Hi ,

Who owns Britain? It's surprisingly hard to answer that question. Ownership of land in this country is extremely hard to discern, although studies indicate that an extremely British mix of the aristocracy and corporations own about half of England, while Scotland's land is owned by an even more concentrated monopoly. This is how, every now and then, you get stories in the press about someone or someone's son deciding to casually sell half a national park or a few villages. It's difficult to build a more equal society on foundations that turn out to be owned by the Duke of Buccleuch.

Like almost every graph related to equality in the UK, land ownership became incredibly unequal over the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries (we skipped all those European revolutions that tended to redistribute land), but in the 20th century governments interested in public good began acquiring public land. National Parks, council housing, and nationalised infrastructure all contributed to one-sixth of all UK land being state-owned in the mid 20th century. Then, mysteriously, something happens to the graph in the late 1970s and inequality skyrockets again. Since then, half of all public land has been sold.

The mass sell off of public assets has accelerated hugely since austerity began as NHS trusts and local councils struggled to stay afloat by selling everything they could. Desperation and unequal access to power produced predictably unfair deals. For example, in 2018 the publicly-owned National Rail sold 5,261railway arches to American private equity company Blackstone for £1.5bn to finance their capital infrastructure programme. The deal was made on the prediction that the new owner could simply double the rents for the businesses in these spaces (and many in gentrifying areas of London would get their rents tripled or more).

So, in summary, a bad trend. What's worrying is how this trend appears to be accelerating again under our new government. Josiah Mortimer at Byline Times is embarking on a new project looking at councils rushing to sell assets without consultation – and finding a lot to talk about, including Cornwall Council's sale of Newquay Airport. Similar questions need to be raised about the mass privatisation of Birmingham Council's assets after the FT reported that the bankruptcy used as a pretext for the sales may have been triggered wrongly. 

These sales are ideological, based on the idea that the private sector should own and run Britain. We can't fix our inequality crisis or any of the other crises, from housing to climate, without getting away from it – but so far our new government appears to believe it too. Plans to allow social rent hikes, the "National Wealth Fund" turning out to not be a wealth fund at all, and reliance on the private sector for NHS reform and housebuilding all indicate inequality being baked into the changed Britain our new government is aiming for. Privatisation is very hard to undo – but it's very necessary to build a more equal society.

What do you think are the causes and impacts of high CEO pay? You said:

• "High CEO pay means that there is less to pay frontline workers and less to invest back into an organisation. It shows poor engagement by an organisation with its workforce and its community. Also, the richest 5% have a high carbon footprint."
  
  
• "The causes are presumably to attract what are considered the "best" people for the job, though there should be other major considerations like integrity, commitment and care for workers.

  It seems to me that the knock-on effects of astronomically high salaries is that consumers ultimately are the losers, certainly not the shareholders (I'm thinking particularly of the water companies where the fines administered for poor service are paid for by the consumers, at least in part)."

•  

  "Lack of workplace democracy. We need companies owned by and run by the workers."
  
  
• "Traditionally, CEOs are responsible for the success or failure of any company. The buck stops with them. However, so many companies have failed in so many ways yet the CEO still gets away with a huge bonus even if they are forced to resign (usually to walk into another lucrative position). High profile examples of this are Royal Mail, polluting water companies, polluting fuel companies. It makes the rest of us feel helpless, that no matter what we do we will remain on the bottom of the pile and they will always be on top."
  
  
• "High CEO Pay is probably best understood as a kind of peacock's tail. The peacocks' tail represents a huge waste of resources, except that it signals the fitness of the make bird, because he can survive and thrive DESPITE his tail. High CEO pay isn't really in anybody's interest (apart from that of the overpaid CEO), but clearly a business that can afford to pay so much for so little is, despite the waste of money doing pretty well. And then the evolutionary arms-race kicks in: if WE want a good CEO for our business we have to pay the going rate, even if this will strain our finances, because everybody else is doing it too."