Right and Fair

The attempted coup has taken Labour from three points ahead to 16 points behind.

Angela Eagle did not have a brick through her window, did not receive homophobic abuse at a meeting that she did not attend, and was not advised by the Police to desist from holding constituency surgeries.

Likewise, Mr Speaker Bercow has today told someone called Seema Malhotra that, "Having taken advice, I am satisfied that there is nothing in your letter, or in the information subsequently elicited by the deputy Serjeant at Arms, which would justify regarding these events as a possible breach."

As John McDonnell puts it, "It's only right and fair that Seema now apologise for the stress that she has caused to my staff over the last few days. As I said on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, the Labour Party needs to unite, and actions like this, which are only being used to try to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, must stop."

The Eagle-Malhotra Tendency's last hope is that a High Court judge will rule on Thursday that only candidates funded by megabucks personal friends of Benjamin Netanyahu were permitted to contest the Leadership of the Labour Party.

Frankly Labour

A lot of people, over many years, have doubted whether Frank Field was quite Labour at all.

They need to take a look at his battle with Philip Green.

Now, try and imagine that battle's being waged by Owen Smith.

Field was one of 10 overtly pro-Brexit Labour MPs, one of whom is now a member of the Shadow Cabinet, while another chairs the Parliamentary Labour Party.

When Jeremy Corbyn has won again, then all 10 need to be appointed to an advisory body.

Not so much dealing with the EU itself; this side of Article 50, on what would there be anything to advise?

But dealing with the fact that, "The referendum result sent a clear message from parts of Britain that have been left behind by globalisation."

Again, try and imagine such a body's being created, or that statement's being made, by Owen Smith.

In Spirit and Actively Supporting

Here: 

Dear Jeremy,

We are writing this letter in support of your campaign to remain Leader of the Labour Party and a future Prime Minister of this Country.

You have supported deaf and disabled people’s causes for many, many years. You have spoken in Parliament.

You have voted against vicious welfare reforms that have blighted our lives, often having to rebel against the Whip to do so.

You have campaigned with us during court vigils, at street protests and you spoke at the ‘10,000 cuts and counting’ memorial for people who had died as a result of welfare reform.

During our campaign to save the ILF when we asked the then Labour Leadership for help and got none, you publicly supported our campaign.

We also recognise the long term and steadfast support of one of our, and your, strongest allies – John McDonnell.

You have supported deaf and disabled people in so many ways over so many years and now it is time for us to have a chance to rally in support of you and John.

We know that you have devoted your political life to supporting people and causes that really do matter to people in this country and around the world.

So we know that when you talk about a new kind of politics that you mean a politics that puts people, people like us, first.

As you fight to retain leadership of the Labour Party, please know that Deaf and Disabled people and our allies are with you in spirit and actively supporting your campaign.

In Solidarity,

Anita Bellows (Disabled People Against Cuts) 

Linda Burnip (Disabled People Against Cuts) 

Ellen Clifford (Disabled People Against Cuts) 

Bob Ellard (Disabled People Against Cuts) 

Andy Greene (Disabled People Against Cuts) 

Debbie Jolly (Disabled People Against Cuts) 

Roger Lewis (Disabled People Against Cuts)

Paula Peters (Disabled People Against Cuts)

On The Remaking of British Capitalism

Frank Field writes:

Theresa May arrived at Downing Street with a promise to the nation: that the government she leads will initiate a complete rethink of how capitalism is conducted in our country, so that it can be made to work for all of us, rather than a mere privileged few at the top.

That rethink is now urgently required, in the light of our select committees’ findings on the losers and winners from the tragic demise of BHS. 

Among the losers is Mrs C Patel, who is 56 and has worked for BHS since leaving school. She told us how she felt “so helpless about what is happening”. 

She is among 11,000 mainly low-paid workers whose jobs are now at risk, and 20,000 former and current pensioners whose pensions face cuts of up to 77%. 

One current BHS pensioner wrote to me to say her modest retirement had been put in “utter jeopardy” by the collapse of the company and its pension fund. 

No such concerns afflict Sir Philip Green, the man who ran BHS for 15 years from 2000. 

He and his family accrued enough wealth on the back of BHS to propel them towards the very top of the Sunday Times Rich List. 

They can count their wealth in billions.

Sir Philip and Lady Green clearly emerge as the biggest financial winners from BHS, although many others involved in its demise – including Dominic Chappell – also pocketed huge sums of money. 

Much of the Green family’s enormous wealth was built up during the early years of Green’s stewardship of BHS. 

And yet there is no evidence whatsoever from this period of the improved turnover, market share, or major increase in investment that might be expected from a leading retailer. 

Investment was evidently either inadequate in scale or ineffective in improving the competitive edge of the business. 

Here we are introduced to our second group of losers from this sorry tale, the BHS customers. 

Our select committees received reports from across the country of how the lifts in their local BHS had been out of service for five years, of gaping holes in the doors of the ladies’ changing rooms, of carpets being taped down, and of air conditioning systems being out of service and left to decay. 

The decay which set in at individual BHS branches mirrors that of its pension fund – it was allowed to decline from a surplus of £43m in 2000, when Green bought the business, to a £571m deficit last year. 

Companies that are suppliers to BHS are now also under threat.

So the picture that was presented to us in evidence was clear – the Green family’s wealth escalated beyond the dreams of avarice, while the health of BHS and its pension fund was neglected. I believe that two immediate responses are now required.

The first is for Green to write a large cheque to make good the shortfall in the BHS pension fund.

This most basic gesture is well within his capabilities – the Green family recently acquired a private jet and another luxurious yacht for a cool £146m – and would restore a sense of justice for those 20,000 workers whose pensions are at risk.

Next, we need the government to initiate a review of company governance in this country.

This review should be undertaken with one key question in mind: should directors be deemed fit and proper persons if they are prone to racking up huge pensions deficits while adding handsomely to their own personal wealth?

And should not such questions be applied to private limited companies, as well as publicly listed ones? 

Both of these questions will require answers if May is to fulfil her promise on the remaking of British capitalism, in particular the corporate greed we have witnessed throughout the sorry demise of a once great high street name.

Why Don’t You Help With The Clear-Up?

Grace Dent writes:

As public scrutiny of Philip Green grows crosser each day, it’s difficult to know whether the billionaire’s rhino hide has been remotely wounded. 

Being described by Frank Field MP as “much worse” than Robert Maxwell has to sting, surely? 

And what about the growing demand for Green’s rather jarring knighthood to be removed in light of the 22,000 pensioners who’ve watched their financial security be steadily obliterated while Green threw parties such as his £6m, three-day long, superstar-laden 60th birthday? 

Kobe burgers on the barbecue; Stevie Wonder providing the cabaret; Leonardo, Gwynnie and Naomi on the dancefloor. 

Green, for a time, really was a very popular man. Avuncular, even. 

Rarely seen publicly without Moss or Campbell stuck to his elbow like expensive impetigo. 

And he was never as popular as when he had a birthday and whisked all his super-close, completely sincere buddies off for a gigantic, sun-drenched freebie. 

One of the small positives of being a “little person” shafted by Green – rather than by a less conspicuous fat-cat – is that one never needs to raise one’s palms skywards howling, “But where did the money all go?” because it’s all there, lovingly documented in the gossip columns and in its bystanders’ breathless memoirs. 

Revellers said Green’s 60th in Mexico was even bigger than Green’s 50th in Cyprus and his 55th in the Maldives! 

They drank Pol Roger in Mexico in 2012 as your pension was pissed down the drain. 

They ate Kobe beef and now you’re making a Lidl basket last three weeks.

So does Green, I wonder, now feel a bit sheepish about this? Probably not.

The scenario reminds me of a wonderful part in the very underrated Nora Ephron movie You’ve Got Mail where lefty, anti-capitalist tub-thumper Frank Navasky meets the corporate mega-boss Joe Fox at a cocktail party.

After accusing Fox – a business Goliath – of a litany of misdoings, Navansky snaps, “Tell me something, really, how do you sleep at night?”, to which Fox’s cold-eyed girlfriend, mistaking the question for non-rhetoric, chirps, “Ah, I use a wonderful over-the-counter drug, Ultradorm. Don't take the whole thing, just half, and you will wake up without even the tiniest hangover.” 

Whether Green sleeps fitfully or like a baby is unknown. 

But we do know that he has not been left remotely poor by BHS’s downfall. 

The estimated £571m needed to plug the black hole in its pension fund could be transferred, I would imagine, via one brisk phone call, made from a sun-lounger, in the time it would take for Green to order a large pre-lunch gin and tonic. 

Of course, Green, due to his fabulously slippery business dealings, is not legally culpable for this debt.

My conscience, if I were a disgraced business mogul faced with the truth that many of my ex-workers were in financial ruin, would prompt me to pay up. But that’s just me. 

If Green has a cash flow problem preventing him charging in like a white knight to clear up the mess he made centre-stage, can’t his celebrity buddies pitch in, all those who lived high on Green’s hog? 

Is it not time for BHS-Aid, a night of charity giving and lavish prize donations? 

I’m not certain if Leo and Gwyneth will understand what BHS is, but perhaps their advisers could explain that it was a department store once found on every high street in Britain, selling cheap clothes and umpteen shelves of nicely packaged novelty tat: “World’s Best Dad” tankards, for instance, and stackable biscuit tins with “Love You Gran” on the lid. 

BHS sold the sorts of things normal, working-class people get for their birthdays, as opposed to “150 close friends flown to Mexico andHappy Birthday sung by Enrique Iglesias”. 

It was staffed by everyday people who got up early and worked hard on busy tills or on shop floors, with sore feet and repetitive strain injuries from scanning three-packs of pop-socks. 

The workers paid into a pension scheme which has now curiously and quite bewilderingly vanished. Not stolen, Gwyneth, oh no. 

Let’s just say your holiday buddy Philip Green has “consciously uncoupled” these workers from their future security.

Still confused, Leo? Try to think of your hit film Catch Me If You Can,where a slippery sort fooled everyone that he was a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, but instead, imagine the protagonist fooling people that their monthly pension deduction would prevent them dying in poverty.

As for Moss and Campbell, they know full well what BHS is. You’ve all enjoyed the party. Why don’t you help with the clear-up?

Inalienable Rights Into The Workplace

Paul Mason writes:

When they compared conditions at Sports Direct to those of a Victorian workhouse, MPs were off the mark. 

What they should have said was: a Georgian-era factory. Or a Shanghai factory in the 1920s. Or a Bangladeshi sweatshop today.

In the history of work, the practices owner Mike Ashley appears to have tolerated have been common: underpayment, fines, refusal of “excessive” toilet breaks, childbirth on shift, harsh discipline and sexual harassment. 

They most typically prevail where a political system is stacked so heavily against the workforce that there can be no countervailing voice, and where an economic model in its infancy requires the urgent extraction of profit through coercion. 

You need under-resourced inspection agencies; unions forbidden to organise; and a ready supply of cheap labour. 

So it was in the England of George III, so it is in Britain in the second decade of the 21st century. 

What is striking, when you consider the modern reality of precarious work and coercive management, is how the concept of human rights stops at the factory gate. 

The workers of Georgian England had no democratic rights or access to law. But the 21st century is supposed to be an age of universal rights.

Every one of the practices described at Sports Direct appears to not just have broken employment law, but also violated the human right of the citizen not to be bullied, shamed, endangered or sexually harassed.

And Sports Direct is not alone. 

There is the fast food outlet where, should one of the workers fail to smile, a “secret shopper” can deduct the bonus of everyone on the shift. 

There are the construction sites, bedecked with “considerate contractor” signs, where blacklisting is a way of life, and the hotels cleaned by migrants who face relentless verbal violence, deductions and inadequate protections. 

Why do we tolerate, between worker and manager, practices that would not be tolerated between the citizen and the state? 

The clue is in the physical geometry of the very first factory, in Cromford, Derbyshire. 

Richard Arkwright, who built it, was a benign employer – but the historic site contained three devices crucial to how work would be governed under capitalism: a high wall, a clock, and a cannon loaded with grapeshot.

The wall was to prevent people seeing in. The clock was to remind workers that their body clocks would be overridden by machine rhythms.

And the cannon was there to prevent the local population storming the premises and tearing it to pieces.

Today’s equivalents needn’t be so crude.

Instead of the cannon and the clock, you have the camera in the cab of the truck driver; the GPS transmitter on the arm of the warehouse worker, tracking their speed and movement as they shift parcels; the barcode a home-care worker has to scan as she enters and leaves a client’s home in strictly timed 15-minute slots.

But secrecy endures at work.

From the warehouse to the software house, the principle of confidentiality is enforced.

As a TV journalist covering workplaces, you face a binary choice: the official story or the undercover one. 

There is no negotiated space in which workers can talk freely about their work.

This arrangement is tacitly endorsed when politicians visit.

They arrive in hi-vis, shepherded by layer upon layer of corporate goons, speak to a selected worker for the cameras and then address a rally in which – strangely but predictably – nobody ever raises an actual political disagreement.

Rights to heckle, to disagree, to boo – which would be normal at a public meeting – are removed in this private and unequal space.

It is hard to remember now that it was once different.

Long after my grandfather died, my grandmother would wander into the offices of the coal mine where he had worked to ask a favour, complain, or just talk to his friends.

At my father’s factory, I don’t recall there being any security on the doors: you could nip in and bring him a sandwich.

What went on in those factories and mines was public knowledge anyway, because the workplace stood at the centre of a stable community, with a rich institutional life of its own. 

Precarity works in favour of today’s employers, both inside and outside the workplace. 

Virtually instant sackability, the absence of unions, and the erosion of legal rights, mean you shut up and put up with it while at work.

The breakup of solid communities, the mercuriality of urban life, and the detachment of the business elite from everyday society, all contribute to the reduction of moral pressure on employers from the communities their businesses serve.

In a few cases, against all the odds, workers organise.

Cleaners at 100 Wood Street, a City of London office block, last week won the London Living Wage of £9.40 an hour via the tried-and-tested method of striking (in this case for 43 days). 

The Unite trade union was instrumental in bringing the action that exposed Mike Ashley at Sports Direct. 

But so much modern work is casual and temporary that unions alone cannot right the wrongs. 

We need new legal rights for workers.

Those that exist have been undermined by reduced access to employment tribunals, and by the exemption of small firms and agency businesses.

And compared to post-2000 human rights law, the entire corpus of employment law, existing separately and conditionally, looks archaic.

A new charter of workplace rights should start from principle of universality: that our human rights extend to the workplace unconditionally, and that human rights law can and should be the first line of defence against bosses like Mike Ashley – rather than a final option, pursued after months or years of sub-legal grievance procedures.

Unfortunately, the Brexit process will throw all workplace rights derived from EU membership into jeopardy [because the EU was doing so well at it, as the rest of this article illustrates]. 

If, as promised, Theresa May maintains Britain’s signature on the European Convention on Human Rights, then it’s up to all of us – not just unions and lawyers – to force the concept of inalienable rights into the workplace.

What Does This Face Say To You?

See also here. How very Andrea Leadsom.