After a week in which hundreds of people have been slaughtered by their own government in Syria and almost three million people are still unemployed, what is the Labour party doing? Debating a parliamentary motion about whether or not a small group of people in London should be merely ridiculously, as opposed to outrageously, well paid. This is not the way back to government.
That’s not to defend the culture of excess that has clearly developed around the City of London: since the credit crunch bank bonuses have increased by almost 50 per cent at a time in which revenues and results have gone down, not up. The cost of rewarding failure and stagnation is discouraging achievement and innovation. From the basic point of fairness and opportunity, it’s simply wrong that within the same company you can have some employees struggling to make rent, while others are taking home as a bonus what many people will never earn across their entire lifetime.
Buried last week by the hue and cry over Stephen Hester’s bonus was a report, All In This Together?, which showed that the ratio between the highest paid and the average paid employees at FTSE 100 companies is now more than double what it was at the beginning of the 21st century. In 2000, the average – not the very poorest, the average – employee’s salary had been at a ratio of 1:47 with the very top. Now, it is a staggering 1:102. Instead of calling for restraint on pay at the top, we should be calling for greater parity of income within companies, to achieve a living wage for the very poorest and a fair cut for those in the middle. But instead, we come across as a party who don’t put people who work first, but are instead implacably opposed to people being successful.
That impression is further heightened when in the same week we’re campaigning against a culture of subsidising failure and stagnation at the top, we’re voting to protect those subsidies at the bottom. It’s simply not right or fair that the taxpayer spends so much money subsidising landlords and outrageous rents; but when, instead of seeking reform, we defend the status quo, we appear to be siding with those who idle, against those who work.
Most importantly, by drifting into the language of ideology, of ‘moral’ capitalism, and the ‘right’ way of doing business, we move away from the voters we need to win and towards the voters we already have.
At a recent Progress discussion on ‘the new centre-ground’, Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, explained that voters come in two different stripes: ‘positional’ and ‘valence’. ‘Positional’ voters are shifted by ideologies; they might, for example, favour a greater or a lesser level of private involvement in public services. ‘Valence’ voters, however, are shifted by outcomes: they aren’t opposed to Andrew Lansley’s bill because of its private element, but because of its potentially disastrous consequences for patient care.
Most party activists are ‘positional’ voters, but the people who actually decide elections are ‘valence’ voters. They might be exercised by Hester’s bonuses or the amount spent on benefits, but they don’t lie awake at night worrying about them, and in the final analysis are unlikely to be won over by a party which appears obsessed with either of those issues. They lie awake at night worrying about whether or not they will find a job, whether they will ever be able to buy a house or leave something for their children. They are not only the people who we must win over to get back into government, but the people who will suffer the most if we fail.
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Stephen Bush is a member of Progress, works as a copywriter, and writes at adangerousnotion.wordpress.com
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