... I'd deserve to be shot.
May be it's because in my own work I get bullied by big-business retailers, but I find it particularly fucking outrageous that fat-cat cunt Sir Philip Green of the Arcadia Group is appointed as a 'procurement czar' and now gets to lectures us on the inefficiencies of public spending.
Ever since a certain shop-keeper's daughter started telling us that society should be run on the model of a business, a consensus has insidiously developed that this is nothing less than 'commonsense'. And it's kind of understandable that simple maxims like 'not spending what you haven't got' have an appeal to ordinary people who can relate this only too well to their own lives.
But the trouble is that the examples that Thatcher - and her successors through Blair to Cameron - were referring to are not those of some quaint and hokey 'mom and pop' small business. The kind of businessmen they are so fond of - like Sir Philip - have money-making strategies that are just not open to the small businesses they would have us believe are the paragons of all civic virtues.
Strategies like creating a labyrinthine chain of ownership through off-shore holding companies that leads back to a wife who is a resident of Monaco. So she is free of paying UK tax on the £1.2billion profits she gets out of the businesses, whilst he gets to say smugly - and entirely legally - that he is a UK tax payer.
Or strategies like extending this off-shoring to the manufacturing for his clothing empire - by sweat-shop labour: In Asia workers for his suppliers can expect 40p an hour for a 70hour week - but only after they have paid a recruitment company up to the equivalent of a year's salary for the job in the first place.
It shows a kind of moral bankruptcy that shouldn't even be tolerated amongst business people - let alone co-opted into the government.
No comments:
Post a Comment