It says something about the state of UK politics that the small but well respected High Pay Centre should find itself obliged to close down for lack of funds at the very moment it is most needed. Not only are pay disparities off the charts, but inequalities in pay and wealth are at the heart of the rage of those left behind that is roiling democratic societies all over the west. It’s a moment when a single individual can with a straight face demand, and obtain, the promise of a pay package adding up to $1 trillion dollars, and annual ‘rewards’ in the billions are commonplace in the private equity and hedge fund sectors. And when the future of the transformative technology of AI could well be decided by the whim of individuals driven by personal greed and extreme pressure from privileged early-stage shareholders salivating over the prospect of bounteous IPOs to come
This is exactly the toxic economic and political nexus the High Pay Centre was set up to explore 15 years ago. In the press release announcing the closure, it notes that ‘our mission has always been to challenge the concentration of wealth and power in our economy…During this time, we have played a leading role in increasing awareness of the extreme pay inequality perpetuated by our current corporate governance system [my emphasis]. We have also highlighted how this is the product of a system in which workers, consumers and other stakeholders lack the power to hold major companies sufficiently to account.’
Yet while the Centre has to its credit gains that include greater transparency on executive pay and workforce pay ratios, and greater opportunities for investors to have their say on company decisions on pay and reward, it regrets that the gap between the pay of top executives and that of British workers has risen to more than 100:1, a record high, and successive governments and regulators have done little of substance to address an economic model that continues to fuel inequality. Each year ‘fat cat day’, marking the point when the median CEO of a FTSE-100 company will have eared the same as a median full-time employee makes in a year, gets earlier and earlier. This year it came just two and a half days into January.
Of course, the UK is a pale shadow, a mere apprentice, of the US in matters of executive pay. But make no mistake. The trail blazed in Silicon Valley and Wall Street is reliably followed, at one remove and a bit less brazenly (‘we have no choice but to follow global trends, you know’), by the institutions of the City of London financial sector – see for example the onward march of uniquely greed-driven private equity and private credit, and the trumped-up hysteria over (unproven) reports of the very rich decamping from these shores.
As to where all this leads, don’t take my word for it: read Nobel economist Paul Krugman (whom the heavens preserve), who in a blistering Substack in June points out that US levels of wealth concentration are far, far greater today than in the so-called Gilded Age with which it is often compared. In 2025 the wealth of the richest 15 Americans totalled a whopping 8.5 per cent of GDP – three times more than the same proportion had amassed in 1918. As he points out, it’s not just that wealth is more concentrated, but what today’s super-rich do with it that is important: which is basically to acquire and hoard power, either directly through political contributions – 19 per cent of which came from 300 billionaires in 2024 – or indirectly through the time-honoured means of media ownership. The fever swamp of X is now a mouthpiece for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos makes the important editorial calls at the Washington Post, the Ellisons father and son are busy turning CBS and CNN into Fox News 2.0, and we all know the tech bro whose attitudes the algorithms of Instagram and Facebook faithfully reflect. Concludes Krugman: for all their ruthlessness, the robber barons were models of restraint compared with today’s oligarchs – whether in business terms or as human beings.
If you think I’m belabouring the US angle, consider this. In a sharply reported piece The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee notes that the defunding of the High Pay Centre is a distant but traceable result of the anti-woke campaign on business being waged by Donald Trump in the US. Via the traditional one-way transatlantic osmosis, for fear of losing American business over the last year half of UK firms have altered their approaches to diversification, equality and inclusion (DEI), nearly one-third having reduced or abandoned them altogether, according to People Management magazine. One of the UK casualties is a small but locally significant social research funding charity belonging for historical reasons to investment manager Aberdeen. In a former existence, Aberdeen was the mutual Standard Life. The High Pay Centre, along with a number of other good causes funded by the now dissolved charity, is one of the last witnesses to the inconvenient socially progressive traditions whose last traces Aberdeen is now busily expunging, no doubt with a sigh of relief at the prospect of never being embarrassed by them again.
Alas, there is one more thing. Toynbee is a senior Guardian columnist, very well connected in social science circles, writing about something that, as I hope has been demonstrated, matters. I mean, really matters. So why has her piece not appeared in the print edition of the paper, only online, while a page in the Saturday paper that she could have occupied was utterly wasted on the whinges of a long-retired BBC Today programme presenter over the vocal tics of one of Today‘s current journalists? It seems things may be even worse than I thought.