Dyson and pals are treating us like dirt
THE phrase “suck it up” originated in the cockpits of World War II bomber planes.
Due to the high altitudes they had to fly at, many pilots would vomit into their oxygen mask, which meant they had to suck up and swallow their own spew if they wanted to carry on breathing.
This week the king of sucking things up, Sir James Dyson, left a sick taste in many mouths when he announced he was building his new driverless car, not in the UK’s postBrexit Land of Milk and Honey he so passionately championed, but in Singapore.
That’s after taking £16million from British taxpayers to develop the prototype.
Dyson has offered no explanation, although the chance to make cars in a low-wage, low-regulation country with cheap supply chains which just signed a trade deal with the EU that
Britain may not soon
have, probably clinched it. There’s been no apology, as there wasn’t when he closed his Wiltshire vacuum cleaner plant at a cost of 600 jobs and moved production to Malaysia.
No, just the accepted logic that a rich patriot’s gotta get richer. The same with his fellow arch-Brexiters Jacob ReesMogg, John Redwood and Lord Ashcroft who are moving their investments abroad which will enable them to escape the shock of a no-deal Brexit.
We’ve just got to suck up the hypocritical puke from the noble Sir James as we have with that other gallant knight Sir Philip Green, who forked out £500,000 to “conceal the truth” about alleged sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying of employees. As we have with Sir Nick Clegg, after he accepted a million quid a year to be the global face of Facebook, which paid
£7.4million UK tax last year on £1.3billion sales. That great crusader for liberal principles (who once fiercely rebuked Facebook) is happy to flog them as he cajoles politicians across the world to accept this dodgy corporate creed.
And how sick-making are the antics of Sir Michael Fallon? The former defence secretary has taken on a £75,000-a-year job to complement his tasty MP salary, advising “one of the most active investors in Saudi Arabia”. That’s the same Saudi Arabia that cares so little about human rights they think it’s fine to chop up journalists on foreign soil when they’re not using bombs to turn Yemen into a mass crater. I’ve long viewed politically motivated knighthoods as badges of shame. Look at Sir Richard Branson, who plays the Man of The People card yet has sued the NHS for not awarding him a contract and became a Caribbean tax exile to avoid paying his dues in a country he never stops professing to love.
The Cabinet Office now bars people from knighthoods if it’s shown they have “poor tax behaviour”.
I’m thinking of petitioning them to remove the Sir from those whose personal behaviour makes the public want to vomit, and calling them something else.
A word familiar to Dyson: Dirtbag.
Sir James took £16million from Brit taxpayers and built new car in Singapore