Thomas Cook cash fiasco

BEFORE going bust, travel firm Thomas Cook asked the Government for a £200m loan to stay afloat. They were turned down.

Then Thomas Cook CEO, Peter Fankhauser, took his begging bowl to private lenders, and got the money but only on condition the Government would act as guarantor for the loan.

Again, Johnson gave the thumbs down. It has now become clear this was not only a demonstration of Tory contempt for the 9,500 UK Thomas Cook employees – not to mention tens of thousands more overseas – but also an illustration of their economic incompetence, and cavalier attitude to taxpayers’ money.

When the 178-year-old firm went into liquidation, the Government had to fork out £100m to repatriate over 150,000 British holidaymakers stranded abroad.

Now it has emerged a further £60m of public money will have to be dished out to pay Thomas Cook workers’ unpaid wages, holiday pay, and redundancy money.

That is before the millions of pounds of state benefits that will have to be forked out as these 9,500 workers sign on for dole money, family support, and help with mortgages they can no longer afford.

So the mathematics clearly illustrate the Tories have allowed 9,500 workers to join the dole queue for no other reason than their blinkered ideological attachment to Thatcherite economics.

Johnson refused state aid to Thomas Cook on the grounds that to do so posed ‘a moral hazard’ to other struggling capitalist outfits, like Wrightbus, makers of the ill-fated ‘Boris Bus’, which has also gone bankrupt.

He had no such scruples about the trillions of pounds of public money used to bail out the banks in 2008, most of which will never be repaid.

If Johnson breaks the law and foists a No-Deal Brexit upon the British people, many billions more of public money will have to be shelled out to pay for the economic and social dislocation that will result, not to mention the ‘public disorder’ anticipated by the leaked Operation Yellowhammer document.