Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Back to the bad old days of greed

All around us are signs of business as usual after a brief spell of deto

OK, he is hunky, gorgeous in fact – what a jawline! Those legs! The polished, rippling chest and arms – and if I cared a toss for football, I would ecstatically describe Cristiano Ronaldo's superhuman movements on the pitch. But an £80m price tag? Is any sportsman, however brill, worth that? At the age of 24?

Apparently so. Real Madrid happily coughed up, setting a new bar on the commercial value of people who can make a ball work for them. Beckham was bought by the same Spanish club in 2003 for only £35m. He must now feel like one of those end-of-sell-by-date goods offered cheap in supermarkets.

Forgive me this idiocy. I am only trying to get into the heads of the overvalued and super-spoilt caste. And those who elevate and shower them with cash.

Over where they mint money or tell us they do, we hear the very fortunate Bob Diamond, president of Barclays, is to trouser millions of pounds as a part of that business empire is sold off. Was there a more propitious bling name bestowed on a newborn?

I thought we had entered new times of moderation and downsizing. Avarice, we assumed, had been marched off to pine and repent and those who were its priests – Sir Fred Goodwin, Sir Victor Blank el al – were in a 21st-century leper colony. Lessons had been learnt by these pariahs and those in public life who were infected by the covetousness of our age. Yet how quiet the mob today when this Ronaldo obscenity has come to pass and one more banker, the Barclay King, adds to an already obese fortune.

So what recession then? What global poverty crisis? Around us are signs of business as usual after a brief spell of detox, that's all. Well-off Britons are coming out of self-pity over the squeeze and that tedious faux austerity. Outrage fatigue may also have set in. You can only hate so many bankers and politicians before fatalism overcomes fury. Or it may be that even now, certain sectors and celebs expect their rich lives to carry on as before, untouched by the sombre new realities.

Sport has certainly assumed it can play with big money but shouldn't be subject to any scrutiny or opprobrium. Wags and sometimes their partners are affectionately mocked, but on the whole sports, like the art world, architecture, and the media were mysteriously spared as socialist fury and near revolution swept through the land. No wonder they still don't get it.

If they did, we would have seen, say, Manchester United announcing it was donating a tenth of this fat transfer to Malawi, so that countless children would get food, mosquito netting, water and school. Madonna then wouldn't have to keep having to rescue the odd cute one and be made to suffer for her fame and fortune.

And wouldn't it be nice if Jonathan Ross were unilaterally to declare a cut in his earnings because he feels uncomfortable with all the comforts his enormous income buys him? Last week there was apparently an evening of bitter canapés and plain wine at the BBC as Mark Thompson announced cuts in future contract arrangements with "stars". An agent of one in the galaxy expressed disgust: "The BBC is taking it out on the middle ranks – people at the top of their game earning £100,000 to £250,000 who have mortgages and commitments like everyone else."

What drugs are these people on that space them out to this extent? I hear there is even a new word coined for this set, whose self-indulgence masquerades as want – meet the new "poorgeois". Of course there is still the top-heavy BBC management where earnings are too high, secretive and, in some cases, intolerably excess to needs.

And if that wasn't enough news, it emerged this weekend that some of the highest BBC presenters also own their own production companies that make the programmes they star in, so they get a cut of the profits of sales to other countries. And guess what? Ross does it, as does Graham Norton and so on, although Ross says it goes back into programming. In the art world too, artists, connoisseurs and those who negotiate sales carry on as if they are still in the Eighties and Nineties. For posh clubs and restaurants, architects, clothes designers, jewellers, makers of expensive shoes and handbags, the recession is as distant as a Siberian winter.

One friend who runs an upmarket restaurant says his business is only up and up. Some summer parties have been eye-wateringly lavish, as if people couldn't even be bothered to pretend times are hard for millions not in those halls of opulence. Fat cats are now in the public sector too. Greg Martin, a state primary school head in Lambeth, is allegedly making a tidy profit by turning some of the school building into a trendy spa, managed by his private company.

The greedy have learned nothing and don't care. They had better wake up. Contemporary Social Evils, a new, timely publication by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (prematurely dismissed by some commentators) collects the views of over three thousand respondents from all classes and a number of experts.

Inequality and greed are named as two of the most destructive features of Britain, which is among the least equal in the developed world. Two decades of governments being, as Peter Mandelson said, exceedingly "relaxed" about the filthy rich has fractured the nation. Quotes such as these reveal the deep unease building up around our country: "Nothing is enough for a person for whom enough is too little." "It makes people ruthless and [leads to] a lack of compassion and community spirit because everyone is out for themselves."

One interviewee condemned the way "the rich buy themselves out of the society we are creating, the less rich aspire to buy themselves out of that society and the poor feel dispossessed and powerless". To ignore such a swell of public opinion would be a big mistake. It could destabilise institutions, leaders and democracy as we have known it.

"Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works" – the unforgettable lines from Wall Street, the film that incarnated the grasping Eighties captained by Thatcher and Reagan. Not any more. Greed is gross. Greed is vile. Greed sucks. That is the message but the ones who should heed it are too stupid or drunk on self-importance to get it.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk