Memo to Dave

I was surprised by your recent careless use of a Tourettes comparison, but am more surprised that you seem to be suffering from a new and unique strain yourself. Tourettes Policylalia (TP) is a seemingly incurable condition in which you respond to public opinion by spontaneously blurting out ill-considered and unworkable policies to make it look as if you are doing something.

The latest TP driven outburst is around executive pay. You promise shareholders a vote and yet they already have one of a sort. If they do not like the decisions of their company they can sell their shares. Capitalism provides the perfect mechanism to regulate executive pay but the 99% do not use it, and, to the extent that their money is controlled by fund managers etc, cannot use it. Giving shareholders a vote will mostly not affect the man in the street - he will not own enough shares to make a difference. Those with most of the votes, fund managers, hedgies etc., will mostly be unaffected themselves. Not exactly a win win is it?

The Unofficial Big Society Green Paper (www.bigsocietygreenpaper.org) makes a suggestion which will provide a meaningful alternative without the need to try and take on core components of capitalism with spur of the moment legislation. Even if you decide to ignore the logical social enterprise way forward surely a better plan would be to legislate to relate executive pay to performance, or to simply tax 'windfall' earnings that do not relate to corporate earnings in a punitive way. I am not for a minute advocating either of those, but what you are promising will make absolutely no difference whatsoever.

If you really want your actions to have an effect they need to be much cleverer. You need to work with capitalism, not against it. By that I mean if you legislate it will find a way around it. To work with it you need to understand that at the moment capitalism is failing the 99% because of the way it is controlled. Those with the huge pay are often in league with others in the same position and have a monopoly over the 'who gets what' decisions. If you want to help capitalism to help itself you need to find a mechanism for penalising those companies who do not conform to your idea of reasonable pay. A penalty that adversely affects their earnings, their share price or their ability to compete for government contracts are the kind of things that I am thinking of.

Finally, actually finding out what each executive earns is not that easy. You could make a start on tackling excessive pay, if you really believe it needs tackling, by ensuring that all pay is declared at the point of award, not through annual accounts long after it has been spent and in a way that often seeks to hide the real recipient. A 'name and shame' policy might be as effective as any legislation.