Scotland's top 100 earners

Published on Wednesday 17 September 2003 01:00

MONEY is a many splendoured thing. Never mind biblical ambivalence suggesting that love of it is the root of all evil, everyone’s practical experience dictates that possession of it is a social necessity.

It entrances and enrages, tempts and taunts, can present itself as a creative force, or masquerade as a destructive one. It can be accumulated or inherited, squandered or invested. In the greater scheme of things, some people are better at holding on to it than others, ensuring that - along with death and taxes - fiscal inequality is an inescapable fact of life.

Like the air we breathe, we all need to earn, or have access to, money to be able to function in the modern world, even though the majority of us will never have enough. That’s a problem only from a personal perspective, because if everyone had sufficient means, the economic system would be hopelessly out of joint. The stock response to lacking resources is to strive to earn more, stimulating wider economic activity that creates more wealth that can then be carved up and shared out.

People complain bitterly about the unfairness of it all, or adopt the psychological defence of kidding on that they don’t really care.

Money is a horse of a curious colour. Harry Enfield established his career as a comedian by lampooning cash-hungry, white-socked lager louts waving wads of notes. Top Gun Tom Cruise punctuated his acting career with a landmark performance as Jerry Maguire, the agent whose clients kept exhorting him to "Show me the money".

Woody Allen, a man who more and more resembles a crumpled dollar bill, once mumbled the memorable throwaway: "Money is better than poverty if only for financial reasons."

The common element that stokes these small sparks of contemporary culture is the preoccupation with money in the public mind - its acquisition, accumulation and application. In particular, there is a universal fascination with other people’s money, and how better it would be utilised if only it would pass into more deserving hands denied that pleasure - namely our own.

That same fascination is fuelled by the cultural belief that each person is entitled to privacy in financial affairs, that there is something vulgar about wanting to discuss details of a person’s income. Ask most colleagues how much they earn and prepare to be snubbed.

Of course, such attitudes mean that when the tantalising veil of privacy is torn aside, by surveys such as this, the in flagrante exposure seems all the more shocking, and deliciously illicit, especially when the figures show that the average income among the top earners is in excess of 1 million.

Scotland’s Top Earners list, it can be revealed, contains no secret code that, once cracked, offers instant membership. It comprises an eclectic bunch of workaholics, people who left school at 14, and stubborn visionaries.

However, native-born Scots are easily in the majority, despite the presence of a bevy of foreign footballers and a few English folk who have flourished in Scotland. Women, as might have been predicted, are under-represented, filling only 10 per cent of the spots.

Business people, either self-made, running the family firm, or embarking on entrepreneurial adventures, emerge as the ballast on a list which is also liberally peppered with cultural representatives who have made their art pay handsomely, as well as a clutch of eloquent QCs and lawyers.

The lesson for any parent aspiring to a place for their offspring in a future Top Earners list is to encourage them to work hard - failing that, get them into law school or creative writing classes. "The rich are different from you and me," F Scott Fitzgerald, that great voyeur of the moneyed classes, wrote with disarming simplicity. The Duke of Buccleuch, an aristocratic landowner who doesn’t appear on the list because his wealth is tied up in fixed assets, can confirm that.

One of his assets is an art collection worth more than 400 million. When a thief walked out of his castle with a Da Vinci under his arm, the Duke suggested that he could only afford to improve security if he was given a bung from public funds.

Scots are often said to have a bad attitude towards those among them who become rich, who "get above" themselves, apparently anyone who strays too far from the herd as tantamount to a traitor. Yet the Scots are not alone. The attitude called "kent yir faither" finds its soulmate on the other side of the world in Australia, where "tall poppy syndrome" has an identical meaning. There are similar levelling phrases for most countries in between too, implying that Scots are not too far out of step with the rest of the human race.

Beneath a veneer of generally good-humoured mockery, few people really grudge the financial rewards reaped by self-made men (and women) who exploit their skills to personal advantage.

Someone who has patiently built up a business over decades - and there are several towards the top of the list - is an object of admiration and respect, although most prefer to avoid the attendant publicity and let their achievements speak for themselves.

What really grates with the public are the numerous tales of "fat cat" directors who receive rewards for failure - massive pay-offs when they have presided over imploding profits. Just as the Victorians denounced the "undeserving poor", a new category has been created for the 21st century - the undeserving rich.

Relatively few on the list could be said to fall into this category.

Money doesn’t actually exist, of course. It is an abstract concept, a few notches up from the primitive system of barter. Nobody invented money. It has evolved with human beings because it permits the wider exchange of goods and services and the development of what we like to call civilised society. The consequent enrichment of the individuals who engage successfully in the process is a side-effect.

The most important conceptual development, according to Scotland’s own Adam Smith, founder of the dismal science of economics, was the division of labour which oiled the social machinery of the industrialisation revolution. As people began to specialise in single trades, a value was attached to their labour which did not exist before. Needless to say, some job specialisms proved more lucrative than others, and the great earnings divide, represented in the pre-industrial age by the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate, began to take shape.

The mythical market place, another manifestation of mathematical alchemy, shuffles the pack and puts people in their place. Economics takes little account of the social value of a job. It is the amoral law of supply and demand, as outlined by Smith, that decrees nurses and teachers should be paid less than television presenters and pop stars; doctors and plumbers less than actors and football players.

There are no public servants in the Top Earners list. The First Minister, the Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice, didn’t even come close to making the grade.

Entrepreneurs, by contrast, are ensconced in the ranks, and a new generation is being actively encouraged to catch them up. Whether it is setting up a small corner shop, or founding a future multinational, they are all chips off the block of Andrew Carnegie, the archetypal Scotsman on the make. He emigrated to America as a poor weaver’s son from Dunfermline and returned the richest man in the world.

As a role model for rampant capitalism, he has few peers, but he did retain a social conscience and, on the grounds that to die rich was to die disgraced, spent most of his retirement giving his fortune away.

There are plenty who aspire to emulate Carnegie today - in terms of acquisition if not ultimate distribution - and the good news is that modern technology and communications means emigration is now optional. Wolfson Microelectronics, an Edinburgh-based chip-maker with a worldwide presence, will float on the stock market later this year and almost certainly create a few more millionaires among its staff to add to next year’s Top Earners list.

Economics dictates that there will be plenty of others who will succeed in emulating Carnegie as well, not in the way they might have preferred, but by dying undisgraced in any financial sense.