Workers pay price for Greens and their crony capitalism
AS SIR Philip Green bloats and floats on his £100million yacht in Monaco, his Arcadia business empire has sunk.
Now 13,000 workers, mostly women, are facing a Christmas of fear and unemployment thanks to this poster boy of avarice.
Green is the face of the worst of capitalism, but let’s not forget Tina, the wife who helped him squirrel away millions by putting Arcadia in her name.
The Greens are the monsters created by an unbridled economic system that, from taxes to property law to pitiful workers’ rights,g is skewed in favour of the rich. h.
Arcadia, which includes Topshop, Burton and Dorothy Perkins, is blaming its demise on the pandemic but Green is the virus which ravaged Arcadia.
In a system which demonises the poor, men n like Green have been feted d and rewarded, regardless of their failure.
Green is an underwhelming ng businessman who failed to modernise Arcadia and nd d embrace online and digital al l marketing.
He not only refused to o invest in Arcadia but he e ripped the financial heart out t of it, just as he did with BHS.
A large chunk of his money came in 2005 from a £1.2billion dividend, the biggest in British corporate history. No tax was paid onn the dividend cheque made out too Tina Green because she is basedd in i tax-free Monaco.
Instead of being penalised by the
Labour Labo government of the time, TonyTon Blair awarded him a knighthoodknig for “services to the retailreta industry”. Blair,B the rotten meat in the putridpu sandwich of Tory governments,ggo was an enthusiasticenn lickspittle to the rich. ric c Green,G a Tory donor, was then hiredhirre by David Cameron to do a spending spe and procurement review revi which produced a thin report repo of beige thinking. It was the connivance of sycophantic sycop politicians that put Green in a position so powerful he could do so much damage to the lives of working people. And that crony capitalism is thriving in this pandemic.
The government, without a transparent tendering process, handed out £ 18bi l lion in coronavirus- related contracts during the first six months of the pandemic alone, with £1.5billion of it traced to companies or individuals with connections to the Conservative Party.
There is always a profit to be made in another’s suffering.
“King of the high street” Green enjoyed a tyrannical reign, with allegations, which he denies, of foul-mouthed tirades, bullying and sexual harassment.
The allegations didn’t dissuade models, celebrities and pop stars, from dining on his yachts and sharing in the fruits of the Greens’ spoils.
Not hard to see why Boris Johnson has been chummy with Green for years in what must be a nauseating meeting of misogynists’ minds.
The Greens’ wealth peaked at £4.9billion but is now around the £1billion mark.
Men like Green, until his crown slipped, were held aloft as examples of hard work and endeavour reaping just rewards.
By that logic, our nurses, care staff, supermarket workers and binmen could retire after Covid.
Yet those who have suggested that billionaires should not even exist have been vilified as revolutionaries.
A mighty row erupted last year when Labour MP Lloyd RussellMoyle suggested “the wealth of the 151 billionaires in Britain should be used to tackle grave social problems”.
The poorest quarter of society pay nearly twice as much of their disposable income to indirect taxes, including VAT and duties to the taxman, as the richest quarter do.
The top one per cent of UK earners take home 14 per cent of the national income.
But when Russell- Moyle highlighted this, it was as though he had donned a Mao suit and proposed rationing.
As workers hope a deal can be done to rescue jobs, Arcadia’s pension fund has an estimated deficit of £350million.
The Greens are being called on to personally fill that black hole but that is unlikely to happen.
So workers could lose 10 per cent of their future pension.
That’s the truth of the “trickle down” effect of the rich – more poverty at the bottom of the pile.