Another fine mess
Life is unfair. You get born – wake up – and find that either you’re the third son of a Duke of the realm and discover that everything is presented to you on a plate and you’re never going to have earn a living … or you’re the fourth son of a couple living on state benefits in a sink estate somewhere in the north-east of England and everyone you know is struggling to survive, has no prospects at all and in the meantime, like you, is consigned to eating fast food and junk and standing around on street corners.
Well, hello and welcome to the real world.
It might a lot fairer if by law we all began with nothing at all and – depending upon whatever IQ you’ve been granted by genetics and your personal drive and ambition, your capacity for hard work, the opportunities that come your way and whether or not you take them – we each go as far as our abilities and the vagaries of random chance can take us.
That could be a long way towards great wealth, public acclaim, sporting success and all the lifestyle accessories that can come with them – or just … er … not very far at all.
Sometimes we get stark reminders of the extraordinary extremes that can happen to anyone – and here I’m not just referring to winning the Lottery [chances somewhere around 14 million to 1 the last time I looked it up].
I often hear of people I know who know other people whose businesses were going bust, or were barely ticking over, until suddenly, somehow, they hit the jackpot of life and are now owners of £10 million houses in salubrious parts of central London, plus £5 million villas in Spain and go on five or six tear-inducingly-expensive skiing, scuba diving and sea cruise holidays per year and who are clearly living high on the hog without a care in the world. And that’s after they’ve paid all the taxes they’re legally bound to pay (and let’s leave out of this the stash or stashes they’ve gotten squirreled away in the Cayman or British Virgin Islands).
You always hear about them, of course. And don’t hear so much about those who either began with silver spoons in their mouths and subsequently fell upon hard times, or who started businesses that – through hard work and enterprise – they gradually turned into conglomerates worth hundreds of millions of pounds … only which later (not necessarily through any fault of their own) suddenly went bust and left them penniless or even hundreds of millions of pounds in debt.
(And there’s a lot of them – many times more than those who ended up as rich as Croesus – I’ll bet).
What strikes me every time some global economic crisis or huge business scandal comes along is how little different are the lives and activities of bankers, insurers, corporate businessmen (and women) and self-made entrepreneurs from those of (money-connected crimes only) career criminals.
To exaggerate to make my point, take a fictitious Eton-and-Cambridge educated merchant banker on the one hand and a scion of a well-known criminal family from Essex on the other.
The one might have made zillions by cutting corners, insider trading, evading taxes, technically breaking the law and/or ‘sailing close to the wind’ in such matters every day, networking, routinely fraudulently representing ‘not very much’ as something really rather special and potentially valuable and selling it for a hell of a lot to some unsuspecting sap without regards to the consequences when the truth is revealed, and generally (above all) looking after Number One in all he does without any regard for either the health of the nation and/or indeed the tens of millions of ordinary citizens of its population who – to use our esteemed Prime Minister’s famous phrase – are ‘just about managing’.
So might the other.
Over the past week, no doubt like many Rust readers, I’ve been stunned and dismayed by the collapse of Carillion – not just the size of the company, but the scale of the disaster and the speculation as to where exactly the story might go from here.
In addition I’ve been puzzled not to mention horrified in learning how it got to where it is but also just wondering what on earth those at the helm of Carillion and/or involved in its conduct at any purposeful level of control and review thought they were doing as it did so.
Never mind the fat cat senior executives – and here, politically the Tory Party must be cringing in its bed at the thought of the hundreds of thousands of votes per week that this example of UK capitalism at its most unappealingly naked must be sending the way of the Labour Party in good time for the next General Election – I’m talking about such sycophantic hangers-on as the minister and senior civil servants in charge of the Trade & Industry Department [or whatever it’s called these days], the Carillion board’s non-executive directors, its compliance officers, its corporate lawyers and (last but not least) its auditors.
What the hell were they all doing – well, apart from turning up to the occasional board meeting, pocketing their stipends and no doubt astronomical annual audit fees, going on freebie jaunts at the expenses of Carillion involving VIP seats at Wembley Stadium, Wimbledon, Twickenham Stadium and the Royal Opera House, plus lavish banquet-style lunches and/or dinners and all sorts of other sundry items that ordinarily would sit comfortably under the general heading “snouts in the trough”?
I’m not suggesting any of them were actively and knowingly negligent, or deliberately took their eye off the ball, or colluded in anything untoward – I’m just suggesting that, in the heady world of giant companies and corporate finance, there’s an instinctive tendency to assume that all is well and will continue thus ad infinitum.
After all, if the executive directors are giving you the impression that the ship of state is cruising smoothly towards greater and greater prosperity for all concerned (not least themselves and you) then who are you to begin searching for trouble and/or asking difficult questions as you move sedately along the corridor from the board room on the fifth floor to the company’s HQ executive dining suite for yet another four-course lunch complete with wines starting at £250 per bottle for which somebody else is paying?
Last night, just before 7.00pm on BBC1, I watched another ‘bleeding heart’ style Labour Party Political Broadcast in which – against a background of emotional and mournful music – a series of videos sequences of the old, sick and dying in various hospitals were interspersed with weeping former NHS nurses explaining why – some after decades of service – they had felt no option but to resign from the NHS because the Tory Government were deliberately letting it run to rack and ruin.
See here – and I’m afraid you will have to skim down to the bottom of the article to ‘press to start’ playing the video – POLITICS HOME WEBSITE
And while you’re at it, have a look at this article by Rajeev Syal upon the findings of the latest National Audit Office report on PFI, as appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
There’s two sides to every story, of course (or so they say) – but if the Tory Party has metaphorically had a penalty awarded against it recently, at the moment it’s doing a very good impression of failing to even let its goalkeeper (whoever that is!) take up his position in front of goal.
Sooner or later, even some of Jeremy Corbyn’s cack-handed penalty attempts are going to end up in the back of the net.
Come to think of it, I might take one myself.
