Outside The Mfs circles, my argument here may be professional suicide. Here goes… I think taxpayers should defend top salaries for local government chief executives. However, to all you town hall 'fat cats' reading this, don't take it as a complimentI am not suggesting that you deserve to earn more than ￡200,000, per se. Indeed, it's galling to hear of such 'staggering' salaries when hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs.But there's more at stake in this debate than complaints about unfairness. Today's fashionable denunciations of exorbitant pay - whether for council chief executives or city bankers - are fuelling unhealthy attitudes which are bad for all of us. The anti fat-cat rhetoric inevitably feeds the demonisation of ambition, leadership, and the perfectly-reasonable aspiration for material wealth.It also cultivates a cynical blame culture, and the politics of resentment.
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