Modern Times

The concluding sentence of an article by Katherine Whitehorn in today’s Observer puts its finger on the problem underlying the malaise affecting contemporary British society:
‘… what has actually been correct, politically in Britain from Mrs Thatcher to Tony Blair? Not an insistence on equality, just an insistence on the efficacy of profit and competition – not public service or honour or professionalism – to cure any failing or inefficiency in anything.’
Underlying this new political orthodoxy is the false belief that people are chiefly motivated by money. On the contrary, as Bertrand Russell put it:
‘Of the infinite desires of man, the chief are the desires for power and glory…When a moderate degree
of comfort is assured, both individuals and communities will pursue power rather than wealth : they may seek wealth as a means to power, or they may forgo an increase of wealth in order to secure an increase of power, but in the former case as in the latter their fundamental motive is not economic.’
Job-satisfaction has much more to do with an employee’s freedom to make his own decisions about the sensible way to carry out his role than with the size of his pay-packet. In other words, a degree of power over his own working life. And for most of us that’s enough. Some individuals, though, crave power over others which leads them to become - in the worst case scenarios - dictators, but in the majority of cases merely charge-hands, foremen, ward-sisters, managers, or chief executives. If Bob Diamond were given the choice of continuing in post at a tenth of his present salary or working as a counter-clerk with no loss of income (the option of transferring to another company being excluded ) can one doubt for a moment what his decision would be?
And yet our government is in thrall to the misconception that unless we pay senior executives silly sums of money no one would take the job, so leading to the situation that whilst the overwhelming majority of people’s incomes are falling in real terms those of the highest earners are increasing substantially.
It’s not only morally obscene, but utterly unnecessary.