The sums involved are stupefying. Apparently the median pay for a FTSE chief executive in 2015 was £4 million, or £1,000 an hour. The national living wage is £7.20. Hence the accusation: the people who earn this (for a given value of the word "earn") are Fat Cats. The image is of an obese, pampered feline, gazing contemptuously at the unwashed toilers by whose labours it subsists and for whose welfare it has not the slightest regard (dogs, as we all know, have owners; cats have staff).
It's not a pretty picture and the label was too much for one high-flyer. Ian Gorham, chief executive of investment firm Hargreaves Lansdown is leaving the firm and not up taking a similar role, according to the Telegraph. He said: "When you wake up every morning and you're trying to work hard and do a good job like everyone in the country, you don't want to read about how you're a fatcat. It's become quite abusive and I don't think it's a good thing for the country."
Well: perhaps. And of course, everyone knows the 'Fat Cat' label is often unfair. These people are hugely talented, driven and successful. They work extremely hard and get results for their companies. Some of them are probably very nice.
But maybe what isn't a good thing for the country is that there is such a huge wealth gap between rich and poor. Because for every super-rich executive there are thousands who are Just About Managing, and many more who are not managing at all. And if we want to see a society where every human being is free to flourish in body, mind and spirit as God intended, we have to question whether this is right.
There are at least two reasons why it might not be. First, unequal societies don't work as well as more equal ones. In their book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better – which has been robustly criticised and robustly defended – Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson show "the pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, [and] encouraging excessive consumption". For each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.
But there's a second reason that is more troubling. Money is power, and power cannot be entrusted into the hands of the unaccountable few. Christians shouldn't pretend that the Bible has a blueprint for an economic system; it was written in very different times. But one principle is that the rulers and the rich are to operate under exactly the same moral and legal system as everyone else. The story of Naboth's vineyard is told to drive home just that point: kings and queens can't just do as they please.
One of the greatest Christian apologists of the last century was GK Chesterton. A fierce critic of socialism, he was the last person to argue for a redistribution of wealth in the name of a spurious equality. But as an independent-minded Conservative, he saw the huge damage to the fabric of society caused by the concentration of wealth in the hands of class of wealthy individuals. He argued for a "Peasant Proprietorship" in which everyone would have enough to be able to live a decent family life, and that to achieve this "the strong centres of modern English property must swiftly or slowly be broken up". "Property" at the end of the 19th century generated the same sort of wealth as the commercial and financial sectors today.
Chesterton drew a lesson from a public health measure of the time requiring poor children to have their heads shaved as a precaution against lice. He said: "Now the case for this particular interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it would mean lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice."
And, he continues: "In the same way, if it should ever happen that poor children, screaming with toothache, disturbed any schoolmaster or artistic gentlemen, it would be easy to pull out all the teeth of the poor; if their nails were disgustingly dirty, their nails could be plucked out; if their noses were indecently blown, their noses could be cut off. The appearance of our humbler fellow-citizens could be quite strikingly simplified before we had done with him."
So, he says: "It never seems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is the wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair."
Chesterton was a great thinker and a great writer who saw what was wrong in his society – among other things, that a few people had far, far too much, and that a great many people had not nearly enough. When that happens, poverty becomes moralised and the poor are blamed – or ignored. Society works for the rich, not the poor – and what else drove the massive anti-establishment reactions in the UK and the US last year, and the widespread disgust with how international financial institutions have treated Greece?
When it takes some very wealthy individuals four days to earn what others do in a year – and what many don't do at all – there is something alarmingly unbalanced in how our society works. You don't have to be a socialist to see that, any more than Chesterton was; you just need to pay attention.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
