THIS is not a good time to be one of the little people.
Look, I don’t doubt that ordinary folk in Roman, Medieval and Victorian times had it bad. But over the last few days the barrage of stories highlighting just how badly decent, working people (and I include myself in that) are being done over by those at the top has been particularly notable, ghastly and anger-inducing.
The ongoing scandal following the collapse of construction and outsourcing giant Carillion is only one of many outrages. The company’s pensions black hole could amount to £900m, and although the Prime Minister Theresa May has made noises about making Carillion’s shareholders pay, and helping the worse affected, you just know those at the bottom who will be hit hardest.
It is currently unclear whether the firm’s failed interim chief executive Keith Cochrane will still be getting his £750k a year salary until the middle of the year, as promised. His predecessor Richard Howson walked away from the company in 2016 with a pay packet totalling £1.6m. Cochrane, we learned yesterday, was also receiving £300 per meeting from taxpayers for “advising” David Mundell’s Scottish Office on matters such as Brexit. Can’t imagine many Carillion workers and contractors seeing the funny side of that one.
Iain Macwhirter: Carillion and the RBS 'hang themselves' memo proves it's all over for neoliberalism
Elsewhere, the latest in the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) saga revealed that even after the £45 billion taxpayer bailout in 2008-09, the bank was sending internal memos urging staff to employ tactics to “let customers hang themselves”, alongside tips on how to achieve bigger bonuses through squeezing more out of the struggling small businesses, a subset they referred to as “basket cases” that were “time consuming but remunerative”.
What really sickened me about the papers shown to MPs last week wasn’t the strategies they contained – nothing should surprise us about the depths to which RBS would sank. No, it was the reaction of current Chief Executive Ross McEwan, who displayed the sort of calm, patronising, disdainful “the person who wrote this doesn’t work for us any more” and “this doesn’t reflect our policy” approach we so often see from fatcats appearing in public.
Mr McEwan, who receives more than £3m a year in salary and bonuses for managing the decline of a firm that has a damn cheek to call any other business a basket case, clearly couldn’t find it in himself to be even the least bit apologetic, remorseful or respectful to the taxpayers who keep him wealthy while the rest of us struggle along under a cloud of static wages, soaring housing costs and the loss of conditions such as reasonable pensions and secure contracts that used to make it all just about manageable.
Lest we forget that no one from RBS has ever been prosecuted for the mismanagement that led to the catastrophic collapse we are all still paying for, or is likely to be.
Meanwhile, the financial losses still being endured by low-paid former BHS and female Glasgow City Council workers long since swept away the condescending notion that we are all in it together. If you thought about it all for too long it might send you over the edge.
Iain Macwhirter: Carillion and the RBS 'hang themselves' memo proves it's all over for neoliberalism
Indeed, I imagine many of those on the receiving end of the outrages above have also been affected by the mental health issues that so often emanate from financial strain, as well as the relationship and family breakdowns, the lost homes and broken communities.
Another consequence is the sort of disengagement and division that leads people to back populist political solutions; I don’t doubt that many of those who voted for Brexit did so out of outrage and despair at exactly the sort of contemptuous treatment of workers we have witnessed repeatedly over the last 10 years.
It’s all very well for Mrs May to talk now of fining bosses who line their own pockets at the expense of their employees’ pension schemes, but this is surely a case of closing the stable door after the horse has not only bolted, but taken all the money and spent it on a super yacht.
The Tories have had almost eight years to tackle executive excess and arrogance. But is perhaps no surprise that the party so closely associated with big business has continued to peddle a softly, softly line even as taxpayers bail out the worse offenders, and their bosses get off largely Scot-free.
If she is serious about punishing the sort of greed that sacrifices the pensions of workers for the sake of short-term bonuses, dividends and windfalls, then Mrs May must start sending these villains to prison as well as taking their money. In short, she must them suffer. Could a punitive tax on the short-term bonus culture also be in order, with proceeds going into a pension fund?
Iain Macwhirter: Carillion and the RBS 'hang themselves' memo proves it's all over for neoliberalism
Sadly, I don’t think for a minute Mrs May has either the inclination or the backbone to stand up for the little people; indeed the Government she leads continues to show nothing but contempt for the struggles of the “just about managing” she vowed to help on becoming party leader.
Meanwhile, the real basket cases at the top continue to laugh all the way to bank.
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