Carillion’s a wealth builder for bosses
THE first time I heard of Carillion was a couple of years ago from a mate handing out leaflets, who told me how the construction firm had made his life hell.
Roy was protesting outside one of their sites with a group of fellow workers who’d been blacklisted by the firm, in his case for having the audacity to once question safety standards.
For 20 years he, and more than 3,000 other workers whose names appeared on a Stalinist-type database, were refused work by construction firms.
Eventually they took their case to the High Court and Carillion admitted their blacklisting, offered compensation, apologised “unreservedly” (as they do) “for the distress and anxiety caused” and admitted “it should never have happened”.
As you may guess, nobody in their company was disciplined for this ideologically-driven outrage that went on for decades and devastated thousands of lives.
We learned this week of something else that should never have happened concerning Carillion. They should never have been allowed to suck billions out of the public purse, which was turned into handsome salaries for the board and big donations to the Tory party, while running a £600million pension deficit and collapsing under a £900m debt leaving workers, suppliers and sub-contractors facing possible ruin. Who didn’t suffer deja vu looking at the familiar photos of the mansions and ski chalets owned by the now-disgraced bosses, the huge salaries they lavished on themselves for failure (finance director Richard Adam earning £8.3m between 2008-16) and the scam they pulled of protecting their bonuses against financial collapse. It shouldn’t happen, but it seems to, whenever high-flying capitalists fail and go cap in hand to the state for a bailout. And it happens because every government since Margaret Thatcher has bought into her philosophy
They sucked billions for handsome salaries for the board
that private firms and their directors are the wealth-creating engines of our economy, while public sector bodies and trade unions are the wealthsucking parasites.
And where has this notion of private good and public evil got us?
As Carillion crashed, despite this Tory government trying to prop them up with more contracts, we learned that the PFI scheme used to let private firms build our schools, hospitals and prisons will saddle us with a £200billion debt by 2040. We learned also that we could have built these buildings up to 70% cheaper if we’d let the state do it.
At what point are we going to stop buying into right-wing propaganda that running our own railways and utilities, and building our own infrastructure, puts us on the road to hell? How much longer are we going to let them hark back to the 1978-9 Winter of Discontent when councils couldn’t clear the rubbish off our streets?
That was then and this is now and the British people are well capable of cutting out the profit-sucking piranhas in the middle and running things for the public good.
Besides, walk around most city centres in this current Winter of Discontent and instead of bags of rubbish you’ll see humans in sleeping bags caused mainly by budget cuts driven by the same ideologists.
Jeremy Corbyn has described Carillion’s collapse as a watershed moment and pledged, if elected, to end what he calls “this outsourcing racket” by giving the public sector first option in providing Government services.
Such a policy surely cannot be wrong. And it surely cannot come soon enough.