Just another Scumbag Millionaire? Green, BHS and the State of UK Regulation

Sir Phillip Green before the Common Committee, 14 June 2016. Source, The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/philip-green-tells-tory-mp-to-stop-looking-at-him-weirdly-in-bizarre-committee-exchange_uk_5761178fe4b03f24e3dadd3d.

Trotting out the phrase “the unacceptable face of capitalism” as part of a “damning” House of Commons Work and Pensions and Business, Innovation and Skills Committees report on the collapse of BHS may make for good headlines but does nothing in terms of progressing reforms towards any more effective system for controlling the behemoths of corporate capitalism.

While the headline versions of the report make much of Sir Philip Green’s “systematic plunder” of the company, a closer reading reveals a systematically flawed system of regulation, one untouched by the financial crisis of 2007, still under attack as a burden on business, and likely to be further weakened as the realities of Brexit become increasingly apparent.

The report – or at least its popular reception – is a classic instance in individualising corporate offending. Sir Phillip Green, and to a lesser extent Dominic Chappell, are the equivalents of the ‘Scumbag Millionaires’ of the 2007 financial crisis, the headline The Sun ran across its front page cover of Fred Goodwin, Stephen Hester, Andy Hornby and Tom McKillop as they sat before the UK Treasury Select Committee hearings of 2009 into the banking crisis.

Thus a key aspect of the debate surrounding the demise of BHS and its systematic plundering, not least of its pension fund, is whether Green will be stripped of his knighthood, itself intimately linked to whether or not he will fulfil what the report calls his “moral duty” and make a large cash payment to the pension fund. But in this latter call, we see the resort to moral duties as an indictment of the state of law and regulation of corporate activity, both in terms of the corporate person (by definition, an a-moral, legally constructed entity) and its directors, senior managers and shareholders. Indeed, the report is less than sanguine about the abilities of The Pension Regulator to secure restitution for the 22,000 pension holders who have been the victims of what is no more nor less than theft and fraud – an all too typical scenario in deregulated, neo-liberal version of capitalism that has long dominated the UK political consensus.

The whole affair – which the Committee’s report and media response to it seems somehow to represent as aberrant and a-typical (hence the ‘Unacceptable Face of Capitalism’ epithet) – in fact sheds light on other routine ways of doing business in the UK. One of these is the normal practice of squirreling funds offshore into tax havens – something Green achieved through his wife’s ownership of Taveta Ltd – and which the Panama Papers revealed, as if such revelations were necessary, is simply one element of industrial scale personal and corporate tax avoidance. And in this business of ‘aggressive tax planning’ – an anaesthetising term if ever there were one – the UK, and its financial services, those which Cameron and Osborne long sought to protect from over-burdening EU legislation – is a world leader.

This affair also tells us something about the craven attitude of UK media and political elites to leading business figures. Until very recently, Sir Philip Green had been lauded as an archetypal entrepreneur, the turnaround kind, the businessman who could not only speak for the best that is competitive capitalism but in fact was fit to advise Government: this is the same Phillip Green who was called upon by the Coalition Government in 2010 to advise on cost savings at it prepared for its ‘Emergency Budget’. At the time, Minister Francis Maude said of Green that “He’s shown how he can turn around big complex businesses. Government is a huge complex organisation, and while it’s not the same as a business, a lot of the same disciplines are needed.”

This is simply one instance of the craven attitude that successive Governments, since the days of New Labour at least, have portrayed in front of entrepreneurs. Recall it had been Gordon Brown when becoming Prime Minister in 2007 who called for a ‘Government of all the Talents’, and invited a series of unlikely bedfellows (and they were mostly fellows) into a labyrinthine of advisory – non-elected – posts. One notable such appointment was (Lord) Digby-Jones, former head of the employers’ organisation the CBI. On resigning his post as Trade Minister in 2009  Digby-Jones argued that “top businessmen” – and not  “incompetent politicians” – should run major Government departments: “Health, education, business, transport, defence and security are too important to be left any longer to enthusiastic amateurs and their honest and hard-working but risk-averse civil servants.”

Finally, this whole shabby episode reveals much about the systematic and ongoing failings of a patchwork regulatory system. None of the regulators involved – Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the Financial Reporting Council, the Pensions Regulator, the Insolvency Service and the Serious Fraud Office – come out of this tale with their already-hardly-stellar reputations enhanced. And for all the talk of regulatory reform, improved systems of corporate governance, greater transparency for private business – all of which grace the pages of this 60 page report – little is likely to transpire in any of these areas. We’ve been here before, many times, not least in the series of Governmental inquiries which followed the 2007 financial crisis, which in sum resulted to virtually no meaningful regulatory reform. Perhaps the most lauded were the proposals in the Vickers Report, that a ring-fence to be erected between investment and retail banking. Subsequently, even Andrew Tyrie the Conservative Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, said of the proposed UK fencing that it is “so weak as to be virtually useless” (Armistead, 2013). A handy catch-all verdict on the state of business regulation in the UK.

This is the story of BHS, of 11,000 jobs lost, of 22,000 pension holders impoverished. It’s a story not of rogue, vilified, condemned individuals. It’s the story of an economic system based on structural irresponsibility, a supine political and media elite, and a regulatory system unable to mitigate capitalism’s inherently destructive effects.

 A slightly earlier version of this blog was originally published on 26 July, 2016 at openDemocracy UK, https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/steve-tombs/unacceptable-face-of-capitalism-what-collapse-of-bhs-shows-us-about-uk-economy

Steve Tombs, Prof of Criminology, The Open University