fight for Labour and for his own political life, Tony Blair now needs new and unfamiliar weapons. For if the real fight is against cynicism, the only effective weapons are shining values. That means drawing harder lines with the enemy. The Tories are wrong-footed on spending, but Labour should talk bravely about tax and equality to emphasise the difference. Labour has never before stood on strong-enough economic ground to make the case: championing the downtrodden is easy in a time of wealth. Tell the top they must hold back their own income increases to let others catch up; they may even respect what they know is a necessary truth. But instead of cynicism-dispelling bravery, Tony Blair's speech was a cringing appeasement of the rich and powerful. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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