What price the life of a British soldier?
Diane Dernie’s son, Ben Parkinson, lost both his legs in Afghanistan. Last week, she decided to challenge the Ministry of Defence’s award of a mere £152,000 as compensation as an impossibly small amount to pay for a lifetime of decent care. The same day, we learnt that average pay for Britain’s leading chief executives had risen by 37 per cent to £2.85m. I can imagine no more eloquent commentary on today’s values and the noxious impact that our collective indifference to huge inequality is having. The MoD’s tariff for war wounds may seem to belong to one world and the remuneration of Britain’s allegedly high-performing chief executives to another, but I don’t agree. There is no circumstance in which any chief executive officer who suffered a similar disability while discharging his duties would be so poorly compensated. If Eric Nicoli, the former chief of EMI, can leave with a pay-off of £3m, as he did last week after failing to solve the company’s problems, be sure that if his job had
