Britain's bosses would have you believe that business in Britain is groaning under red tap

e and punitive tax levels, inhibiting enterprise and putting British firms at a disadvantage compared with overseas competitors.

As usual, reality paints a far different picture from the tawdry image scrawled by the CBI and Tory frontbenchers. Not only do British businesses pay lower levels of corporation tax than their counterparts abroad but they benefit from the most savage legal hamstringing of trade unionism.

But boardroom fat cats in Britain have one further advantage over their competitors, which is their total inability to feel any sense of shame.

The relatively poor performance since the 1990s of pension investment funds, overseen by the top companies themselves, has brought about a wide-ranging cull of occupational pension schemes. Final salary schemes have been axed in favour of money purchase or have been barred to new employees and, in many companies, staff have been told that they will have to increase pensions fund payments to ensure previously guaranteed benefits.

At a time when the government has been deliberately running down the value of the state retirement pension and driving pensioners towards means-tested benefits, the increasingly shaky nature of occupational schemes has brought about higher levels of insecurity among working people.

However, it's not all doom and gloom. There is a silver lining.

Unfortunately, that silver lining, doesn't shine too brightly outside the corridors of corporate power, where directors are doing what they are best at—looking after number one. Bosses are not only slurping up huge salaries, each-way bonuses and golden parachutes. They have also, as TUC general secretary Brendan Barber says, got "their snouts in a pensions trough."

If having contributions worth one-thirtieth of their salary each year paid into a pension scheme is good enough for directors, why do most workers only receive one-sixtieth？ And if companies only donate 6 percent of an employee's salary for money purchase schemes, why do they give 20430 percent for directors' schemes？

The answer, which will be no secret to many trade unionists, is that we live in a class- divided society in which big business and the rich call the shots.

The Child Poverty Action Group revelation that Britain also has the worst regional social inequality in the industrialised world—second only to Mexico—illustrates how fatuous are claims that this country enjoys social justice and opportunities for all. The stark facts of inequality, based on class, gender, age and race, that are outlined in the CPAG Poverty book ought to dictate a new government approach to tackling poverty.

Inequality and poverty cannot be tackled by allowing big business and the rich to dodge their responsibilities to society and to use their positions of power to seize the lion's share.

According to the author, British businesses ______.

A．suffer h lot from high levels of corporation tax

B．are experiencing an unfair competition

C．complain about the CBI and Tory leaders

D．enjoy more advantages than foreign businesses