Last year, Richard Desmond, the proprietor of Express Newspapers announced he was paying himself a chairman’s remuneration of some £52m - the equivalent of £1m a week.

It hardly raised an eyebrow.

Although hefty by historical standards, it was not by contemporary ones. Just a few months earlier Lakshmi Mittal had paid himself a record £1.1bn dividend. At the time it was the highest private dividend on record. But that record did not last for long as high street retailer Philip Green topped it with a dividend of £1.2bn from his Arcadia Group – the equivalent of the annual pay of 54,000 people on average earnings.

When it comes to top salaries, dividends and bonuses, the last decade has seen one record after another tumble. Take boardroom pay. The total average earnings of the chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies have doubled over the last five years – rising five times as fast as average pay.

In the last financial year UK corporate bonuses topped £30bn.

It is little wonder that amidst such corporate greed, amidst a system bedevilled by failed light-touch regulation, short-term profiteering, under-investment, and a craven acquiescence to the demands of the wealthy and big business we now face a devastating recession – a recession which will be laid bare in grim statistics and graphs but which will spell human misery for millions of working people

Financial Times columnist says: “I now fear that the fragility of the financial system with the huge rewards that it generates for insiders will destroy the political legitimacy of the market economy itself. So it is time to start thinking radical thoughts about how to fix the problems”.

When Alastair Darling appeared on TV to announce the bail-out, and he reassured us that things were returning to normal, I was sickened. For me and my members we don’t want a return to the past – where workers are forced to opt out of the working time directive on pain of losing their job, where anti-union laws shackle our rights, where asylum seekers are scapegoated for society’s ills and the BNP fill the political vacuum in too many of our communities, where short-term profiteering undermines our industry and we pay the price in lost jobs, low pay, long hours, stress, where health and safety is compromised in return for a quick profit.

  The most recent government survey shows that the country’s wealthiest 1% own 34% of the wealth. The poorest 50% owned just 1% of the wealth. One in four workers earn less than £12,000 a year, three-quarters less than £30,000.  

f the City was the goose that laid the golden egg then it is clear it is past its sell by date and the stench – the stench of corporate greed - has become overpowering.

And as people struggle to avoid repossessions, to hang on to their jobs, to meet rising fuel and food bills, to cope with inflation the government has responded by bailing out the banks with workers’ taxes – and working people will pay with their jobs, their homes, their wages as redundancies sweep every sector and every region, as house prices collapse, as public finances are squeezed, as communities suffer and workers are asked to take pay cuts, pay freezes or below inflation rises to pay for the years of greed and profiteering. 

  This is an opportunity to bring about a fundamental transformation in our economy and society. How come Martin Wolf can see it but Government Ministers can’t? How come Peter Mandelson thinks we should be “intensely relaxed” about the super-rich and the growing gulf between rich and poor. How come John Hutton believes there is nothing we can do. I’m sure we’d all like to tell him what he can do.

  Ed Balls rejects the London Living Wage – just £7.45 an hour – as artificial, inflationary, not necessary or appropriate, claiming it could distort labour markets and prove poor value for money. What utter garbage. I’ll tell Ed Balls what distorts the market – City bonuses. And Gordon Brown talks not of using our ownership of the banks to deliver social policy but of returning the banks to private control as soon as possible. It is clear they want us to subsidise the banks in the bad times, simply to allow them to return to the profiteering role which was central to bringing about this crisis. 

We used to say when campaigning for public ownership that you can’t control what you do not own. Now apparently you cannot control what you do own.

Because this is not a question of resources it is a question of political will.

I’ll tell you what they could do. They could start by putting an end to the tax avoidance of the rich and the corporations with their fancy lawyers.

Whilst job centre staff are laid off, £33bn annually is lost to tax avoidance. The actual rate of tax paid by the fifty largest companies has fallen over the past seven years.

Just that lost tax could pay for a 10% increase in the state pension or could build an extra 60 hospitals.

 Just one quarter of the total tax lost to avoidance activities of the few would be enough to provide five and a half million public sector workers, who are currently facing the prospect of a real terms pay cut, with a pay settlement equivalent to the rise in average earnings.

Yet the government has failed to act. It stands steadfastly by the now discredited light touch, hands-off regulation. I want hands on. Hands on the wealth, the unpaid taxes, the profits made from the exploitation of labour and for that wealth to be used to fund education, health, public services, jobs and for the colossal resources available to us to deliver our social policies.

It is not a question of resources but a question of will.

So while the bank bail-out saves the banks, protects those with savings, shores up capitalism there is precious little about bailing out the poor.

When will the government bail out the 13.2 million people in poverty, the 2.1 million pensioners living in poverty, the students starting life in debt, the homeless and the rest of the poor and disadvantaged.

Comrades, in past years we’ve met – and been looked on as slightly quaint and old-fashioned with our ideas of regulation, public ownership and yes, socialism. No longer. Our ideas today have more relevance than ever.

For the rest of the day I am sure we will debate mechanisms, structures, alliances, conferences, conventions, manifestos and more….it is right that we do so. But let us not get sidetracked from the immediate tasks and the battle of ideas.

  We should be using our ownership of banks and financial institutions to appoint worker directors, to put in place spending policies aimed at dealing with social problems, ending the dividends to private shareholders and putting an end to repossessions. 

 We must arm our movement with a fighting programme –

The right to a job, the right to a home, to bring in to public ownership the finance and building industry to ensure we can plan and build the affordable housing needed.

To bring in to public ownership those profitable companies threatening widescale redundancies and run them in the public interest.

The objective cannot be simply to recapture the economy and society we had pre-crash. It must be about creating a Britain – and a global system - where the long-term needs of people are put before the short-term gains of financiers, where social policy trumps fiscal policy, where the value of a nurse or firefighter or public servant is more than the value of those who run hedge funds or those who gamble and speculate with our money but produce nothing.

This is an opportunity to bring about a fundamental transformation in our economy and society.