Tuesday 16th January
George Orwell warned us in Animal Farm “Four legs good – two legs bad”. And so, we then had the Thatcher Revolution where suddenly the slogan, the rhetoric, the entire Government Philosophy was “Private Good, Public Bad”. Tony Blair, under the guise of Pragmatism, continued along the same lines. Cosying up to Big Business and just like in Animal Farm, looking around the room you couldn’t distinguish Pig from Man.
The trouble with Private Companies – at least the vast ones like Stagecoach and Carillion and Group4 is that they simply have to have exponential growth, year on year, in order to maintain not only their share price but the exorbitant salaries of their Executives and Directors. And Government has colluded, practically falling over itself to grant contracts worth billions to Private Companies. And here is the nasty bit – those same companies invariably donate large sums to the very same Political parties making the decisions of what and to whom to award these very contracts. Now it may be too big a leap to actually accuse those in power of corruption – but there is no denying how cosy it all is.
And then – what happens when a huge company like Carillion goes bust? There is only one solution. One way or another the Government has to step in and either bail out, or at the very least keep things going until either a restructuring or another huge concern can take over. A strange co-incidence is that the Chairman of Carillion is called Phillip Green (no relation to the infamous BHS boss) – and of course the Prime Minister’s husband is a director of Group4, which also has its trotters deep in the mud of Government contracts. Invariably whoever takes over will have the same Directors and shareholders, and the same raiding of Pension funds…
The current crisis is only just emerging, and it may have a few twists and turns before it is all resolved. But undoubtedly it will not shake the faith, the absurd doctrinal belief that our current Politicians have in ‘Private good – Public bad.’