What is it that allows the well-heeled to get away with it so often?
If you or I transcend the traffic code, the tax regulations, or even speak sharply to a Border Agency officer, we will be in trouble faster than you can say "Theresa May". If some overpaid director plunges a million customers into financial mire, do we hear the gaolers keys start to rattle? Do we blazes.
The Companies Act of 2006 made it a duty for all directors of quoted companies to pay heed to the interests of stakeholders such as staff, customers (you and me), suppliers, the community and the environment as well as shareholders. Is the imposition of zero-hours contracting in the interests of staff? Is gambling with deposits in order to swell bonuses in depositors' interests? Is growing the dividend in the interest of communities dependent on energy supplies? Think back over the 5 years since the financial crash and count if you can how many directors of banks, of energy companies, of any FTSE company have had their collars felt for anything, let alone concerning these wider accountabilities. The laws which most people obey exist so that nobody is above them so why is the answer to my question what it is [probably zero]?
Boards have been pathetic but so have Regulators. Look at the Coop/Flowers fiasco - an insider gets the nod from cronies without scrutiny. An employer is obliged these days to give honest references in respect of past employees. Were Fowler's references sought? Were they taken up? Were they honest as to his behaviour? Here too is one rule for the haves and another for the have lesses: the poor benighted job seeker, having their cv pulled to bits and losing out because they may have some minor misdemeanour on their record from their teens; versus a major directorship with fiduciary responsibilities (let alone customers' money) being nodded through to someone wholly unqualified and unfit.
There is no need to legislate and hold enquiries. All that is needed is for directors to do what they are amply paid to do; for regulators to regulate; and for the laws to be applied as much to the powerful as they do to the rest of us - and a Government with backbone and teeth to ensure that all this is done. If a few directors ended up like Enron's, it might "encourager les autres".
Monday 25 November 2013
Monday 18 November 2013
Selling off the nation's assets affects local communities too
There is a "proposal" subject to "consultation" to close a local Post Office, replacing it with some sort of unspecified lesser service at the local W.H. Smith. This may not sound like the end of the world: a sensible reduction in cost of accommodation at least. This is how most outsourcing initiatives are presented: as sensible business options, because to those behind them, business is God and their only yardstick for success is money. So Probation, Royal Mail, NHS services and so much more are redefined as inefficient businesses so that new "owners" can be brought in to run them, with improvement in financial results the goal.
We hear much from workforce, Unions, Opposition and the public objecting to these sell-offs of services which have been in public sector hands for decades; so much so that perhaps the partisan arguments have become almost too well-known to retain their real import. Return if you will to Uckfield High Street and the Crown Post Office. Here work several experienced and skilled people, part of the community, known to and liked by their customers, providing the full service of the Post Office. If the building is closed and the "service" is contracted (note the double entendre) to WHS, what will be the consequences? First, staff will lose jobs with all that can mean to them, their families and the community. Second, the services will be curtailed, as the new "service" will be delivered by less expert and worse remunerated staff and exclude some elements for which WHS is not licensed, such as passport and driving licence applications, meaning that customers will have to go to a main Post Office in another town completely, involving cost and inconvenience. Third, the trust and relationships between customers and staff will be lost as the agenda of the new owner will clearly be different from that of a public service. And I am sure there will be more such deficits of a human kind, all in the name of money.
Money seems to be the only criterion for decision-making understood by this inhuman Coalition, whereas Labour has among its values mutuality, altruism and community. There is nothing wrong with defining performance using wider parameters than just cost and returns. Social cohesion; the needs of people of all means; doing things which may not be efficient; what is wrong with these?
Accepting the closure of Uckfield Crown Post Office is not the small thing it may at first sight appear, for it typifies how the country has been forced to accept the wholesale decimation of public assets and services in the names of money and the ideology of smaller government. I have become ashamed of my initial response to the threat of this closure - that it was not all that important - because it is a local illustration of what is happening all over the country and because I can see the real impact it will have on people in my community. It typifies too how rural needs are disproportionately subject to the models assumed to be effective in urban environments. Shame on those behind it.
We hear much from workforce, Unions, Opposition and the public objecting to these sell-offs of services which have been in public sector hands for decades; so much so that perhaps the partisan arguments have become almost too well-known to retain their real import. Return if you will to Uckfield High Street and the Crown Post Office. Here work several experienced and skilled people, part of the community, known to and liked by their customers, providing the full service of the Post Office. If the building is closed and the "service" is contracted (note the double entendre) to WHS, what will be the consequences? First, staff will lose jobs with all that can mean to them, their families and the community. Second, the services will be curtailed, as the new "service" will be delivered by less expert and worse remunerated staff and exclude some elements for which WHS is not licensed, such as passport and driving licence applications, meaning that customers will have to go to a main Post Office in another town completely, involving cost and inconvenience. Third, the trust and relationships between customers and staff will be lost as the agenda of the new owner will clearly be different from that of a public service. And I am sure there will be more such deficits of a human kind, all in the name of money.
Money seems to be the only criterion for decision-making understood by this inhuman Coalition, whereas Labour has among its values mutuality, altruism and community. There is nothing wrong with defining performance using wider parameters than just cost and returns. Social cohesion; the needs of people of all means; doing things which may not be efficient; what is wrong with these?
Accepting the closure of Uckfield Crown Post Office is not the small thing it may at first sight appear, for it typifies how the country has been forced to accept the wholesale decimation of public assets and services in the names of money and the ideology of smaller government. I have become ashamed of my initial response to the threat of this closure - that it was not all that important - because it is a local illustration of what is happening all over the country and because I can see the real impact it will have on people in my community. It typifies too how rural needs are disproportionately subject to the models assumed to be effective in urban environments. Shame on those behind it.
Monday 11 November 2013
Markets vs Planning
Free market capitalism works in silos. Someone sees an opportunity in a particular sector; identifies resources to apply profitably and tries to grow a business in that sector. The enterprise relies on the pre-existence of infrastructure, skills and media which enable their success. The business thrives or fails. The infrastructure remains. Simple.
But the world is more complex than this. Those pre-existing conditions on which the entrepreneur relies; and those resources which may be brought to bear for the enterprise do not just happen. The free market did not create them.
The Industrial Revolution brought people together into conurbations which became the markets of the last 2 centuries. The movers and shakers of those communities invested heavily in roads, rail, schools and communications infrastructures to serve their cities. Those great Town Halls of Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and many other cities are metaphors for that community investment. Trade demanded that these be linked too, so energy, railways, canals and roads were a part of their plans for prosperity. For 200 years or so, these investments, updated and complemented by the welfare state, formed the basis for enterprise to flourish, especially around making things, using the combination of new technologies and mass labour.
But the post-Thatcher, post-manufacturing era saw not only the demise of the great employing businesses but a doctrinaire departure from the idea of planning which had created the means on which enterprises were built. Thousands of businesses failed and their skilled workers were cast aside as industrial waste. Without planning in place to re-use them, whole communities have never been able to recover fully. Yes, today there are more people in work than there were then; but this work is different, as desperate people have been forced to apply themselves to work which may be less skilled and less financially rewarding. The important sectors of the future may be different and not need to be in the conurbations with their ready infrastructure, Care for the growing seniors population; ICT and web-based supply; leisure and retailing are the 21st century equivalents of ship-building, textiles and widgets; and have different needs and locations.
We argue that instead of looking at enterprise as the starting point for recovery, planning is required which prepares the way. Local authorities need to understand how their local economy can thrive in future: what resources they uniquely have or can develop; what skills are inherent in their workforce; what opportunities may exist, This local plan (and local can mean regional) can then lead to a clearer understanding of what skills may be needed and where in order to make for a thriving economy. The mapping of people to training to jobs to housing and transport can then drive that investment that no entrepreneur will make, no matter how clever they may be, for it is beyond their silo. Instead of planning being seen as a dirty word, representing the dead hand of bureaucracy, as portrayed by the Right, let it be embraced as the facilitator of work, community and prosperity, so that the right infrastructure is in the right places for the people of the country; and for the future's entrepreneurs to make us of.
But the world is more complex than this. Those pre-existing conditions on which the entrepreneur relies; and those resources which may be brought to bear for the enterprise do not just happen. The free market did not create them.
The Industrial Revolution brought people together into conurbations which became the markets of the last 2 centuries. The movers and shakers of those communities invested heavily in roads, rail, schools and communications infrastructures to serve their cities. Those great Town Halls of Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and many other cities are metaphors for that community investment. Trade demanded that these be linked too, so energy, railways, canals and roads were a part of their plans for prosperity. For 200 years or so, these investments, updated and complemented by the welfare state, formed the basis for enterprise to flourish, especially around making things, using the combination of new technologies and mass labour.
But the post-Thatcher, post-manufacturing era saw not only the demise of the great employing businesses but a doctrinaire departure from the idea of planning which had created the means on which enterprises were built. Thousands of businesses failed and their skilled workers were cast aside as industrial waste. Without planning in place to re-use them, whole communities have never been able to recover fully. Yes, today there are more people in work than there were then; but this work is different, as desperate people have been forced to apply themselves to work which may be less skilled and less financially rewarding. The important sectors of the future may be different and not need to be in the conurbations with their ready infrastructure, Care for the growing seniors population; ICT and web-based supply; leisure and retailing are the 21st century equivalents of ship-building, textiles and widgets; and have different needs and locations.
We argue that instead of looking at enterprise as the starting point for recovery, planning is required which prepares the way. Local authorities need to understand how their local economy can thrive in future: what resources they uniquely have or can develop; what skills are inherent in their workforce; what opportunities may exist, This local plan (and local can mean regional) can then lead to a clearer understanding of what skills may be needed and where in order to make for a thriving economy. The mapping of people to training to jobs to housing and transport can then drive that investment that no entrepreneur will make, no matter how clever they may be, for it is beyond their silo. Instead of planning being seen as a dirty word, representing the dead hand of bureaucracy, as portrayed by the Right, let it be embraced as the facilitator of work, community and prosperity, so that the right infrastructure is in the right places for the people of the country; and for the future's entrepreneurs to make us of.
Monday 4 November 2013
First Class Conference
"Class" is a think-tank for the Left to bring ideas which can form a manifesto for a future Labour Government. It is the first think-tank backed by the Union movement but is open to all left-minded contributors, such as UckfieldLabour. Its first conference was marked by the openness of Union leaders to academic input as well as party, journalistic and activist. Some strands of the content were:
Union strength is less than it used to be but it remains a powerful asset in countering the power wielded so unfairly by the financial elite. The latter may own the assets of the country but it does not own nor serve the people. This ownership has to be challenged, through repatriation of land and social ownership of the strategic utilities: energy; transport; water, healthcare. This will stop the propping up of inefficient private sector corporates which milk the dividends from windfall assets. It will reverse the erosion of services which the State should provide but which cannot be provided once capacity declines below a critical point, as outsourcing cherry picks the most profitable services.
This can be achieved and the neoliberal hegemony challenged. To do so, economics needs redefinition, to include the wellbeing of society and the environment, ie the collective good. We live in a community, where the strong protect the weak and not a market of self-serving individualists. To do so efficiency needs redescription, to show how individual services interact with each other to form an effective organism to achieve a strong society. It has to be shown how the closure of one plant in the name of efficiency may cause inefficiency on a far wider scale by its impact on other functions.This renewed understanding has to be broadcast throughout society to equip people to challenge the "GDP" mentality and enable argument on our own terms. This will attract brickbats and derision from the bullying Right but this has to be borne because it is right.
How can the collective strength of Unions be brought to bear for sectors which lack Union representation? Unions need to do more to win members and recognition in call centres, food production, the care sector etc but this will not be effective quickly. A new Ministry of Labour with responsibility for the welfare of working people should be established, mandating Joint Industrial Councils to set and maintain fair terms for each sector, with representation of employers and workers in national rather than enterprise-based collective bargaining, as laid down by human rights law.
Lastly, democracy must be reinvigorated. The Coalition has ridden roughshod over its mandate in its selling off of NHS assets, dismissal of decades of understanding of teaching and privatisation of efficient national services such as Royal Mail and East Coast Rail. No wonder voters stay away when their will is totally ignored. A renewed respect for the voice of stakeholders is needed in work, education and local communities to restore the motivation to vote and ensure that decision-making takes account of all interests, not merely that of the fastest buck.
Union strength is less than it used to be but it remains a powerful asset in countering the power wielded so unfairly by the financial elite. The latter may own the assets of the country but it does not own nor serve the people. This ownership has to be challenged, through repatriation of land and social ownership of the strategic utilities: energy; transport; water, healthcare. This will stop the propping up of inefficient private sector corporates which milk the dividends from windfall assets. It will reverse the erosion of services which the State should provide but which cannot be provided once capacity declines below a critical point, as outsourcing cherry picks the most profitable services.
This can be achieved and the neoliberal hegemony challenged. To do so, economics needs redefinition, to include the wellbeing of society and the environment, ie the collective good. We live in a community, where the strong protect the weak and not a market of self-serving individualists. To do so efficiency needs redescription, to show how individual services interact with each other to form an effective organism to achieve a strong society. It has to be shown how the closure of one plant in the name of efficiency may cause inefficiency on a far wider scale by its impact on other functions.This renewed understanding has to be broadcast throughout society to equip people to challenge the "GDP" mentality and enable argument on our own terms. This will attract brickbats and derision from the bullying Right but this has to be borne because it is right.
How can the collective strength of Unions be brought to bear for sectors which lack Union representation? Unions need to do more to win members and recognition in call centres, food production, the care sector etc but this will not be effective quickly. A new Ministry of Labour with responsibility for the welfare of working people should be established, mandating Joint Industrial Councils to set and maintain fair terms for each sector, with representation of employers and workers in national rather than enterprise-based collective bargaining, as laid down by human rights law.
Lastly, democracy must be reinvigorated. The Coalition has ridden roughshod over its mandate in its selling off of NHS assets, dismissal of decades of understanding of teaching and privatisation of efficient national services such as Royal Mail and East Coast Rail. No wonder voters stay away when their will is totally ignored. A renewed respect for the voice of stakeholders is needed in work, education and local communities to restore the motivation to vote and ensure that decision-making takes account of all interests, not merely that of the fastest buck.
Sunday 3 November 2013
The means of production
Funny how some words can be red rags to bulls. The phrase "the means of production" sometimes prefaced by "Common or "State or "Collective ownership" - can conjour red mist before the eyes of capitalists of any political party. But this stems more from fear of loss of earnings potential for them and their mates than from concern that it may not work. Capitalists know full well that ownership of land, of minerals, of fixed assets is the high ground of their battlefield.
It is time now surely, with the manifestly ideological decision of the Coalition to privatise thoroughly effective public enterprises like Royal Mail and East Coast rail, to revisit the notion of at least State ownership of strategically vital assets. The privatisation of rail was a clear cock-up from the outset, which has delivered nothing for its public stakeholders and everything for its shareholders. Water likewise; energy likewise. Is the private sector so brilliant that its performance shines like a beacon beckoning more assets? Surely not, when the bailing out of banks, the exemplars of private enterprise, via a begging bowl to the State is concerned.
Why wait for the inevitable demand for bail-out when disaster strikes in private hands? Why not put those vital assets which constitute the defence of the realm against cold, illness, starvation and worklessness into the hands of those who most concern themselves with these issues, the people of the country, the people who work in or are served by these industries and their representatives? This has nothing to do with dogma and everything to do with strategic sense.
Politicians seem to have little appreciation of history other than to parrot the failures of the past as reasons not to do things. Better by far to learn from why things failed in the past to get them right in future, if the prize is the right one. Making the management of public enterprises professional but accountable would be a step forward, for example.
Making UK safe from speculator/investors' misuse of the means of production and sure of fairly priced continuity of supply of essential utilities would be the greatest legacy a future government could offer in its manifesto.
It is time now surely, with the manifestly ideological decision of the Coalition to privatise thoroughly effective public enterprises like Royal Mail and East Coast rail, to revisit the notion of at least State ownership of strategically vital assets. The privatisation of rail was a clear cock-up from the outset, which has delivered nothing for its public stakeholders and everything for its shareholders. Water likewise; energy likewise. Is the private sector so brilliant that its performance shines like a beacon beckoning more assets? Surely not, when the bailing out of banks, the exemplars of private enterprise, via a begging bowl to the State is concerned.
Why wait for the inevitable demand for bail-out when disaster strikes in private hands? Why not put those vital assets which constitute the defence of the realm against cold, illness, starvation and worklessness into the hands of those who most concern themselves with these issues, the people of the country, the people who work in or are served by these industries and their representatives? This has nothing to do with dogma and everything to do with strategic sense.
Politicians seem to have little appreciation of history other than to parrot the failures of the past as reasons not to do things. Better by far to learn from why things failed in the past to get them right in future, if the prize is the right one. Making the management of public enterprises professional but accountable would be a step forward, for example.
Making UK safe from speculator/investors' misuse of the means of production and sure of fairly priced continuity of supply of essential utilities would be the greatest legacy a future government could offer in its manifesto.
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