Any other business: The ‘non-partisan’ High Pay Commission that’s there to prove ‘the left can win’

I set out my argument on the unfairness of soaring executive pay back in November, when I pointed out that ‘in all the years I’ve been writing about the socially divisive nature of this trend and the impossibility of justifying it performance terms, the fat cats have multiplied their take more than fourfold’. So I welcome the Prime Minister’s sudden interest in the subject: I hope he really intends to empower investors to do more about it, and is not just mouthing concern in order to upstage Ed Miliband on the only issue on which the failing Labour leader threatens to gain traction. But I also hope Cameron’s team will ponder my advice that the problem is not lack of transparency but an excess of it, fuelling a grotesque game of boardroom leapfrog. And they should ignore calls to put ‘workers’ representatives’ on remuneration committees, an idea which is a subversive throwback to the 1970s, recalling the notorious Bullock committee on ‘industrial democracy’ whose recommendations not even the Callaghan government was foolish enough to enact.

The chief proponent of workers’ representatives these days is the serious-­sounding ‘High Pay Commission’, chaired by the former Guardian journalist Deborah ­Hargreaves and made up of a theologian, a trade unionist, a Lib Dem peer and a couple of fund managers. The commission describes itself as ‘independent from any political party or organisation’ and ‘non-partisan’, yet also admits to being ‘established by Compass’ — a pressure group whose slogan is ‘Direction for the Democratic Left’ and which trumpets the commission as ‘showing the left can win’. Perhaps the BBC ought to highlight that claim every time it gives Ms Hargreaves airtime.

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