With five million public sector workers facing a prolonged pay freeze, Britain's corporate bosses have been coining in increased pay, shares and perks averaging 25 percent in the past year.
And while Tory ministers are frantically pulling strings behind the scenes to veto a miserable 5.7 percent settlement for rail signalling staff, there is no signs of ministerial intervention to cramp the luxury style of the Tory Party's circles of cronies in the boardrooms.
Public sector earnings are increasing at just two percent a year; private sector pay at double that rate.
But all this is chicken-feed compared with the 70-200 percent extra on much larger initial salaries awarded to top-paid executives in five major companies, Barclays, Cadbury, Royal Bank of Scotland, Blue Circle and Warburgs.
Some hard-faced bosses still claim that they are 'under-paid', notably Sir James Ball, outgoing chair of Legal and General, defending a 50 percent-plus increase to £473,000 of chief executive David Prosser.
Pay cut
Of course in the harsh cutand-thrust, some can lose out. Spare a thought for poor Sir Patrick Sheehy of tobacco giant BAT, whose package has been cut 37 percent to just £620,000: he now earns less thn in 1991!
Others can face the boot if they clash with their key Board members. But it will offer little consolation for them to pick up their redundancy cheques on the way out.
Sacked Fisons chief executive Cedric Scroggs was shown the door with a mere £750,000 in his hand. Laura Ashley boss Jim Maxmin did a little better with f1.2 million, while Glaxo's ousted chief executive Ernest Mario will collect a more reasonable £4 million - the biggest payoff in British corporate history.
Small wonder that critics are now complaining that it can be more financially rewarding to be an ousted failure than to remain in office as a successful chief executive.
For all these high flyers, mega-salaries are supposedly 'incentive': for ordinary workers, however, even a maximum 48- hour week is apparently out of the question, and millions exist below the EC's decency threshold. And for unemployed youth, even the miserable £50 a week proposed in Labour's latest job-creation scheme is decried as too extravagant by Tory ministers.
One thing is clear: Labour's leader apparent, the frightfully moderate Tony Blair, has no intention of taxing or in any way Over 100,000 turned out in sweltering sunshine for this year's Lesbian and Gay Pride march to Anniversary of the Stonewall Riot in New York.
embarrassing the stinking rich. That's just one reason why their friends the newspaper moguls are not too unhappy at the prospect of Blair for PM. Brockwell Park on June 18, celebrating the 25th