Fat Cat Tuesday

Today is Fat Cat Tuesday, that moment when the bosses of Britain’s top 100 FTSE companies will already have earnt – just five days into the New Year – as much as the average British worker will earn across the whole of 2016, i.e. £27,645; and the reason they achieve that so fast is because they are being paid at the eye-watering rate of £1200 an hour. Such grotesque inequality, and all the associated social ills that it brings with it, is the reason why William Morris’s communism, with its demand for actual, practical equality (not merely formal equality before the law), retains such a powerful claim upon us.  Whatever has dated in Morris’s work (quite a lot, I sometimes think), the sharp cutting edge of his fundamental communist demand – economic equality as the lever towards social neighbourliness -  will continue to trouble and inspire us.