THE decision on Thursday by the administrators to close all 163 BHS stores and throw 11,000 workers out of a job with immediate effect has caused a storm of ‘moral outrage’ from MPs and business leaders.
Speaking on BBC radio on Friday morning, the head of the Institute of Directors, Simon Walker, abandoned the normal stance of this organisation, which is to defend to the hilt every action by the bosses and instead launched a scathing attack on the former owner of BHS, Sir Philip Green.
Green owned the high street retailer for 15 years until last year, when he sold the company for £1 to a ‘consortium’ led by a man called Dominic Chappell, a three-times bankrupt.
When BHS was placed in the hands of administrators last month with debts of £1.3 billion and a deficit in the workers’ pension fund of £571 million, it quickly emerged that Green and Chappell would not be the ones to suffer.
According to reports in the press, Green pocketed £400 million from BHS before selling it to Chappell, more than enough to pay for the £100 million ‘mega yacht’ he recently purchased.
Chappell, it is alleged, got a further £25 million in fees, and salaries, during his year-long ownership of the company. What BHS workers are getting is the dole and a savage cut in pensions. This blatant looting of BHS has brought down the usual condemnations, with Walker accusing Green of ‘lamentable failure of behaviour’ before adding his real worry that it is ‘deeply damaging’ to the image of British business.
Tory MPs are similarly queuing up to condemn Green for showing the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’. What is scaring them is that the working class is today acutely aware that this is not the unacceptable face of capitalism but its only face.
What Green and the hedge funds did to BHS is exactly what is being carried out by capitalism across the country. Tata Steel sold its Scunthorpe works to a London-based investment firm run by a group of financiers, also for the princely sum of £1.
In return for cuts in pay and pensions of the 4,000-plus workforce, the plant will similarly be kept going for a year while it can be financially looted before being closed forever.
On an even larger scale, this systematic looting and plundering of industry is being carried out by the Tory government in its war against the welfare state and the NHS. Hospitals, saddled with unrepayable PFI debts, are being set up for bankruptcy. No doubt they too will be sold off for a pound to the privateers, while the Tories attempt to impose new wage-cutting contracts on NHS workers.
While thousands of jobs are being lost and thousands more workers being forced to take pay cuts and watch as their pension funds are systematically looted for the profit of the capitalists and bankers, the leaders of the trade unions sit back and do nothing.
Indeed, Unite leader Len McCluskey positively welcomed the selling for one pound of the Scunthorpe steelworks to a hedge fund. On the closure of BHS, all the shopworkers’ union USDAW could say was to urge the Tories to cut the business rate and for the administrators to consult with the staff.
This passive acceptance by the trade union leadership of the wholesale collapse of manufacturing and service industries along with its refusal to fight for the NHS or for any of the gains of the working class must be stopped immediately.
The lesson from the collapse of BHS and the collapse of the steel industry will be learnt by the working class. Capitalism today is so bankrupt that it cannot provide any future for workers and their families.
The time is ripe to demand that the TUC leaders fight by calling a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers government that will nationalise all industry and the banks under the management of the working class. This is the only way to stop the plunderers.
