Labour's playground antics show it has run out of time

Chris Blackhurst
8 Jun 2009

What a shower. If they were in the City, they wouldn't last a second. I write, of course, of the Labour hierarchy that, for the time being at least, is nominally in charge of this country.

Bankers have had a major kicking in recent months, company bosses have been accused of being fat cats, we've had rows about rewards for failure.

But the truth is that all of it is second division alongside the shambles we're witnessing at present.

The bankers who loaned money hand over fist and took their organisations down an expansionist and speculative path may have been greedy and reckless. But they've gone.

Likewise, some corporate chiefs have been singled out for having been paid eye-watering sums.

However, none, as far as I'm aware, were blatantly fiddling their expenses and switching addresses to avoid capital gains tax.

As for rewards for failure, boards have been accused of being too lenient, of allowing executives to walk away with barrowloads of cash after having screwed up.

Yet, the same politicians who have done the sniping stand back and allow their colleagues to carry on working as MPs after these revelations so they can claim their pensions.

They should go from the Commons immediately but nobody has.

What apparently is unacceptable for Sir Fred Goodwin is fine for Hazel Blears and co. It is hypocrisy on a breathtaking scale.

At no time during the banking crisis was there any doubt as to who was running the worst-affected organisations. Love them or loathe them, at least Goodwin, Sir Victor Blank, Lord Stevenson and the rest were in charge.

Here, we have the spectacle at the top of government of someone who no longer commands authority and power sufficiently to do what he would like or what ought to be done. gordon Brown wanted to move Alistair Darling but the Chancellor said "no", so he stayed put. Unbelievable. Does anyone know of a major company that would be managed in such a fashion? Not only that. This isn't any old top job. It's the Chancellor. The Prime Minister no longer has confidence in the person overseeing the nation's finances.

It may be that the loss of support is due more to his expenses claims and "flipping" the location of his second home rather than mismanagement of the economy (some might say, if only Darling had exhibited the same level of diligence towards boosting the Treasury coffers rather than his own, but heigh-ho).

However, that is not the point: Brown has decided that for whatever reason, he should not be Chancellor. Darling disagrees. The result is uncertainty, and the pound slides against the dollar and euro. That, though, is another point. This isn't playground, who-is-in-which gang, stuff. It's grown-up, very real, shop-window conduct.

It's not just we in Britain who are watching, but the world. Perception moves markets and at the moment, nobody likes what they are seeing.

In business, too, the shuffling of jobs willy-nilly simply does not occur.

One moment, Alan Johnson is health secretary; the next, he is at the Home Office. The number of posts held by some ministers during the past 12 years of Labour - names such as John Reid and John Hutton spring to mind - is mind-boggling.

Are we seriously expected to believe they are qualified to do all of them? In a company, if the finance director goes, another financial bod normally takes their place, not the head of HR or the marketing manager.

Yet, in politics, apparently, that's fine. Then, lo and behold, the new incumbents struggle to get on top of their briefs. Promoting from within, which would be more sensible, is more or less frowned upon.

Once someone is deemed to be "Cabinet material" (God knows what that means in the current administration), they're shifted around from department to department. It doesn't happen in commerce, yet these are the people who think they're qualified to pronounce on the City and business, to criticise when they see fit.

Worse, in this particular regime, is their lack of actual, non-political, experience. Seemingly, being a former polytechnic lecturer or an ex-full-time Labour Party researcher makes you suitable to direct a vast government department, to assimilate hugely complex arguments and to formulate massively significant strategies.

Not in my book, or in any management textbook, come to that.

Fair enough, the City has had its pasting. But if this lot were in the Square Mile they would long since have been shown the door.

Brown-Sugar? Not really to my taste

SIR ALAN Sugar as enterprise tsar? As a piece of shameless pandering to celebrity, the installation of the Amstrad founder in Government takes some beating.

Quite what he will achieve is beyond me. More, quite what Gordon Brown imagines he will bring to the circus (sorry, well-oiled Whitehall machine) is equally baffling.

Sugar has his qualities - in the same way that a bare-knuckle cage-fighter is not to be messed with. If he goes in there and says "to hell with all this red tape", more power to his fearsomely sharp elbow.

But his employer, don't forget, is the same person who has singularly failed to do anything to reduce the stifling burden of petty regulation and not only that, has actually succeeded in adding to it. Still, the thought of the grizzly tycoon sitting across the table from the Business Secretary warms the heart, if nothing else. The chances of Lord Mandelson ever being given work in Sugar's empire are absolutely zero - if he were on The Apprentice, he'd be one of the first making the trudge to the waiting taxi.

Pre-packs like Cobra are so hard to swallow

LIKE a lot of people, I went along with the success that was Cobra Beer. Yes, it did occasionally occur to me that I only ever saw it in curry houses - and not even all those, since some offered rival Kingfisher as the "Indian" beer.

I had never been offered a bottle at anyone's house, and I don't recall ever seeing someone put a case through the supermarket till.

What Cobra had, of course, was a profile out of step with its sales. So the company's subsequent financial difficulties did not surprise.

What does provoke shock though, as usual, is the company's pre-pack administration.

Molson Coors gets 50.1%, and a new company controlled by Lord Bilimoria the remaining 49.9%. Bilimoria will be head of the new enterprise, as he was of Cobra.

According to Bilimoria, the administration was the result "of a long and thorough process whereby we explored a variety of options to maximise value for our creditors and stakeholders".

What he should have said was: "We explored the options but then decided not to maximise value for some of our creditors."

Something must be done about pre-packs. It cannot be right that the unsecured creditors are treated in such a cavalier fashion, and that the person who drove the firm into the wall is allowed to pick themselves up and carry on regardless.

Pre-packs are nothing less than a stain on British business.