The Guardian view on British business: stop stroking the fat cats | Editorial
As important as the detail of the government's proposals to change the way big businesses are run is the context. Today's green paper comes in the year of Brexit and Donald Trump, at a time when voters, as Theresa May recently said, "see the emergence of a new global elite who sometimes seem to play by a different set of rules and whose lives are far removed from their everyday existence". Well ensconced in that global elite are the chief executives of major companies. Think of Philip Green, whom MPs have accused of letting BHS die. Think of Mike Ashley, apologising for staff mistreatment at Sports Direct. Think of all those bumper pay deals at FTSE 100 firms.
As the High Pay Centre points out, the average FTSE 100 CEO is now earning as much as 147 of their own employees. The average CEO pay package comes in at 5.5m a year. Those are just the front-page stories: leaf through the business section of any paper and chances are it will contain some tale of fat-cattery. Crucially, all this is happening in the middle of the sharpest pay squeeze for 70 years and historic spending cuts.
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