Fat Cat Tuesday spawns big feline trend while fighting widening pay gap

A campaign group has highlighted the sharp and increasing disparity of earnings between top city "fat cats" and the average worker and sparked a celebration of heavy felines on social media.

FatCatTuesday was trending on Twitter on the day - barely five days into the year - that inequality campaigners says leading FTSE 100 chief executives will surpass the average UK earnings for the whole of 2016.

The High Pay Centre think tank said their calculations found the leading city earners will exceed the average salary of £27,645 by late afternoon on Tuesday.

The group said the executives earn an average hourly rate of £1,200 in roles that have seen incentive awards increase by nearly 50% of their average annual salary of £4.96 million.

By contrast the annual pay of the average worker increased by £445 from £27,200 to £27,645, said the think tank, which is calling on the Government to do more to curb executive pay.

"Fat Cat Tuesday again highlights the continuing problem of the unfair pay gap in the UK," High Pay Centre director Stefan Stern said. "We are not all in this together, it seems."

A range of images of cats of varying degrees of weight were soon circulating on Twitter to mark Fat Cat Tuesday.

Many of the comments that accompanied them in the tweets showed little interest in the cause that had given the day its name.

Labour Party and trade union figures though were vocal in their support of the cause.

Seema Malhotra, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said the claim of the widening pay gap was "shocking" and endangered Britain's "long-term economic stability".

TUC General Secretary Frances O'Grady said workers were worse off since the financial crisis and should be given "more collective bargaining rights" if the Government is to deliver a "fair economy".

The Adam Smith Institute dismissed the High Pay Centre calculations as "pub economics, not serious analysis" and said the group had failed to grasp the true value of CEOs.

"Chief executives can be worth quite a lot to firms, as is shown by huge moves in company share prices when good CEOs are hired, or bad CEOs are fired," the think tank's executive director Sam Bowman said.

While others debated the merits of the cause that spawned Fat Cat Tuesday, for some on social media the day remained an excuse to share images of their portly pets: