However often rehearsed, the facts remain eye-popping. Inequality has bolted out of control over the last three decades.
Democracy has proved increasingly powerless to check the unaccountable runaway oligarchy that fails even to pay its taxes. Ferdinand Mount gives a lucid account of political decay alongside all this looting, a disengaged electorate and a cult of leadership in hock to overmighty media oligarchs, all ominously suggestive of the decline and fall of the Roman empire.
When a Tory tells the story, it’s far more compelling than any left-winger. Mount was head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit from 1982 to 1984 and a director of the then most influential Tory think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies. He was in the thick of it when Thatcher’s Big Bang deregulation of finance blew the lid off any gentlemanly restraint in the City. The government he served let off a simultaneous cannonade of jereboam corks at the unions, which had until then kept manual wages up with the rest.
The combination of these two policies in the 1980s helped send into reverse what had seemed a steady postwar progression towards greater equality. Mount, who documented those years in his charming and slightly faux-naive recent memoir Cold Cream, seems to have been an innocent abroad in the corridors of Thatcherism.
Now he stands wide-eyed with shock at the consequences, with eloquent pen to capture what he sees. The facts are neatly arrayed: chief executives’ pay in FTSE 100 companies rose from 45 times to 120 times more than the pay of average employees. Money didn’t trickle down, it was sucked upwards; the share of national pay going to the lowest earners fell steeply over the last three decades, half the population getting just eight per cent of a doubling in national income.
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