What a pleasure to see the bonus-vultures on the back foot for once – but it can’t last…
It seems that every new days brings one more member of the British Business Elite (their trademark) dragged blinking into the open to face public distaste for their plundering ways. And what a pleasure it is – this isn’t schadenfreude (we, not entirely) but the hope that comes from seeing a chink in the armour of a fundamentalist ideology. For years and years the prevailing etiquette (resulting from an awful lot of myth-making) was that it was both wrong morally and practically counterproductive to question how much money the rich took home. Such talk would simply shatter our economic credibility (apparently) and chase away all the stars of the financial sector (oh, if only). This is the first real and sustained assault on out culture of greed that I can remember.
Which is exactly why we can expect to see a carefully designed and coordinated backlash. Well-paid PR execs will be devising stories to drop into the press to make us regret our ingratitude. Daily Mail commentators will be being briefed. Politicians will be taken aside and warned. A challenge simply cannot be allowed to the existing dogmas.
So we’ll be keeping an eye out for them here and it would be great to have you all keeping an eye out too. Please send us the examples of the coordinated backlash in favour of greed that you spot in the press and elsewhere so we can at least keep an eye on the way the fight from the other side is shaping up.
We don’t have their PR budget but that doesn’t mean we’re just going to swallow this stuff…
Robin McAlpine