More drugs, water companies, sewerage, and prisons

13 July 2024

Following my brief mention of cannabis in last week’s mutterings, a friend said their son was surprised to get a receipt when he bought some cannabis in one of the American states.  I hadn’t thought of that before but I’ve never been offered a receipt when I’ve bought cannabis over here.  I wonder why.

The illegal drug market is flourishing in Britain and some people believe that legalising cannabis for recreational use will stop users from having to buy from dealers who have a vested interest in converting them to more unpleasant and expensive drugs like cocaine (which, as far as I know, hasn’t been legal since the beginning of the 20^th century when Coca Cola had to stop putting it in their fizzy drink.)

Other people don’t think this is such a good idea and say there is some evidence that legal drugs would have to be subjected to quality controls and tax, which would make them more expensive than illegal drugs.

I obviously don’t know which way it would go but cannabis buds are hard to ‘dilute’; it’s much easier to cut cocaine with salt, bleach powder or other white crystalline substances.

Perhaps there’s a case for legalising cannabis and letting market forces decide whether stoners will pay more for a purer product or will take the risk by continuing to go to their friendly neighbourhood dealers where they can place a side-order of amphetamines.

We now have a new government so, while I don’t think their manifesto mentioned rationalising the drugs market, we can always hope.  The chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has told business leaders Labour will “fix the foundations” of the British economy so why not practise by starting here? It’d be easier than trying to sort out the sewage problem.

Thames Water is the biggest water company and is threatened with bankruptcy after the water companies in England and Wales were sold to the highest bidder in 1989 in the dying throes of Maggie Thatcher’s government.

In the following 36 years, the privatised companies rewarded their shareholders and executives handsomely while, as ‘wild’ swimmers all over the country are suffering, failing to deal with any of the big problems.  Ah but, says Thames Water, many of their water mains and sewage pipes are Victorian.  So?  Weren’t they Victorian when they did their due diligence before buying the company?

Thames Water had no debts when it was privatised but owed £14.7bn in 2022.  Its pension fund was £26m overfunded in 2008 but was £260m underfunded by 2015.  Much of this is down to Macquarie, which started as a small Australian bank in the 1960s and grew enough to become an asset stripper and buy Thames Water in 2006.  

It immediately rewarded itself by paying out £656m in dividends (mostly to itself of course) even though the company only made a profit of only £241m, grabbing the shortfall of £425m from the company’s reserves.  

It broke Thames Water up into a complex structure of inter-related companies, including subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and added insult to injury by taking approximately £2.8bn out of the company before it sold Thames Water in 2017.

A Macquarie spokesperson said: “During the 11 years in which our funds were shareholders in Thames Water, we oversaw the largest investment programme in the company’s history and the highest rate of investment per customer in the industry.”  They didn’t mention that they’d taken out all the money and been forced to borrow huge sums from lenders, paying them large amounts of interest, to provide the money for what they claimed was “their” investment in the industry.

Robert Maxwell, come back, all is forgiven.

Like Maxwell, Macquarie proved between 2006 and 2017 its dedication to ripping off everybody in sight, including the pension funds of the staff who actually do the work.  The company has been described by one commentator as “a powerful totem of mismanagement, corporate greed and lax regulatory oversight”

Only 9% of Thames Water is now owned by UK investors.  The rest is owned by investors in Canada, Abu Dhabi, China, Australia and the Netherlands and these shareholders recently decided the company was “uninvestable” and refused to throw good money after bad to bail the company out.

Of course, Thames Water isn’t the only water company to abuse a monopoly but, as the biggest water company, it offers a costly warning to governments not to repeat the stupidities of Thatcherism.

Oop north, another private company has let so much filth into Lake Windermere that the algae it produced on the surface of the lake can be seen from space.  Scotland doesn’t seem to have fared too badly but its water companies were never privatised and what is now Scottish Water is still owned by the Scottish government.  In 1988, when water privatisation was being considered, it was rumoured that the Loch Ness Monster had applied for accommodation in Lake Baikal.

(By the way, did you know there’s more water in Loch Ness than there is in all the lakes, rivers and reservoirs in England and Wales combined?)

Labour’s manifesto also promised to make life easier for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence and are now (I hope) trying to find a way of keeping these people in prison after the last government recently came up with the brilliant idea of reducing overcrowding in prisons by effectively reducing criminals’ sentences and letting them out early.  Why don’t they take up my earlier suggestion not imprison ‘white collar’ criminals but to bankrupt them, transferring all their assets to the state, and make them live on state benefits?

With everything else that was severely damaged during the last government’s 14 years in power, like the NHS, education and social care, Labour will need to prioritise actions and I suspect the purification of what we ingest and egest is an even lower priority than the classification of drugs.

The last government seemed to believe that privatising and sub-contracting services would bring more money back into the economy because of taxes on their profits and on wages paid to their staff;  this would then allow further investment in infrastructure, such as waterproofing roofs in schools and hospital buildings.  They also seemed to believe there are fairies at the bottom of my garden but I haven’t seen any yet.

Why classify books / what is fantasy?

28 October 2023

I grew up with an insatiable and utterly indiscriminate love of reading.

The first book I remember reading was in primary school.  It had pictures and words on every page.  It was about a farmer and his dog.  The dog’s name was “Old Lob”.  Unless that was the farmer.  It was very boring.

At home, I remember Winnie the Pooh, Orlando the Marmalade Cat, Mary Plain, William and Biggles and the Arthur Ransome books (it was many years later before I felt even a slight worry about calling a teenage girl Titty, at the time it was just a name.)

I also read some of the stories of heroic deeds by prep schoolboys during the First World War who discovered that Fritz in Form IVB was a German spy.  I even read some Billy Bunter books and loved Dr Doolittle but couldn’t get into Enid Blyton though I gained comfort from the cozy worlds of Wind in the Willows and Rudyard Kipling’s stories.

I still have some of these but the rest came from the library where I’d gather a handful of books for the week often chosen after reading the first two pages.  If I found an author I liked, I’d read everything I could find by them and, I have to confess, I can’t remember a single book or author that I didn’t like, probably because they failed the 2-page test.

It was many decades before I realised that some people thought ‘normal’ stories were different from fantasy and science fiction because, to me, all fiction was fantasy:  obviously William came out of Richmal Crompton’s head and wasn’t real.

I blame Andrew Lang.  He and his wife Leonora produced a wonderful series of Colour Fairy Books which gathered folk tales from all over the world and I loved them.

At about the same time, I found George MacDonald’s wonderful stories and I also came across Vice Versa by F Anstey in which a boy and his father swapped lives.  (The latter offered the basic plot for the Tom Hanks film Big and Jamie Lee Curtis’s Freaky Friday.)

Later, of course, there were the Mary Poppins books and those by E Nesbit and ‘BB’.

Thus did I find myself reading ‘real’ fantasy fiction without even realising I’d crossed a threshold;  or that there was a threshold.

I was introduced to science fiction by Dan Dare in the Eagle comic and writers like Jules Verne, H G Wells, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.  BBC’s Children’s Hour also added impetus with stories like Angus MacVicar’s The Lost Planet and went on to discover authors like Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and that people like Eric Frank Russell and Harry Harrison could write science fiction that was funny.

Inevitably, I also read ‘horror’ and ghost stories, from the classic stories of Mary Shelley and M R James through Bram Stoker (who wrote one very good book and several rather silly ones) to the likes of H P Lovecraft.  Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon wrote wonderful fantasy and I later discovered Roger Zelazny.

At the same time as I discovered John Steinbeck and the Saint and Hammond Innes books, I was reading books by Joan Aiken, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner that are probably exempted from the taint of fantasy by being called ‘children’s books’ (now probably ‘young adult books’).  I also devoured those by Jan Mark and Helen Cresswell, both of whom could make me laugh out loud, which once cleared a space for me on a crowded platform on the Victoria line.

Having heard I was supposed to despise Mills & Boon books, I naturally had to read some and I enjoyed them;  they were good stories and were well-written

My failure to understand the boundaries between the various sub-cultures of fiction was supported by what now appears to have been a similar problem facing publishers.  While going through a phase of reading crime stories, the type published by Penguin in green covers, I came across Charles Williams (read Many Dimensions and you’ll understand my doubts about publishers’ classifications).

Williams was one of the Inklings, with CS Lewis who wrote a sci-fi trilogy and the Narnia fantasy series, while JRR Tolkien introduced a whole new depth to fantasy with Lord of the Rings.  Sadly, Tolkien’s work inspired so many similar epics that I forget which one is which.

Nowadays,  some ‘proper’ authors like Kazuo Ishiguro distance themselves from ‘science fiction’ and ‘fantasy’ despite writing books like Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant;  others are less concerned about which shelf they go on and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Nebula Award in 1986 and won the Arthur C Clarke Award in the following year.

My life now restricts my time so much that I tend to fall back on easy bedtime reading and tend to rely on Reacher books and books like Longbourn, which tells the story of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants;  and of course, the incomparable Terry Pratchett, whose books combined humour with fantasy and social comment.

I have always had a feeling the only reason to classify fiction is to decide where they should be filed in libraries and bookshops but my publisher son tells me it helps their ‘Readers’ if they’ve read other books in the same genre.  Last time my books moved house, I decided to organise them into reference books and others, which I sorted by the author’s name.  This was a mistake.  If I’m looking for the book on Richard Feynman, I have to remember it’s written by James Gleick, but if I want the book on chaos theory or the laws of chance, I’m buggered because I can’t remember who wrote them.

However, I’ve now worked my way up to 30-page rule:  if I don’t care what happens next by the time I reach page 30, I give up and go to the next book on the heap by my bed.

Looking back now, I can see my reading habits developed at random, without being limited to particular genres or prejudices.  I used to read non-judgmentally and was neither attracted nor appalled by the racism, misogyny, sexism and jingoism in so many of the books (though I do remember feeling a little uneasy about the cruelty in Billy Bunter books).  They were of their time and I don’t think they embedded any prejudices in my mind but, as Mandy Rice-Davis almost said some years later in a rather different context “Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I?”

Farage v Coutts, climate crisis v money, interpreting holy words and ULEZ

22 July 2023

Hasn’t the Coutts affair been fascinating.

As an old, private bank, it normally keeps a low profile, but hit the news recently when it closed Nigel Farage’s account.  According to reports in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, the internal Coutts report said “The relationship has been below commercial criteria for some time and upon review of Nigel’s past public profile and connections, the perceived risks for the future weighed against the benefit of retention, the decision was taken to exit upon repayment of an existing mortgage.”

However, Farage doesn’t do low profiles so he publicised private documents showing the bank believed his public persona posed a risk to the bank’s reputation. 

Since he outed Coutts, Dame Alison Rose, the head of NatWest (Coutts’ owners), has written to him apologising for what she called “deeply inappropriate comments” in an internal report that described Farage as a “disingenuous grifter” who promotes “xenophobic, chauvinistic and racist views”.  (Farage described the report as a “prejudiced, nasty document” but hasn’t apparently denied these charges.) 

The Financial Conduct Authority contacted the bank about the fuss Farage created and its chair, Ashley Alder, told MPs that, while lenders cannot discriminate against customers on the grounds of gender or race, “For banks as well as other commercial enterprises, it’s fundamentally up to them to choose who they do business with” particularly if they believe a potential customer might pose a risk to their reputation.

It’s not known if Vladimir Putin has an account at Coutts (or NatWest) but it seems doubtful if they’re that picky.

Much to the relief of South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, Putin himself has now said he won’t attend a BRICS summit in South Africa for fear of being arrested for war crimes as he stands by the baggage carousel waiting for his violin case to appear.

Cluster bombs, which are very unpleasant, have been sent by America to Ukraine which has pledged only to use them on large groups of Russian soldiers.  Does their use count as a war crime?  (The UK has confirmed that the destruction of its stock of cluster weapons was completed in December 2013.)

The Nigerian government’s failure to limit religious extremism and, according to Amnesty International, its creation of “a permissive environment for brutality” in poorer communities and Usman Buda was stoned to death on 25 June after he made a casual remark to a beggar that was interpreted by passers-by as being blasphemous under Islamic law. 

An essential part of Islam is to know the Quran and read it regularly but the killers seem unaware of the bit that says “He has sent down upon you, [O Muhammad], the Book in truth, confirming what was before it. And He revealed the Torah and the Gospel before, as guidance for the people. And He revealed the Quran.” (3:3–4).  In other words, Islam accepts the teachings of Judaism and Christianity. 

Judaism forbids revenge, saying that a person who takes revenge against a colleague transgresses a Torah prohibition (Leviticus 19:18 says ” You shall not take vengeance”) while the New Testament says “Avenge not yourselves … Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19).

Talking of which, the results of this week’s by-elections provided an interesting chance to compare how the news was headlined by various papers.

The Daily Telegraph said “the Tories fell to substantial defeats in the Selby and Ainsty and Somerton and Frome polls, [and] their victory in Boris Johnson’s former constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip came after a campaign centred on opposing the expansion of Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emissions zone.”

The Daily Mail said “Tories unexpectedly hold Uxbridge – but Selby is an historic Labour gain and the Lib Dems batter them in Somerton: Rishi Sunak avoids wipe-out as Sadiq Khan’s hated Ulez is blamed for Labour failing in Boris’s old seat.”

The Guardian said “Labour routs Tories in Selby and Ainsty but falls short in Uxbridge … [but as] one glimmer of hope for the Conservatives, they held on to the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat formerly held by Boris Johnson, fending off a predicted Labour win by just 495 votes.”

The Daily Mirror said “Tories suffer brutal by-election losses as Labour and Lib Dems seize historic victories … Rishi Sunak’s Government was branded a ‘circus of chaos’ … the PM came just 495 votes from a triple humiliation in Boris Johnson’s old seat.”

Interestingly, the right-wing papers credit Labour with the Conservative win in Uxbridge, claiming it was London’s Labour mayor’s unpopular proposals for extending the ultra-low emissions zone that let them scrape through in Boris Johnson’s old seat.

Kier Starmer has also urged Sadiq Khan to “reflect” on the zone’s extension, thereby implying he’d rather dump it than risk reducing Labour’s election chances.

Put another way, both major parties seem to believe their chances at the next election are more important than how their children and grandchildren are affected by poisonous emissions from polluting vehicles.

The same lack of concern about the climate crisis was writ large this week by the Swedish firm Vattenfall which has pulled out of the multi-billion pound Norfolk Boreas windfarm.  This would have generated enough power from renewable sources to supply 1.5m British homes but Vattenfall said it would no longer be profitable since the price of global gas (from fossil fuels) had gone up too much.  In other words, they’re more interested in money than in the future of the planet.

Well, I suppose that’s just late-stage capitalism.

A complaint was posted last week on our local Next Door group last week:  “I suspect that everyone had their electricity cut off today? It would be nice if someone in the know could give us a warning as I was right in the middle of something and my Wifi was no longer. (sic) Please can someone do the decent thing in future!” 

Like?  Praying for advance notice of falling trees and squirrels immolating themselves on power cables and equipment failures and fairies at the bottom of the garden perhaps?

Funeral feathers, medals, nuclear war, UK money, Trump admits theft

25 September 2022

The Queen’s funeral on Monday was attended by some 500 heads of state – foreign presidents, kings, queens and prime ministers – whose security was provided by 10,000 police who, as a mark of respect, stopped catching criminals for the day.

I didn’t watch it but my wife did so I saw odd bits as I passed and was riveted by one soldier’s problem with a swan feather dangling from his hat and tickling his face.  Knowing he couldn’t move, he twitched his head very slightly in an attempt to shift it but finally gave up and blew so some feathers wafted gently up into the air before settling down again.

Just as normal people don’t, I found myself thinking that if Putin exploded a nuclear device on the funeral, he’d also destroy the Palace of Westminster, New Scotland Yard and much of Whitehall.  He’d then be able to invade the UK in a rubber dinghy but he’d have to remember to get a London Bridge train because Victoria station would probably have been damaged by the blast.

At the time, I was puzzled to see the youngest royal grandchild, who is 14, wearing two medals.  How can a 14-year old have done anything that earns a medal?  My wife suggested he might have been in the Scouts and got one for rubbing two sticks together;  I thought he might have got the other for swimming a complete length of the school pool. 

After imagining Putin nuking London, I tried to think what it must be like to be a civilian in, say, eastern Ukraine, when it’s suddenly taken over by a foreign power.  One such was a teacher who was told to teach Moscow’s censored curriculum and had to choose whether to go along with it or to leave, abandoning her pupils’ futures to the mercy of the Russian occupiers.  She chose to leave and left carrying a pot plant and a bag of poems after 25 years’ service. 

I wonder what I’d have done.  My life isn’t terribly important to me (though I’d like to do a lot of sorting before I die) but I like to think I’d stick to my principles and explain both sides of the question to the children, even if I then got ‘disappeared’. 

Meanwhile, our new prime minister’s attempting to change everything, only some of which needs changing, but Liz Truss is sticking with her belief in the ‘trickle-down’ theory regardless.

This theory was postulated in the 1980s by one of Ronald Reagan’s advisers, Arthur Laffer, and suggests that reducing taxes on corporations and people who are already rich will encourage more investment and everyone will benefit as the economy grows.  So rich Brits trousering £1m a year will now be an estimated £55,000 a year* better off and will immediately reinvest this in their businesses to create more jobs for poorer people and the economy as a whole will grow and we’ll all benefit and we’ll have fairies at the bottom of our garden.

The theory has since been comprehensively rubbished by various experts, including the International Monetary Fund in a 2015 assessment which concluded that increasing the income of the top 20% results in lower growth and “when the richer get richer, benefits do not trickle down” so countries’ policies “should focus on raising the income of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class”.

Laffer himself has since accepted that it only works when tax rates are high, which he described as over 50%, and that lowering tax rates when they’re already below 50% actually increases budget deficits. 

Even Joe Biden has said he’s “sick and tired” of people who believe that ‘trickle-down’ economics works, which doesn’t bode well for a UK free trade agreement with America (even Liz Truss herself has already admitted this’ll take years to agree). 

What happened to “levelling up” anyway?  It’s obviously oxymoronic and means “evening-out”, which is the only way to balance the distribution of wealth, but this doesn’t have the same vote-catching ring to it.  Besides, it would definitely upset those getting paid most who, quite coincidentally, tend to be those who vote for and give lots of money to the Conservative party because they believe in making the rich richer and only tossing pennies at the poor.  Er …

There’s something unusual about the way Truss moves (and speaks).  A photograph of her shaking hands with Emmanuel Macron caught my eye because she was turned about 45^o away from him.  Normal people face each other when shaking hands. 

But hey, let’s give them a chance:  Truss used to be an accountant and, in the first leadership ballot, 264 of 314 of her own MPs didn’t want her as prime minister.  Her business and energy secretary doesn’t understand geology and her chancellor hasn’t heard of the Micawber Principle.  In her campaign, she promised that fracking would only happen with local approval but it now seems that local decisions will be over-ruled by governmental diktat.  She also promised more financial help for adult social care (we’re waiting with unbated breath). 

Friday saw a not-budget (experts only check the numbers in real budgets) in which Kwasi Kwarteng supported the wealthy by cutting taxes and removing the cap on bankers’ bonuses, and borrowing an extra £400bn at ever-increasing interest rates to fund this rather than imposing a windfall tax on windfall profits.  Even the staunchest Conservatives described it as a high-risk budget and markets reacted by marking sterling down to its lowest level against the US dollar in 37 years so a pound now only costs just over a dollar.  This makes sterling very cheap for money launderers who will rush to secure London’s reputation as the premier European centre for money laundering.

Our wildlife and countryside have also been threatened with new, feebler planning rules and, if there was any mention of more money for education and the NHS, I missed it.

While we’re running out of money, Vladimir Putin is running out of soldiers and thousands of Russians are fleeing the country before their call-up papers arrive.  He’s also threatened a nuclear attack but Truss has already said she’d be prepared to respond in kind so that’s alright.

Donald Trump has tested a new defence against some of the accusations making it increasingly likely he won’t be able to stand for president in 2024.  In an interview with Fox News, he defended the recovery of classified papers from his Florida home by saying “as I understand it, if you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it.”  Explains a lot about him and, in passing, admits he stole classified papers.

The other loonies on the right, the Proud Boys, now have a 23-page manifesto with a section telling people how to carry out violent attacks and then cover their tracks.  I still think their name makes them sound like a fun LGBT+ group, but perhaps that’s their intention (aw, look at the great butch sweeties).

Not to be outdone, the loonies on the left had a hit this week when they claimed that some of the classified papers Trump stole from the White House were buried with his ex-wife on his New Jersey golf course.

Is the world getting weirder or is it just my imagination?

*          The UK’s median income from full-time work is £26,000 pa, less than half the extra people already being given £1,000,000 pa will get.

A fairy story and an invitation

7 November 2021

Fairy story

Once upon a time, the companies who build houses and blocks of flats discovered it was cheaper to use cladding and other materials that they knew were combustible.  This let them make more profit and pay their directors more.  They were also able to pay their owners dividends. 

When the buildings needed more heat insulation, these inflammable cladding panels were used.

One day, the cladding on a big building called Grenfell Tower caught fire and a lot of people were burnt to death.  The landlords, the Royal (!) Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, had already been warned that fire precautions inside the buildings were inadequate but had done nothing except threaten the complainers with legal action.

It’s not our fault, said the companies who’d made and sold the cladding they knew was dangerous.  It’s not our fault, said the companies who’d built the flats and used the cladding they knew was dangerous. It’s not our fault, said the landlords, the Royal (!) Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, who had already been warned that fire precautions inside the buildings were inadequate but had done nothing.

They all said they’d followed the rules.

So everybody was happy except the people who lived in similar properties.  Their friends and relations weren’t too pleased either.  Nor were a lot of other people who wanted similar materials removed from all other buildings;  and force-fed to the manufacturers and developers and landlords.

When they started to count all the other buildings with similar cladding, the companies who had manufactured and installed the faulty materials and managed the properties ran out of fingers and lost count and said it would cost a lot of money to make them all safe. 

So they said it wasn’t their problem.  They thought the government should pay.  

They all had public liability insurance but the insurers said it wasn’t their problem.  They thought the government should pay.

The government didn’t want to pay because their money comes from innocent people known as Taxpayers whose votes keep them in power.  And anyway, the government had already spent its money on new railway lines and border controls and new Brexit bureaucracy so they didn’t have any to spare.

In the end, they all agreed that the people living in the flats should pay for the greed of the companies and councils and their managers who had kept the money that could have protected them.  So they sent these people very large bills.  Some people living in dangerous buildings in Salford were asked to pay £20,000 each. 

Nothing happened for a very long time.  People still had to live in dangerous flats which they couldn’t sell because nobody wanted to buy a flat that might kill them.

While nothing was happening, even more people needed ‘affordable’ housing. 

(‘Affordable’ means smaller properties which are cheaper to buy even though property developers still make the same profit per square foot as they do on larger properties.) 

Then the developers had A Good Idea.  They told the government they couldn’t afford to build as many cheaper properties if they were forced to pay for their mistakes.    The government knew that if they didn’t let developers build more cheaper properties, the families who need them might be unhappy and not vote for them again.

But people got bored and hoped that, if they ignored it, the problems would go away, so nothing happened for another very long time.

Property developers continued to choose materials by price, not safety or suitability, because they thought money was more important than other people’s lives.  The government continued to give ‘help to buy’ money to developers instead of directly to people buying their first house.  At least one developer publicly said that next year would be even more profitable because the government scheme was continuing.

Luckily, a good fairy will appear to give this story will have a happy ending.  All the companies who manufactured and built and owned and managed the properties will have to pay to make buildings safe.  And they will have to return the money intended to help buyers to the government.

This may bankrupt some of them but this only matters to poor people who will lose their jobs who will be given token benefits and payments by the government.  As long as they’re not foreigners or immigrants or refugees.

All the very rich people in all the companies will be made to sell everything they own privately to pay for the repairs.  Then they will spend a long time in prison for corporate manslaughter and the rest of us will live happily ever after.

Epilogue

Unfortunately, this is a fairy story and there will be no happy ending because there are probably no fairies.  However, in grossly over-simplified form, it illustrates the vast chasm between people on the political ‘right’ who support companies and those on the political ‘left’ who support people.

Because the companies involved are ‘limited liability’ companies, they can go bust with impunity:  shareholders lose the money they spent on their shares but keep the dividends the company’s given them since they bought the shares, and the directors and managers keep the salaries and bonuses they paid themselves.  (The people who actually did the work also get to keep what they were paid but this is a tiny proportion of the total payments and wouldn’t make any difference.)

Perhaps the law on ‘limited liability’ needs to be changed in such cases so that directors and managers should have to repay all the money they took from the company that exceeded a fixed minimum, selling houses and yachts and other stuff they’d bought, to make up any shortfall;  and shareholders (some of whom are often the same people) should refund all the dividends they’d been given by the company.  Then the company could pay the people who’d actually provided the money given to the directors and shareholders, the suppliers, tax authorities and all the others who lost money in the bankruptcy they’d caused.

Even so, the people who died will still be dead.

Disclaimer

This is obviously a grossly over-simplified summary of a very complex world involving laws and regulations that were introduced centuries ago but, by reducing it to the absurd, the basic inequities become clear.  I know many people will disagree violently but all I’m trying to do is highlight the fact that, in business, equity and humanity are only relevant if they increase customers’ goodwill and the business’s profits.

I’d just like people to think about whether there can ever be any connection between being honourable and believing pounds, shillings and pence are the only measure of success.

(Complaints and corrections to me please and, if they’re interesting enough, I’ll include them in a future Muttering).