Nobody has ever heard of Linda Cook, but she’s yet another symbol, the latest symbol, of what’s sickening Britain.   She was former head of Shell’s gas and power business, didn’t get the chief exec role, so she left – but only after getting her pension pot more than doubled to nearly $25 millions (about £16.5m).   That’s the equivalent of awarding her an extra 15 years of pension contributions.   As if that were not enough, she also received a $7.6m ‘golden goodbye’.

Now fast-forward to Shell’s announcement yesterday that it’s cutting a further 1,000 jobs, on top of the 6,000 that the new CEO Peter Voser has sacked since he took over last summer.   Curiously the statement didn’t include the increased pensions and golden goodbyes that each of these 7,000 received, but I’m sure that was just an oversight.

Britain is now two nations – the 99% who are struggling in the most damaging recession for nearly a century, including nearly 2.5 million jobless, and on the other hand the 1% who live in an impervious bubble, scratching each others’ backs in their incestuous remuneration committees, and in equal measure provoking and insulting the rest of the country by the shamelessness of their greed.   Platitudes and exhortation from the politicians  are worthless to stop them.

What is needed to bring them to heel is a  Pay Commission (not just a High Pay Commission, though that would make a good starting point) to establish objective pay norms based on skill, effort, innovation, and commitment, not on the say-so of mutually self-aggrandizing friends and acquaintances.   Any significant divergence from these values and assessments would have to be validated, on plausible and convincing grounds, by the regulatory authority which would have the power to strike down any such excessive deviation, giving the reasons publicly for their decisions where appropriate.

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