A group of leftists and centre-leftists have come together in ecumenical communion to call for the establishment of a High Pay Commission. The 100 signatories to the request include Lib Dems, Labourites, Greens and lecturers in media studies, and their most famous champion (in these days when the General Secretary of the TUC is no longer a household name) is the Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor, Vincent Cable. The argument of the 100 signatories is that, just as in 1997 there was a case for the Low Pay Commission to tackle the problem of low pay, so today we need a commission to tackle the problem of high pay.

One enjoys the symmetry while noting the difficulty it causes. Low pay is obviously a problem for the low paid, and is (for all but the most grinding mill owner) a clear social evil. High pay is a less obvious catastrophe for those who are the recipients of it, explaining the absence of the Child Affluence Action Group, Rich Concern and War on Wealth. And it isn’t an entirely clear problem for those who are not recipients of it either. I might envy the ownership of a Porsche (I don’t, actually) but is Porschelessness such a huge difficulty?

At first Dr Cable seems (in an article timed to coincide with the new campaign) to say that it is. “The past decade,” he writes, “has seen widening differences in income and wealth, which taxation and regulation have failed to address.” So presumably the High Pay Commission will, in some way, deal with that. The TUC General Secretary (whose name is Brendan Barber) targets “the growing gap between executive and employee pay [which] has a damaging impact on staff engagement and has created a new class of super-rich that float free from society”. Professor Ruth Lister highlights the way in which very high pay “erodes the bonds of common citizenship; undermines the principles of equal opportunity and the recognition of equal worth; and has fuelled the credit crunch”.

This seems fairly clear. People earning vast amounts is bad for the rest of us, and it would be good to stop it happening. But not so fast. Dr Cable quickly qualifies thus: “There is nothing intrinsically offensive to most people about talented inventors, entrepreneurs, performers or sports stars benefiting substantially from unique talents that enrich or protect or entertain the rest of us.” In other words, it is only some high earners whose wealth is sufficiently offensive for us to want to restrict it — inequality is not the issue. They are what might be called the “undeserving rich”: those who attract “reward without merit” and are involved in “tax- dodging”. Dr Cable further narrows down this problem by suggesting that the new commission could decide that some of the apparently undeserving wealth gatherers are actually kosher dosh pullers “even if they offend natural justice and our sense of fairness”. Thus rather undermining Professor Lister’s rationale.

I can see that a bonus culture that rewards excessive risks taken with other people’s money and not your own is undesirable. I also agree with Dr Cable when he suggests that many high earners develop an exaggerated notion of their own marketability to justify stratospheric reward. I know several executives at the BBC (and I am sure that they in turn know many people in commercial media) who would probably struggle to earn half their current salaries outside the corporation. I have met some very wealthy people who believe the mythology that they earn what they do relative to others purely or even mainly as a consequence of their own ineffable qualities, rather than as a part consequence of luck and birth.

But that’s all a slightly different matter. The very wealthy are a tiny proportion of the population. £120,000 per annum puts you in the top 1 per cent of salary earners, £60,000 in the top 5 per cent, £32,000 in the top 25 per cent. And £25,000 makes you average — if you’re a full-time worker. The super bonus earners — the apparent target of the High Pay Commission — are fewer than 0.1 per cent. Even if you took away half their money (and the recession has probably accomplished much of that) the beneficial social or economic impact on the rest of us would be minimal, if anything at all. The only obvious positive consequence of setting up such a commission would be the ability to say that you had one and that you were having a good go at the Goodwins.

Some research carried out by the Fabian Society for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, published earlier in the summer, seemed to suggest that there was no huge public appetite for an attempt to restrict top pay. There was a rather touching belief in the notion that the wealthy had somehow deserved their wealth, as there was a rather worrying acceptance that the poor in some way deserved their poverty.

Why? Perhaps because those surveyed — almost no matter what their own income and circumstances — put themselves “in the middle”, the position which, 79 per cent agreed, was the most uncomfortable of all because it didn’t offer “the rewards of the rich” or “the benefits of the poor”. Interestingly, too, the respondents imagined average earnings to be higher than they actually were.

This misperception, it occurred to me, is more of a problem than the pay of a tiny, unlovely and easily attacked minority. And it is a misperception shared by the wealthy (ie, those earning more than £100,000), who were found to believe recently that the average wage in Britain is roughly double the true figure. They had no idea how much richer they were than most people, and most people had little idea how much richer than them this group were.

Those earning above £100,000 are Britain’s true elite: elite doctors, elite dentists, elite journalists, elite headmasters, elite civil servants, elite businesspeople; many of them with a diminishing notion of how most people in Britain live, and protected from scrutiny and comparison by our very British idea of privacy.

So here is my suggestion, which avoids the bureaucratic nonsense of a High Pay Unit, and replaces it with the greatest weapon for change in a democracy — transparency. It is that we adopt the Swedish system of making public all tax records. What we earn in pay and coffee futures, shares and land income, all to be there for all to see, from John Humphrys’s after-dinner speaking to my book royalties to the surgeon next door’s earnings from her private practice to the army sergeant’s pay. We’ll know what the Jones’s get and form a better notion of how rewards are distributed in modern Britain.

And not only will that be more useful than a High Pay Commission, it will be much, much more fun.

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