When the Ku Klux Klan came for Fred Goodwin. Or not.
I MUST admit that I did not immediately grasp the obvious parallels between the decision to strip a banker of his knighthood and the brutal murder of hundreds of American blacks at the hands of a mass white supremacist paramilitary organisation. So I am thankful to Lord Digby Jones, a man who served as trade [...]
Capping bankers’ bonuses: is that a promise, Ed?
GETTING one banker voluntarily to forego one bonus, one time, is the easy bit. But taking on the entrenched enrichissez vous ethos that pervades the financial sector will not be achieved by moral suasion alone. Don’t get me wrong, Ed Miliband has handled the Simon Hester affair in a manner that compensates – well, ever [...]
Rich Ricci: the class politics of £44m bonuses
AMONG the value propositions for the Grand National next month is Willie Mullins-trained The Midnight Club, who has demonstrated impressive stamina in a couple of outings in Ireland earlier this season. At 14-1 last time I looked, it could be worth having a few bob on him. Yet even though the winner of Britain’s most [...]
Duke of York: time to get a job, mate
HIGHLY attractive woman though Angelina Jolie indisputably is, I do sometimes wonder what it is about thespianism that makes her especially suitable for her role as goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Nor am I clear why Geri Halliwell was chosen to undertake a similar job for the UN Population Fund, although [...]
Business with dictatorships: Mandelson’s inconsistency
PETER Mandelson doesn’t do contrition. Whatever the extent of his ties with Libya – and he denies Tory claims that he has commercial interests in the country – he has come out strongly in defence of British companies that did business with the Gaddafi regime. ‘Sense and judgment have flown out the window as normally [...]
Private Finance Initiative: an idiot’s guide
IMAGINE a mortgage that you pay off over many decades, and then hand the house back to the building society at the end of it. That, more or less, is how the Private Finance Initiative works. PFI always was a rip-off for the taxpayer. But just how egregious a scam the whole crooked set up [...]
A Modest Proposal for preventing the bankers in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick
IT IS a melancholy object to those, who walk through Dublin, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabbin-doors crowded with hedge fund managers, followed by three, four, or six forex dealers, all in rags, and importuning every passing European Union bureaucrat and International Monetary Fund official for an [...]
BSkyB: whoever you vote for, Rupert Murdoch gets in
THERE is no qualitative difference between having a dominant interest in BSkyB and securing outright ownership of the satellite broadcaster. Either way, Rupert Murdoch gets to call the shots. Even so, Vince Cable is surely right to insist that News Corp’s £8.2bn offer for the BSkyB shares it does not already own be given a [...]
All in it together? Not FTSE 100 bosses
CILLIT Bang is the best bath cleaner there is, and Vanish stain remover has saved more than one of my shirts over the years. But these wonderful products would not sell in any lesser quantity if Bart Becht, chief executive of manufacturer Reckitt Benckiser, was not on 102 times Wayne Rooney’s wedge. Indeed, there is [...]
The class politics of Lord Wolfson and his pals
GENUFLECTION to the opinions of those we have come to call ‘business leaders’ has formed an unquestionable norm of economic orthodoxy under every British government since 1979. Trade unions are repeatedly castigated as vested interests. By contrast, the agenda of the wealth creators is routinely presented as ideologically neutral. OK, these guys dodge a bit [...]
