Don’t be fooled by his West Coast Main Line pleas, Richard Branson is no people’s capitalist

Sir Richard Branson has long been Britain’s favourite capitalist. Unlike the fat cat tycoons of left-wing caricatures, sat atop their shiny towers counting wads of cash, Branson is considered one of a new breed of entrepreneurs that emerged at the turn of the century. Usually engaged in some sort of philanthropic work in the developing world, these touchy-feely industrialists presented the public with a softer side of commerce as they “tore off their ties, threw open their shirt necks and fretted about their employees’ spiritual well-being,” as Terry Eagleton puts it.

Nor does his popularity appear to have abated with the passage of time. Branson was reportedly “furious” at what he called the “insane choice” of rival FirstGroup to run the profitable West Coast Main Line and an e-Petitionwas launched by a completely unconnected party calling for the award of the £5.5 billion West Coast franchise to FirstGroup to be changed in favour of Virgin. Thus far the petition has attracted 160,000 signatures, which Branson has pointed to as evidence of “the strong British instinct for fairness, common sense and democracy”.

Despite his vast fortune (estimated at £3.4bn by the 2012 Sunday Times Rich List), if the petition is anything to go by Branson maintains an almost impenetrable aura of the everyman David fighting the corporate Goliath. In a 2011 poll by the Aspire Global Network (AGN), Branson was voted the leader most people said they would most like to work for. Elsewhere he’s even been voted the people’s ideal choice for the next Prime Minister.

Considering some of the causes he has previously championed, the longevity of the cult of Branson is as baffling as it is impressive. The privatisation of the rail network was one of the most disastrous sell-offs of public assets during John Major’s government, yet Branson, unlike the majority of the British people, has done extremely well out of it. Virgin Rail has in the pastdepended heavily on state money and been the subject of a large number of passenger complaints. The pre-tax profits for Virgin Rail Group Holdings Ltd in 2011 were £102.7 million, with profits per employee reaching a staggering £33,713. Those who believe in a classless alliance between the exploited and the exploiters may also be disappointed with Virgin’s record on workers’ rights. In April, Branson pleaded with employees at his Virgin America Airlines not to vote in favour of joining the Transport Workers Union (TWU) after staff had filed a petitionwith the National Mediation Board (NMB) for representation with the union. According to TWU organising director Frank MacCann, while flying Virgin can be enjoyable for passengers, flight attendants have a “very different experience”. “Work rules are inconsistently enforced, promises regarding rest, vacation and benefits are often broken, and discipline for minor violations can be unnecessarily harsh and inconsistently applied,” McCann said.

“Flight attendants realise that the only way they can improve their working conditions is to form a union,” he added.

It is a little known fact that Branson’s first company started amid a purchase-tax fraud that landed him a night in prison in 1971. Only last year we also learned of plans by Branson to move a slice of his business to Switzerland to reduce his company’s tax bill. According to Virgin, the move was undertaken to “accelerate [Virgin’s] expansion” and “develop the Virgin brand internationally”. It isn’t hard to discern why large corporations make announcements about their tax affairs in language like this. They are often trying either to conceal something from their workers or sell something to the rest of us. In this case Virgin appeared to prefer gobbledygook to an admission that they wanted to reduce their payments to the UK exchequer. Depriving the treasury of funds – funds that pay, amongst other things, for the treatment of terminally ill children– is hardly something to boast about, after all. That isn’t to say the bar was set particularly high to begin with or anything. Commenting on Virgin’s historical tax record before the move was announced, Richard Murphy from Tax Research said: “I didn’t think Virgin paid any tax here, let’s be blunt about it. It’s been remarkably poor at doing so.”

What is it then that accounts for Branson’s enduring popularity? In trying to understand the hype it’s worth remembering a remark once made by Mark Twain: if you give a man a reputation as an early riser, that man can sleep till noon. In recession-hit Britain people also need reassurance: reassurance against a backdrop of collapsing financial scenery that it isn’t all just one big racket. Through sheer force of personality Branson gives us this, while at the same time managing to convince people that the interests of billionaires and workers are one and the same. Branson has that all-important X-factor, too; and the ability to glide seamlessly through the world of celebrity is one of the most valuable assets a modern politician or captain of industry can possess. It’s how Princess Diana became the “people’s princess” despite leaving her entire estate to her own super-rich family. It’s how Tony Blair was able to turn up at Labour conferences year after year, mouth a few platitudes and all would be forgiven. It may also explain how it was that Sir Richard Branson came to be anointed as the exemplary peoples’ capitalist. The main objection his admirers face is a substantial one, however: peoples’ capitalists, like unicorns, do not really exist.

There are those who are appalled by George Galloway now, and those who have always been appalled by George Galloway

The most striking thing about George Galloway’s latest outburst was not what he said so much as the fact that there were still people willing to take him seriously. This is heartening in a way of course, for such people will learn everything they need to know about George Galloway simply by listening to George Galloway. But for those of us who believed the end of Mr Galloway’s credibility had come many years ago, it was also something of a surprise.

The Respect MP’s latest remarks, made on his Goodnight with George Galloway programme, began by describing Julian Assange’s sex life as “sordid and disgusting”. You could have been forgiven for thinking this a good start. However this was less a condemnation of the alleged improper sexual conduct Mr Assange is wanted by the Swedish authorities for questioning over, and more a judgement on Mr Assange’s sexual promiscuity – as was rapidly intuited as Mr Galloway went on to talk in detail about the actual allegations:
“I mean not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion. Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you’re already in the sex game with them.”

Unfortunately Mr Galloway is not the first man whose reactionary attitude towards promiscuity bleeds into an unwillingness to grant a woman the right to say no once she has climbed between the sheets. More interesting has been some of the response to Mr Galloway’s comments. Some have asked whether, this time at least, the “maverick” MP for Bradford West hasn’t “gone too far”. Mr Galloway has even lost his column at Holyrood for this particular outburst of the unpalatable.

All in all one gets the distinct impression that people expected more from the man.

However while Mr Galloway’s latest remarks undoubtedly stink, his previous record is no less pestiferous. Is it really such a shock to discover that a man who once embraced the leader of Hamas has a lousy attitude towards women? One would have thought the two positions complimented each other excellently. While I still experience feelings of outrage related to Mr Galloway, that outrage pre-dates this week and is nowadays reserved mainly for those who keep up the pretence that Mr Galloway is some sort of radical.

As recently as April, Salma Yaqoob, who says she finds Mr Galloway’s latest remarks “deeply disappointing and wrong”, described Mr Galloway in the New Statesman as “a man who stands by his principles and tells it straight”. Writing in the Independent around the same time, Patrick Cockburn put the “ferocity” of the attacks on Mr Galloway down to nothing more than the “comatose nature of British politics”. News presenters were launching “a shower of insulting and unproven accusations,” Mr Cockburn added. As if to prove that many on the left still held a torch for Mr Galloway, he was pencilled in to speak at the Marxism 2012 festival on a bill that included Tony Benn and Owen Jones.

All of this came before his now infamous remarks about rape. However it all came after the Respect MP had described the President of Syria Bashar al-Assad as the “last Arab leader”, after he had heaped praise on Saddam Hussein for his “indefatigability”, and after he had claimed that a gay man was executed in Iran for “sex crimes against young men”. It also came after Mr Galloway had published not so much a book as a eulogy to Fidel Castro; and after, on his Talksport radio show, he said that “not a single photograph of a single dead person” had ever been “adduced” as proof that the Tiananmen Square massacre had taken place.

Staying true to one’s original political beliefs is as much a sign of the rigid dogmatist as it is of the committed idealist. The measure of a person of the left can also very often be taken by their attitude towards George Orwell. In an edition of the late Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish civil war, Mr Galloway repeated the Stalinist lie that Orwell had smeared the International Brigades who travelled to Spain to fight fascism. Their memory had been “sullied by Orwell’s slanders, unfortunately reinforced by Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom,” Mr Galloway said. The reality of course was that Orwell had documented the vile role of the Stalinists in suppressing the Spanish revolution. Considering the worst day of Mr Galloway’s life was the day the Soviet Union collapsed, his distaste for the man who saw through Stalinism before the majority of the intelligentsia is perhaps unsurprising.

If anything, the longevity of George Galloway goes to show that you can believe in practically anything on the political left these days so long as you profess a dislike for the United States of America and Israel. It is often said that the political left is too idealistic. That individuals like George Galloway are still in the ranks is testament to the contrary. A good deal more idealism would be very welcome at this point.

Originally published @the Independent 
(Image: the Independent)

Railways are too important to run on greed

In the novel Catch 22, one of the central characters is an entrepreneurial war profiteer by the name of Milo Minderbinder. Caught swindling his fellow countrymen, Milo likes to evoke the “historic right of free men to pay as much as they have to for the things they need in order to survive”. When Milo’s profiteering results in the price of food in the army mess hall climbing so high that the enlisted men can no longer afford to eat, Milo valiantly cites the alternative. And since he is an unapologetic champion of the free-market, the alternative is for the enlisted men to exercise their freedom of choice and “choose” starvation.

The twisted logic of Milo Minderbinder reached the summit of political power in Britain under the Conservative government of the 80s and 90s. Public services were given away at knock down prices to a private sector which, it was assumed as a matter of course, could run things better than workers or the state. The last significant privatisation before the Conservatives lost power to New Labour in 1997 was British Rail, which was split up and sold off in 1994. The logic of the market dictated, after all, that if you didn’t like how a company ran a service you could choose, of your own free will, not to use it. Privatisation engendered choice, so it was said. And like the men in Milo Minderbinder’s mess hall, if you didn’t like it you could always take your money, exercise your freedom of choice and, well, go and live in the woods or something.

Only on the pages of Atlas Shrugged could life be that simple. The real-world consequences of rail privatisation were huge profits for fat cat bosses, large dividends for shareholders and enormous price hikes for passengers. Today in Britain some of the highest train fares in Europe co-exist alongside some extremely low rates of electrification and embarrassingly shoddy services. Despite ten years of above-inflation rail price increases, which have left some in the south-east spending 15 per cent of their salary on rail travel (usually, perversely, on trains to get them to and from the place where they earn that salary), the cost of supporting the rail network is much greater today than it was before the dissolution of British Rail. In 2010/11, Network Rail was subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of £3.96 billion. This compares with an average of £1.4billion over the 10 years leading up to privatisation. In light of the expected 6 per cent increase in fares, 10 per cent of commuters say they will no longer be able to afford to travel by train when new prices kick in.

Sir Richard Branson is apparently “furious” at what he called the “insane choice” of rival FirstGroup to run the profitable West Coast Main line. FirstGroup bid £5.5bn, more than double Virgin’s existing payments, leading to fears that FirstGroup will cut staff, scrap services and push up fares to meet its obligations when it takes over in December. Squabbling over who the contract was awarded to misses the point, however. And Mr Branson would say that, wouldn’t he? Happy to move Virgin’s brand division to Switzerland to save the company millions in tax revenue, Virgin Rail has in the past depended heavily on state money and been the subject of a large number of passenger complaints.

The rail network epitomises the grotesque idea of private gain and public loss that only a few years ago left taxpayers picking up the bill when the banks crashed. Just as the government could not let banks that were “too big to fail” go under, so it cannot permit the companies that run our trains to fail because the consequences would be too severe. For obvious reasons the rail network cannot be turned off for a few days based on the crackpot idea of letting the market run its course. And so the train companies resemble a compulsive gambler placing bets with somebody else’s money. The result is a grotesque parody where profits go to fat cats while the tab for bad business practice will always be picked up by the taxpayer.

If recent opinion polls are anything to go by, over half the British public would support full nationalisation of the railways. Even Conservative supporters appear to have abandoned at least a small portion of the failed dogma of the 1980s, with a majority saying they would prefer nationalisation to the current shambles. The only thing that appears to be stopping the political class taking action and bringing the railways back under public ownership is blind faith in an ideology which looks increasingly incompatible with a civilised way of life: public bad, private good. Karl Marx once wrote that the tradition of all dead generations “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Whatever you think of the man, it doesn't take a communist to recognise that a capitalist rail network is both tragedy and farce mixed with an unmistakable stench of greed.

Originally published @the Independent
(Picture: the Independent)

The developing world’s latest export: adoptable children

Many bad things that are done in the world are done by people who are convinced that what they are doing is unquestionably good. In 1992 at an open air mass in Knock, Ireland, Mother Teresa, no doubt under the apprehension that what she was saying was divinely warranted, called for contraceptives to be driven out of the republic. “Let us promise…that we will never allow in this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.”

Sticking (slightly at least) with the divine theme, Madonna (not the appellation of Mary the supposed mother of Jesus but the pop singer) made her own, more benign intervention in the African continent a decade later to adopt a one-year-old child. Racial, geographical and financial barriers were seemingly broken down and a child with, let’s be honest, little hope of a decent future was given a chance – a real chance – at a better life. One might even call it an act of internationalism. And if there is anything the world needs more of these days, it is internationalism.

It isn’t only Madonna who appears ready to overlook domestic kids in favour of sprogs from overseas, however. The eight agencies that undertake inter-country adoption in the UK received 895 enquiries in 2010-11, which equates to almost 11 per cent of all enquiries about adoption (domestic and inter-country). According to the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA), it now receives more enquiries through its website relating to inter-country than to domestic adoption. (Interestingly, the number of enquiries it received spiked in 2007 which, coincidentally, was the year Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie adopted a three-year-old boy from an orphanage in Ho Chi Min City. We are all celebrities now.)

There is something very modern about inter-country adoption. No longer are potential adopters confined to the selection of a child – a baby, very often – from a finite domestic pool, but they can, as in the modern supermarket, sample a blend of exotic variations from far and wide. Money also talks louder on the international stage. Taking a more direct route, the former Dragon’s Den star James Caan, whose estimated wealth is in excess of £100million, offered an impoverished family 100,000 rupees – about £745 – to buy a baby on a trip to Pakistan in 2010, an impulse he later apologised for.

The boom in inter-country adoption has no doubt been encouraged in part by strict rules governing UK adoption: the average time for an adoption to go through is two years and seven months. The rules on inter-country adoption have gotten considerably tighter since the notorious case of the Kilshaws, however, whom the tabloids dubbed “the most hated couple in Britain” after the pair “bought” two American babies over the internet in 2000.

The growing number of inter-country adoptions has unfortunately also brought with it instances of adopters getting “buyers’ remorse” when the fairytale has not been forthcoming. In April 2010, Torry-Ann Hansen of Tennessee sent her seven-year-old adopted son back to Russia together with a note addressed to the Russian authorities saying she no longer wanted him. Citing behavioural problems, she returned the child, together with his one-way Aeroflot ticket, like an unwanted purchase.

Most of those looking to adopt abroad have, I imagine, the same motivation for doing so as those hoping to adopt domestically: a desire to give a child the best possible start in life. And yet the disparities in power and wealth (as with all disparities in power and wealth) inevitably set up a grossly unequal relationship between budding parents in the west and those who “produce” the adoptees of the future in the developing world. Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international adoptions to the US in 2010, second only to China. Adoption is fast becoming Ethiopia’s new export, perhaps soon to overtake coffee. Yet not everybody is happy with the way things are going. “We want people to invest in Ethiopia rather than take our children,” Dr Bulti Gutema, head of the government’s adoption authority, has said. Media investigations have also found evidence to suggest that some adoption agencies have recruited children from intact families.

Without wishing to sound too much like a dyed-in-the-wool nativist, one also need not go all the way to Africa or China to find deprived children. The number of kids in care in the UK has increased by 4,510 – a rise of almost eight per cent – since 2006, when there were 59,890. Yet there were 500 fewer adoptions last year, down from 3,700. Research has shown that children in care are more likely to have no educational qualifications, to become homeless, to commit crime and, in the case of girls, to become teenage mothers. We also know that for every year that a child in care is not adopted, his or her chances of finding parents decreases by 20 per cent. Do not, whatever you do, accept the idea that the “deserving poor” (if you really must use such definitions) exist only overseas.

I have listened to young women in my peer group say on a number of occasions that they have no plans to get pregnant because it will “ruin” their bodies. “Why have a baby yourself, and put yourself through all that, when you can adopt?” as a female friend rhetorically put it to me. As a man I am in no position to judge the pros and cons of pregnancy. How could I possibly make a judgement on that? All the same: how very modern. If the statistics are correct, and if these young women follow through on their plans, there is a good chance one or two of them will look to the developing world for children. Which leads me to a thought I’m not sure that I wanted: would we then, as a society, have arrived at a place where childbirth, like so many other unpleasant things, was being contracted out to the women of the developing world?

Originally published @the Independent (Image: the Independent)

Twitter crime: The state should not have the power to punish people for being offensive

Several years ago, in a conversation with a fellow student on my university’s online debating forum, I encountered a mentality I have long since grown familiar with. The dialogue had started amiably enough. On the question of whether or not religion was a force for good in the world, I had taken the position that it was not. My opponent posited that it had. Not much of interest so far, you might say. The cordial atmosphere got decidedly chilly, however, as the conversation progressed.

Student: “Those blowing themselves up and committing atrocities are using religion as an excuse for what they are doing.”

Me: “But you can find justification for all sorts of atrocities against non-believers, apostates and others in the Holy texts.”

Student: “How dare you say that! That is deeply offensive. Lots of us have faith and don’t go around doing the things you say that religious people do.”

Me: “No, I wasn’t saying that….”

Student: “I can’t believe you are being so insensitive!”

Soon afterwards the fledgling online forum where the debate had taken place was pulled down and I was dragged before the head of faculty and admonished for my “insensitivity”. Fifteen minutes of our subsequent politics lecture was also given over to a muddled talk on how it wasn’t kosher to “disrespect” the beliefs of other students. At the time something occurred to me that the late Christopher Hitchens had written in a reflection on the student rebellions of 1968. “We didn’t want the dean telling us what we could smoke or who we could sleep with or what we could wear, or anything of this sort,” Hitchens wrote. “Now you go to campus and student activists are continuously demanding more supervision, of themselves and of others, in order to assure proper behaviour and in order to ensure that nobody gets upset.”

This mentality has taken on a life of its own in recent years as it has become increasingly unexceptional to hear of individuals who have been carted off by the police for saying things which have in some way caused “offense”. A recent example was that of Liam Stacey, a 21-year-old university student who sent a flurry of offensive tweets into cyberspace as Fabrice Muamba lay in a critical condition on a football pitch. It started when Stacey posted “LOL, F*** Muamba. He’s dead” on Twitter. After this had earned him the considerable wrath of other Twitter users, who re-tweeted Stacey’s vile message en masse, he lashed out with a volley of guttersnipe racist abuse. Stacey was subsequently given a 56-day jail term. In a separate incident last month another man was arrested for “malicious communication” after allegedly sending Newcastle United defender Danny Simpson abuse via Twitter. And yesterday a teenager from Weymouth was arrested after tweeting Olympic diver Tom Daley saying: “You let your dad down i hope you know that.” (Daley’s father passed away last year after a long battle with brain cancer).

A throat-clearing is required to make myself absolutely clear: to defend a person’s right to use vile language is not to defend the sentiment behind the words. Nor is it to defend those instances of sustained abuse that constitute harassment. But as George Orwell once said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. To point out that the language used by Stacey and others was abhorrent would be an understatement. It would also be to miss the point, for once you start to argue over which words a person should or should not go to jail for using you may as well be quibbling over whether or not a sick man should be turned over in bed.

One of the arguments put forward by those who believe in prohibitive speech laws is that while it might be ok to criticise ideologies and religions, insulting things which are innate, such as a person’s race, sexuality or gender, must be strictly off limits. At first this sounds entirely reasonable. You cannot help the way you were born and therefore you should not have to put up with abuse for it. And yet if you believe the law should get involved at this point you must set down some definitions of those characteristics which are “innate” and therefore off limits. Doing so in many cases is almost impossible.

Take sexism for example. Certain things are quite obviously sexist and accepted as such. Informing a woman that she deserves to be treated differently for no other reason than her gender is sexist. Most people would agree on that. Things get trickier, however, as you reach more contentious ground. What about the person who claims that some of the behavioural differences between men and women may be hard-wired biologically as opposed to being the result of differences in how male and female children are socialised? Would such a person be considered beyond the pale? Would it be acceptable to drag them through the courts on charges related to hate speech? After all, I’m quite sure a statement like this would upset someone. Alternatively we might settle on a definition of hate speech that includes only racial insults. But by what objective standard are insults based on a person’s skin colour more hurtful than abuse suffered because of a disability, or because a person is overweight? And how do you quantify hurt feelings without making them the exclusive preserve of a few arbitrarily selected groups?

This is in no way an attempt to play down the suffering of those on the receiving end of abuse, online or otherwise. Nor is it to make excuses for those who use the anonymity of the internet to blight the lives of others. But racism and prejudice are combated most effectively when the public reaction to those airing vile views is punishment in and of itself. The disgust shown by a large number of Twitter users to the comments of Liam Stacey demonstrates that as a society we are getting to that point, slowly but surely, without needing to hand the power to sanction people with unpalatable (and even repulsive) opinions to the state. After all, what makes us think it will be easy to take those powers back?

Originally published @the Independent. (Image: the Independent)