Fancy a good laugh? How about this one, then. ‘Sir’ Philip Green has threatened the Commons committee looking at the collapse of BHS that he won’t attend if the committee chairman Frank Field does not first resign. Green says Mr Field had used his position as committee chairman “to destroy my reputation” ahead of the hearing. I did not attempt to stifle my own laughter when I read that. 11,000 people have lost their jobs at a company he sold to a former bankrupt for a quid because he knew it was going tits up. What reputation does Green have left?
Lest we forget, Green took hundreds of millions of pounds out of the company, allowing the pension scheme to plunge into deficit, a situation that was to lead to its collapse. It is instructive to look at the actual words used by Field when he was talking about what would be needed to rescue the pension fund: £600m was needed to cover BHS’s pension hole, which affects more than 20,000 people. If Green’s proposal amounted to “anything less than that, the committee will just laugh at him”, he said. Because of that, Green said he was “not prepared to participate” with the committee, giving it two fingers whilst blowing the world’s biggest raspberry at the people who have lost their jobs.
Select committees are where MPs do what we elect them to do. Forget the pantomime at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). This is where we, through our elected politicians, get to hold the rich and powerful to account. Green thinks he is above all that. He thinks that he can select the members of the committee. Sorry Mr Green: it ain’t gonna happen.
That Green was given a knighthood is astonishing enough in itself, but not as astonishing as the fact that it was given to him by a Labour government, the one led by Gordon Brown. Rewarding the “unacceptable face of capitalism” would be disgraceful enough if it had been under a Tory government, let alone the dying embers of the Labour government.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, has called for Green to be stripped of that knighthood if he fails to attend the committee meeting on Wednesday. I’ll go along with that and I’d go further. If he does turn up, but it is clearly demonstrated that Green was culpable in the collapse of BHS he loses that knighthood right here, right now.
If Green is serious about saving any part of his reputation that remains, he’d do well to turn up, fess up and apologise to every single person who, thanks to his actions and the fly by nights who worked with him, screwed the company into the ground.
Once the Commons hearing is over, let’s hope ‘Sir’ Philip buggers off to Monaco for good, to join his fellow tax dodging parasites on their luxury yachts. He has nothing left to offer Britain.
