Shareholder Empowerment no Longer Looks like Progressive Policy

Tom Powdrill writes:

"Corporate governance reform involving shareholder empowerment no longer looks like progressive policy. From the 1990s onwards a number of influential people on the Left enthusiastically embraced the ideas that shareholders = the public, that shareholder engagement was a new/exciting way to restrain poor corporate behaviour, and that tooling up shareholders could tackle tricky issues like executive pay. I'm not sure quite when this hit the wall, but I think you would struggle to get many people on the Left to get out of bed for this agenda now.

In large part this is due to practical experience. Shareholders, which mainly means asset managers, have been overwhelming uninterested in tackling the scale of executive pay, and unwilling to engage over labour issues. I think we lost a decade - and corporates gained the same - in fiddling about trying to find ways to make asset managers do things they don't want to, and trying to redesign executive pay rather than just constrain it."

And: "What is particularly striking is the disconnect that has developed between technocratic policy wonk opinion and public opinion, and a seeming unwillingness on either side to meet in the middle. I think a lot of mainstream policy people still think that they got nothing much wrong over the past couple of decades, and the public are just too dense to know what's good for them."