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Labour conference - live updates: Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell clash with members over Brexit policy

Ashley Cowburn, Joe Watts, Rachael Revesz, Lizzy Buchan
Updated
Reuters
Reuters

On the eve of the conference last night, Labour accused big business leaders of “siphoning away” taxpayers’ money into their own pockets, leaving young British people without the future prospects they deserve.

A senior figure in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet attacked corporate chiefs for “sitting on piles of cash” that should have been spent improving skills for young workers.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent Shadow International Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner warned executives they had missed a chance to show they could be trusted to meet their obligations to society and promised a Labour government would make them pay.

It comes after businesses returned to Labour conference this year, keen to understand what the future might hold under a Corbyn government in the light of the party’s better than expected performance in the election.

The Independent recently polled various Labour manifesto policies, with those representing a crackdown on corporate excess proving highly popular – in particular a measure to cap the pay of top executives at a specific ratio of a firm’s lowest-paid worker won overwhelming support.

Mr Gardiner said: “The idea that somebody in the same company can say to somebody else in that company, ‘you are earning below the average wage of £28,000 a year, and yet I in this company am earning, in some cases, 50 times as much as you are’…it is just to treat your colleagues with contempt.”

He pre-empted the inevitable attack from critics that his words are “anti-business”, saying: “This is not anti-business in any way whatsoever. It is about saying look, let’s ensure everyone in a company has a stake in the company, they want it to do well, because they know if it does, they also do well.

“It’s common sense. It’s what people want. As The Independent’s poll found out, this isn’t a case of saying ‘this is something people should think about’.

“They already think it. They think ‘who are the bozos who think it’s right that somebody should be earning £10m a year, when somebody in that company is being paid less than £25,000. They think it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t.”