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Attacking high council salaries is merely feeding the demonisation of ambition, says Claire Fox Outside The MJ's circles, my argument here may be professional suicide. Here goes... I think taxpayers should defend top salaries for local government chief executives. However, to all you town hall ‘fat cats' reading this, don't take it as a compliment. I am not suggesting that you deserve to earn more than £200,000, per se. Indeed, it's galling to hear of such ‘staggering' salaries when hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs. But there's more at stake in this debate than complaints about unfairness. Today's fashionable denunciations of exorbitant pay – whether for council chief executives or city bankers – are fuelling unhealthy attitudes which are bad for all of us. The anti fat-cat rhetoric inevitably feeds the demonisation of ambition, leadership, and the perfectly-reasonable aspiration for material wealth. It also cultivates a cynical blame culture, and the politics of resentment. The revelation about council leaders' six-figure salaries was made by the Taxpayers' Alliance (TPA). The TPA deemed the council fat cat phenomena scandalous because ‘we're in a recession and many of these rewards are financially unsustainable and morally indefensible'. But these conclusions seem less based on serious economic analysis of the recession, and more on a moralistic disdain for anyone earning ‘too much'. The inference chimes with the broader view that the fat pay packets of those at the top of society symbolise society's addiction to material excess and greed. Just look at the moralistic narrative epitomised by the officially-sanctioned banker-bashing of late. But does this simplistic stigmatising of high-earning executives offer any honest appraisal of, or solution to, the economic crisis? Such conclusions can distract us from deeper systemic explanations. The social problems of low production and inefficient distribution have been too easily sidelined by a personalised hatred of well-paid individuals' lifestyles. This means avoiding much harder truths – government ministers, not bankers, happily encouraged financial speculation to generate economic growth and sustain public spending. More worrying still, the increasing role of finance masked an underlying stagnation of the productive economy. Bash the rich is a silly slogan when chanted by anarchists. It's a dangerous slogan when it goes mainstream. One unintended outcome might be the negative effect it has on reinvigorating growth. Do we think Britain can become productive again if we make the values of wanting to be rich and successful an illegitimate aspiration? Similarly, I don't want to over-flatter them, but ambitious leaders may be wary of taking on multimillion-pound public sector budgets if their rewards are to be ridiculed. Who will choose a job that will mean making difficult, unpopular decisions, if the motives for being a council leader are interpreted as the pursuit of easy money? As a modestly-paid taxpayer and citizen, I know that while the target today may be the handsomely-paid leader, tomorrow it may be my bonus on the line. Frequently, politicians and commentators intersperse attacks on ‘greedy' bankers with attacks on ‘greedy' sub-prime mortgage-lenders and a consumer-addicted public. When shadow chancellor, George Osborne, concurred with the TPA, he grabbed the opportunity to send a ‘powerful signal' to all the public sector: ‘The age of excess is over and we need an age of restraint and responsibility'. Will the teachers, who have demanded a 10% wage rise, be told they are being irresponsible? Will a care assistant's desire to earn enough to live a comfortable life be deemed excessive, and who will decide? As the Financial Times announces that ‘the private-sector recession is about to be followed by a public-sector one', we know spending will inevitably need to be cut. Let's try and make those decisions without moralistic lectures about greed. The Institute of Ideas is hosting a one-day Post G20 Public Summit to discuss the economy on 16 May. For more details see www.battleofideas.org.uk Claire Fox is the director of the Institute of Ideas

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WHITEHALL

Give this moralising the brush-off

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