All hail Adrian Beecroft

You may have heard of the Beecroft Report. It's a very thin, unsubstantiated paper on employment rights and business efficiency written for the Prime Minister by a private equity speculator who has contributed precisely zero to the economy, the culture or the country.

Beecroft's big idea to solve the worst depression in a hundred years is… (drum roll) … make it easier to sack workers. Never mind that that scumbag Blair used to boast that British employees are the least protected in the western world (sorry, 'most flexible') and that the crash was caused by people like Beecroft: the economy can only be fixed by sacking people on a whim.

But let's not rush to judgement. Mr. Beecroft has this to say:

A proportion of employees, secure in the knowledge that their employer will be reluctant to dismiss them, work at a level well below their true capacity: they coast along

He's right. Or rather, he's right if you apply this piercing aperçu to some very small groups of employees:

1. Bankers and allied trades
2. Politicians

Have any of them taken responsibility? Been sacked? Gone to prison?

No.

But Beecroft's determined to make sure that checkout operators, litter-pickers and fast-food servers have dragged us all down and need to have their gold-plated zero-hours contracts stripped away to liberate the wealth-creating genius of the corporate world.

Let me give you a couple of examples of these molly-coddled layabouts. I have a friend who was summarily fired a couple of days ago. Her crime? Paying for 2 tins of dog food while working on the till at a major supermarket. Receipted, recorded, done in front of managers. Another works at Pizza Hut. Their particular brand of evil works like this: all the staff are on zero-hours contracts: they're employed but don't have set hours. So they can't work anywhere else, in case they're called in. They go to work, but if there aren't enough customers, they have to sit around in case things get busy. But they're not paid for waiting around - they're compelled to be 'at work' but not paid for being they're because they're not actually working.

Lazy bastards. They've had it too easy for too long.

Let's do lunch

I've just spent the afternoon with one of my favourite classes, doing plays about bankers and other con-men, from almost 300 years apart: Philip Massinger's very conservative comedy A New Way to Pay Old Debts (revolting city wide-boy loses his cash and daughter as punishment for being a flash social climber - the aristocratic values endure) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, an astonishing satire set in the 1980s world of investment banking and financial engineering - in verse.

In this one, the wide-boys win, though the toff bankers they replace are equally corrupt and revolting. They use the crudest sexualised language to discuss their work, though they're all too worn-out to actually have sex with anyone. They're amoral, cruel, greedy and selfish. Unfortunately, the City Boys didn't see it as a critique: legend has it that City firms block booked the theatre when it was first released, encouraging their workers to worship their fictional counterparts.

I hope my students enjoyed today's session: it's hard to analyse comedy without killing it stone dead. Some hadn't read them of course, but I like to think I've done my bit for the cause while simultaneously introducing them to literature they might not otherwise have come across. It's Gerrard Winstanley next: some of his pamphlets and Churchill's play about him, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.

(For your amusement: David Cameron Pretending To Be Common).

This is how to phrase a put-down

The British Bankers' Association (not a popular club at the moment) didn't like a Cambridge student pointing out vulnerabilities in the Chip and Pin system, and tried to censor his thesis (according to their spokesmen every week, there aren't any problems with it).

His university responded absolutely magnificently.

Second, you seem to think that we might censor a student's thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values. 

I have authorised the thesis to be issued as a Computer Laboratory Technical Report. This will make it easier for people to find and to cite, and will ensure that its presence on our web site is permanent....

You complain that our work may undermine public confidence in the payments system. What will support public confidence in the payments system is evidence that the banks are frank and honest in admitting its weaknesses when they are exposed, and diligent in effecting the necessary remedies. Your letter shows that, instead, your member banks do their lamentable best to deprecate the work of those outside their cosy club, and indeed to censor it.

Mmm, fried squid rings

Actually, it was Matt Taibi of Rolling Stone who described Goldman Sachs as a giant vampire squid. Read the piece here.

Eric the Red

Full marks for inventive, gleeful, revolutionary fervour from Eric Cantona, who calls for a mass withdrawal of funds from the banks to smash them. Not a particularly far-sighted policy, but the angry lefty in me thoroughly approves.

This'll melt your heart

A lovely advert from Humble Oil in 1962. 'Each day Humble supplies enough Energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier'!

from an article by Al Gore. We should all be very proud. 

Did you know that American capitalism is particularly anti-environmentalism because Puritanism was at the core of its foundation? 

Unlike Catholicism, which encouraged Good Works of charity as well as torturing thousands of heretics to death, 17th-century Protestantism believed that worldly success indicated that God approved of you (poor people = unGodly). One of their core texts was the Bible verse about being given the stewardship of earth, to make productive. So good Protestants were encouraged to work hard, look after themselves (don't help the poor: God's decided they deserve to be poor) and don't worry about environmentalism because God's got a plan you shouldn't interfere with. Profit is a sign of efficient exploitation, therefore high profits = God's smiling on you. 

From this stems America's reluctance to act collectively (e.g. decent welfare, a national health service, trade unions), to trust each other (buy guns, only care about your family) and to reduce breakneck consumption. 

You can see it in the spiritual diaries devout worshippers were encouraged to keep. In fiction, Robinson Crusoe is a prime example: it's a journal in which he obsessively details what he's given and what he does with it. Waste and unproductiveness is wrong, efficiency i Godly - which means exploiting the Island (= earth) to the utmost, from the soil to poor Man Friday). 'Counting your Blessings' is part of this tradition too.

It's not just the US, of course - sanctimonious rapacious scum can be found anywhere, but because the Founding Fathers were all Puritans, the ethos of individualism was rooted from the start.

And so we get to Mr. Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, famously described as, who recently described the bankers' self-enrichment which has bankrupted most countries as 'Doing God's Work'.* He's not wrong. He's theologically within a proud tradition. Of mean-minded fundamentalist selfishness. 

God, eh?

*Oddly enough, he said it in a fawning profile in The Times which has cravenly removed the article without explanation. Lucky everybody spotted it first!

What is he trying to say?

Click on the picture for a larger image.

Doonesbury gets it

I know some banksters will be on here making little points in their defence, but there really isn't one: entire states are heavily indebted because they saved the banking system, which has demonstrated that it's learned absolutely nothing, and is currently engaged in making government bonds even more expensive - the bonds required to cover the cash spent reviving the banks. Click for a larger version

So, farewell then

It's the last official day of term. I've seen and been phoned by many students and there's an air of good will about the place. To ensure its continuance, you've earned a break from my humourless ranting. Apart from the habitual weekend break (this week enhanced by a charity ball), I'm off to visit my personal banker for Monday and Tuesday.

No, not as a one-man lynch mob: the gentleman in question is a distinguished friend, despite his possession of two model light sabres. Who'd have thought he works in the IT department?

I won't be back at work until Wednesday. As the proud possessor of an enhanced CRB form, I'm considered safe to present some poems with Zoot Horn, to an audience of literally several enraptured sixth-form students.

Have a good weekend.

No, Peter, of course it isn't.

Peter Mandelson, silky sinister unelected eminence grise of New Labour turned silky sinister unelected eminence grise of Labour, has announced that today's supertax on bankers' bonuses isn't a punishment for their greed, hypocrisy, destruction of the economy, arrogance and failure to acknowledge that we've saved their skins.

He's right in a way: it's also a cheap and easy way to make New Labour look like it's on the side of the people for a change (it was Mandelson who said that he was 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes' in response to a question about the ever-widening gap between rich and poor - despite leaving massive gaps in the tax regulations and selling the Inland Revenue's offices to a company based in a tax haven!).

It's a cynical piece of electoral politics which won't make much of a dent in the national debt. I still support it though. Many of the banks are state-owned and almost all of them are propped up by state guarantees and asset swapped. The bankers need punishing. They mentally decoupled the real economy from the financial services sector. They've bankrupted their institutions and nearly bankrupted the country, evade tax, award themselves massive bonuses and are generally partying like it's 1928.

This 50% tax on bonuses is nothing: supertax on the very highest sums once reached somewhere in the 90%+ range in the late 70s, and Thatcher only gradually reduced it.

The bankers will no doubt redouble their efforts to get the Tories re-elected. Cameron will make tutting noises about bankers until he's elected (because the Daily Mail isn't happy with them either), then resume his position (kneeling before a pinstriped crotch, mouth open). Will some bankers leave the country? Maybe. Where will they go? Somewhere the banking system's in rude health, with no angry citizens protesting over their continued beggary at the hands of financial whizzkids.

Oh dear. There's no such place. Poor bankers.

Bankers, the lot of them

The greedy bastards who bankrupted us while raking in billions to stash offshore are threatening to leave the country because taxes have been increased to pay for bailing the banks out - Steve Bell nails these destructive, selfish gits:

This is infuriating - Cameron's announcing 'the age of austerity' as though government waste has ruined us all. It hasn't. Saving the banks (Tories all) has sunk us, but Cameron's desperate not to mention his commitment to finance capitalism. It's such lazy, reactionary politics to blame big government for shortfalls - very Reaganite 1980s. We all like schools, decent hospitals and state pensions - let's be proud of paying for them.

Personally I'd have protected depositors and allowed the institutions to crash, but Brown et al decided this wouldn't be good for the economy. If goverment cutbacks are required: ID cards, nuclear weapons, the armed services in general, Department for Business (fewer businesses - fewer bureaucrats required to kiss their arses), properly nationalise trains rather than pay extortionate subsidies to franchises.

How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?

Anyone watch Newsnight last night? I was infuriated by the vox pops with a pair of bankers. One of them had the classic combination of long, greased-back hair, loud suit, louder shirt and yet louder tie. He looked, in fact, like a paedophile otter, and I say that as a relative rodent. With a straight face, he attacked the new 50% tax rate (which only applies to earnings above £150,000, not the whole pay-packet) as a class-driven way to pay for government mistakes, and threatened the emigration of the banking sector.

Er… isn't the country in massive amounts of debt because we've had to bail out pretty much all the banks? Yes, this and the previous government volunteered their services like desperate rent boys, but there's no getting round the fact that these bankers made millions personally while bankrupting the entire nation - and now they're squealing because we want a little more of their stratospheric pay in order to keep the country afloat. If they want to emigrate, brilliant. I can't think that many countries will be queuing up to avail themselves of bankers' services, but at least they'll be off our patch.

Perhaps we should start a letter writing campaign. Let's each adopt a merchant bank and send postcards every day encouraging these bastards to leave (or kill themselves).

(the title of this post is a country song: terrible music, great lyrics)