As the cost of living crisis starts to bite, Britain’s spectacle of injustice and profiteering may ignite public indignation
Who is shocked? “Outrage over huge pay rises for Manchester Airports Group bosses” was a Guardian story on Wednesday, just as the airport seized up. Those eight-hour queues of passengers were partly caused by the company’s mass redundancies; almost 900 jobs were lost at the airport group during the pandemic. No wonder it now has trouble recruiting, after the remaining staff took a 10% pay cut to help the company through Covid. Yet in that same crisis moment, executives had grasped themselves huge pay rises of almost 25%. The chief executive was awarded a £500,000 rise, taking his total pay to £2.5m.
This is just one of the many stories from the boardroom troughs that have filled the business pages over the last decades, as fat cats have plundered the companies they manage while average wages have stood still. Here’s the question: is Britain so habituated to decades of kleptocracy that voters just cynically shrug this off, the way they do in Russia?
