Of course Rishi Sunak’s wife is a non-dom. For the Tories, hyper-wealth is normal

theguardian.com:

Who is shocked? “Outrage over huge pay rises for Manchester Airports Group bosses” was a Guardian story on Wednesday, just as the airport seized up. Those eight-hour queues of passengers were partly caused by the company’s mass redundancies; almost 900 jobs were lost at the airport group during the pandemic. No wonder it now has trouble recruiting, after the remaining staff took a 10% pay cut to help the company through Covid. Yet in that same crisis moment, executives had grasped themselves huge pay rises of almost 25%. The chief executive was awarded a £500,000 rise, taking his total pay to £2.5m.

This is just one of the many stories from the boardroom troughs that have filled the business pages over the last decades, as fat cats have plundered the companies they manage while average wages have stood still. Here’s the question: is Britain so habituated to decades of kleptocracy that voters just cynically shrug this off, the way they do in Russia?

The lid blew off top pay in the 1980s, and since then many of these masters of the universe have been severely undertaxed, according to a report on Wednesday from the IFS. A corrupted tax system allows those who register their income through their own companies to pay just 27% tax, by classing their earnings as “capital gains”: as employees, these high earners should be paying an average 42%, the IFS says. This deceit looks glaringly worse in a week where ordinary employees have been hit with the national insurance levy. Other types of incomes – whether capital gains, share dividends, professional law partnerships or landlords’ rents – doesn’t pay any NI contributions, and is taxed lower than earned income. Taxes on unearned wealth can fall to as low as 10% for the “business