Several weeks ago, chancellor George Osborne was happily reprising one of his favourite catchphrases in the budget. “We are all in this together”. A year ago, ‘Sir’ Philip Green, who is worth some £5 billion, sold the failing BHS business for a quid. This after paying £106 million for the company in 2001. These are the headlines but look beneath the headlines. Green did not make a loss of some £106 million from BHS: he made a profit of some £294 million because during the 15 years he owned the company he took £400 million out of it. All perfectly legal, no doubt, but “we are all in this together?”
Doubtless the seriously wealthy multi-billionaire is suffering sleepless nights for the 11,000 BHS employees who are shortly to be made jobless. Not only jobless, but because of the enormous deficit in the company’s pension fund, staff will also lose sizeable chunks of their pensions.
BHS has been a staple of the High Street for many years. It is not somewhere I have chosen to shop, but then I detest shopping at the best of times. It always had a tired and faded image, at least to my mind. It’s very good for lighting, apparently, and towels, but seemingly not much else. So we have a brand that appears to have not changed and adapted for modern times. They appear to have ploughed a lonely furrow forever and forgotten about their customers. Right at the top of the blame list has to be Philip Green, who owned the company for 15 years and sold it when, I would suggest, it was in serious trouble.
Reading between the lines, it seems there is little hope for BHS. Sharks like Mike Ashley and his tat clothing company Sports Direct are circling. Although the wages paid by BHS are minimum wage, just like Ashley’s company, they are surely a better employer, or maybe were, given what has happened.
Doubtless we shall soon discover the reasons for the company’s decline but they will be of little consolation to 11,000 people, along with their families, who will be thrown on the scrapheap.
Ah, I hear you cry (I hope I don’t hear it, actually), if a company sells goods that people don’t want, then the way of the world is that it will go bust. That’s just the way it is, as Bruce Hornsby once said, some things will never change. I don’t see it quite like that. These are ordinary people in a society where division and inequality is the norm. Green can make complex, though legal, arrangements to minimise his taxes whilst his employees scrape along barely earning enough to pay tax in the first place. Whilst Green is in the process of buying this third luxury yacht, his former employees will be fretting about putting bread on the table. Does he not have any responsibility for running the company into the ground and then getting out when things got bad?
Because we have not yet escaped the terrible legacy of Margaret Thatcher, where we are encouraged to accrue as much money as possible and ignore everyone else, there will be sympathy and a shrug of inevitability about it. Not enough of us will care, although it could be any of us tomorrow.
I know who really is in it altogether: the likes of Green and his friends in government, like the Tory Party he helps to bankroll. The working class of this country have never had it so bad, shorn of trade union rights and recipients of crumbs that fall from the top table. This is the David Cameron world of “do what you are told or else”. You can only have aspiration if you are one of us.
Green, it has to be said, got his knighthood from a Labour government, probably one of the most shameful acts of the New Labour era (but somewhere behind the invasion of Iraq) and his award demonstrated the absurd nature of the honours list.
Working people are not just at the foot of the food chain; they have fallen from it altogether. The fall of BHS is another nail in the coffin for the High Street, but above all it is a tragedy for the people who are losing their jobs in a society that is so accustomed to the power of market forces and the pernicious pursuit of greed we just shake our heads and then carry on. There is nothing we can do about it. We don’t have the power. The likes of Green and Cameron have a monopoly on power.
