Young people are losing confidence in capitalism because of the huge gap in pay between FTSE bosses and workers, a Tory minister warned on Thursday.
Nick Gibb, one of Britain’s longest serving education ministers, stressed that a failure to address this issue would mean it would be hard to “maintain support for the free market and capitalism”.
In an interview with the ConservativeHome website, Mr Gibb said: “One of the great problems we have to deal with now is that of equality.
“So there’s a very interesting interview I saw with Mrs Thatcher, pre-’79, with William Buckley, and in that interview she talks about the highest earners earning four times as much as the average income, and she thought this was probably fine, because you needed to have disparities in wealth.”
But he stressed: “If you now look at the figures of a FTSE chief executive, he will be earning 100 to 130 times the average salary.
“So something has happened, and I believe very strongly in free markets and capitalism, which is the best way of creating wealth, it’s the best way of having clean water and hospitals and schools.
“But it’s losing the confidence of younger people in the population generally, because of these disparities in equality.”
Pressed on what should be done about this, he added: “These are the issues we have to address, I’m not sure that as a party we have yet accepted the importance of this issue. Because if we do not address it, we will not be able to maintain support for the free market and capitalism…
“How is it that one of these big housing companies can pay such huge bonuses to their chief executive? How are they making such profits to enable that to happen?”
Mr Gibb has had three stints as schools minister from 2010, totalling more than 10 years.
He added: “In modern politics, I’m afraid there’s too many people who are just interested in career progression.
“Politics is driven by people who are very ambitious. If you come into politics you should come in because you believe in ideas.”
He hailed education and improvements in schools as a “success story” under the recent Tory administrations, with a focus on phonics for reading.
Having visited more than a thousand schools, he added: “I could almost tell within a few minutes of talking to a head teacher what the results would be, just based on the philosophy of the head teacher and the school.
“So once you’ve come to the view that there’s a particular approach to education – so for example a competence-based curriculum, or a whole-language approach to teaching reading, or a progressive way of teaching maths, or downgrading the importance of academic subjects in secondary school – once you’ve come to the conclusion that that philosophy of education is failing, particularly disadvantaged children, then obviously the answer is to challenge that approach.”
