Tories: a party of integrity

There are moments when I fear I do the British Tory Party an injustice. 

At times, it strikes me as profoundly dishonest, bordering on corrupt. However, this is merely a matter of point of view and that, viewed in a different light, the Tory Party does just what it’s committed to doing, in full and without reservation.

Conservative fundraising dinner.
Where the wealthy buy access to ministers, and get what the paid for

When a flight or a train I’m planning to catch is delayed or cancelled, I don’t just feel irritation at the inconvenience, I also have a sense of being cheated. It feels to me that when I handed over money for my ticket, the train company or airline entered into a contract with me to deliver me, on time, to the agreed destination. When it fails to do that, I feel they’ve broken their commitment to me.

There are, of course, circumstances beyond the control of the companies: they can’t be blamed for an icebound airport or, as happened on a recent train journey of mine, a fire at London’s Euston station. No, I’m talking about the kind of delay explained away as “due to the late arrival of the inbound aircraft”. What? “We’re late because we were late already”? We’re supposed to say, “oh, well, that’s OK then”?

It’s clearly an increasingly widespread belief that such behaviour isn’t acceptable. That’s why airlines and train companies are having to reimburse passengers for poor service. There is a general feeling that it is in the nature of a paid, commercial transaction that the provider of the service enters a commitment to its customers, and must honour it or compensate them.

The British Conservative and Unionist Party is nothing if it is not the embodiment of the commercial spirit. It is just what it’s paid for. Like a good company, it takes payments from its customers and delivers a service to them.

Some voters are naïve enough to think that this means it owes a service to everyone. We all pay, after all. But the reality is that we pay the government, through taxation, but even when the Tories are in power, that isn’t the same thing as the Tory Party. A great many of us pay nothing to the Tory Party; some, and I include myself in this number, are even benighted enough to make contributions to a different party. In my case, the one best placed to replace it in power.

How can we possibly expect the Tories to look after us?

Indeed, they don’t. The last ten years have seen the lowest rate of income growth in Britain for – wait for it – drum roll – 150 years. The ten years of weak growth have been covered by three years of financial crash followed by seven years – yes, you’ve got it – of Tory government.

As income growth across the board stalls and inflation rises, the Resolution Foundation – from whose report that figure came – finds that living standards are falling, and have been falling for three quarters now.

This is affecting the vast majority of the income distribution. Inequality is falling across 99% of the population. But that does leave a precious 1%.

It’s what’s happening to that 1% that changes the picture. That is, of course, the 1% at the top. Where I use the words top and bottom in terms of income, naturally, not worth. Their income is now growing fast enough to account, on its own, for growing inequality in Britain, despite the lowering inequality across the other 99%.

Indeed, with 8.5% of the all national income, the top 1% have now recovered to where they were before the crash. That’s just short of the all-time high, back in 2009-2010, of 8.7%.

So the Tories have delivered. Just not to everyone. All that guff about “all in it together” that we were given back in 2010 – well, it was just guff.

Now let’s see who pays for the Tory Party.

According to the Electoral Commission, as the recent general election campaign got under way, in the week of 3 to 9 May, the Conservatives received £4.1m as opposed to the £2.7m that went to Labour. Some of the contributions were particularly striking:

• John Griffin, founder of the huge and growing taxi company Addision Lee, paid £900,000.
• John Armitage, Britain's ninth-richest hedge fund manager, stumped up £500,000
• Sir Henry and Lady Keswick gave £25,000 each. Sir Henry previously owned the right-wing magazine, The Spectator.
• David Mayhew, who formerly chaired banking group JP Morgan Cazenove, gave £25,000
• Property developer David Rowland gave £200,000.

So it goes on. The outstandingly wealthy paid for Tory success at the polls. I say ‘paid’ advisedly: these aren’t gifts, they are purchases. And as when I buy a rail or air ticket, the purchaser expects something in return.

The Tories are delivering. No “delayed because we were late” for them. They take the money, they send the wealth flowing back towards the wealthiest.

Which, when you think about, is a kind of integrity of its own. Isn’t it?

A dire anniversary, which calls for action

Thirty years ago today, on 3 December 1984, the people of Bhopal in Central India woke up to the realisation that their city had been the victim of perhaps the worst industrial accident the world has seen.

Overnight, the toxic gas Methyl Isocyanate leaked from the local fertiliser plant run by Union Carbide. Estimates of deaths vary, though it seems likely that 8000 died within a fortnight and 8000 later on as a result of the poisoning. The Indian government counted nearly 600,000 injuries, some 42,000 of them serious including nearly 4000 permanently disabling.

Bhopal victims lie where they fell, on 3 December 1984

To this day, there are children in Bhopal struggling with serious disability that most experts attribute to the accident, though the allegations is impossible to prove.

Eventually, Union Carbide paid $470 million in compensation, which works out at around $900 million in today’s terms. Taking only the deaths into account, that works out at about $56,000 per life, about $3000 more than US median salary currently. It seems that the worth of an Indian life takes a relatively low-paid US worker just over a year to earn, and that’s if we think the injuries to survivors count for nothing.

Union Carbide now belongs to Dow Chemical. For the year up to the third quarter of 2014 its earnings (profit) were about $2.3 billion, approximately twice the compensation paid for Bhopal. It paid its Chief Executive, Andrew N. Liveris, a little over $20 million last year, or a tad under the equivalent of 360 Bhopal lives.

In 2013, Dow Chemical paid over a million dollars in political contributions, getting on for 20 Bhopal lives’ worth. They contributed to both main parties in the US though, if we exclude the sums going to ostensibly non-party Political Action Committees and the like, Republicans received nearly four times as much as Democrats.

Like most large corporations, Dow is buying itself politicians, and is principally favouring its natural allies in the Republican Party.

By coincidence, today, as well as being the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, also saw newspaper stories about the physicist Stephen Hawking. He was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease at 21 and given two years to live; this year, he celebrated his 72nd birthday.

He owes his survival to his doctors. But he owes his ability to communicate, given that he now can only do so through moving a cheek muscle, to Intel with whom he has collaborated for many years. The work the company has done with him will benefit many highly disabled people.

Comparing the Intel and Dow stories teaches a key lesson: corporations are neither good nor bad, any more than guns are. What matters, in both areas, is what use we make of them. Helping Steven Hawking and others afflicted by a terrible debilitating disease? Good. Poisoning Bhopal? Bad.

It’s the same with guns. Sometimes we just have to use them, whether it’s to defeat the Nazis or ISIS. At other times, we’d like them securely locked away somewhere. Over here in Europe, we have taken strict steps to make sure they are, steps the US would do well to imitate.

Sadly, however, though we haven’t allowed the US to influence us out of gun regulation – we have, you might say, stuck to our guns – we seem to be having trouble breaking with US thinking on regulating our corporations.

Putting that right, so that we move towards a society in which a bunch of reckless bankers can’t put our entire finance system at risk, or a bunch of inept managers poison an entire city in India, feels to me to be as urgent for the world as gun control is in the US. And a lot more important than cutting immigration.

Besides, what better tribute could there be to the suffering citizens of Bhopal?

Who said freedom was free?

Two lines in West Side Story have to be among the best in any musical:

Everything free in America
For a small fee in America

Smart insights, not just memorable songs

So acute, so witty. Though perhaps not entirely accurate: there’s nothing small about the fee. In fact, yesterday a Supreme Court judgement ensured that US freedom commanded an impressive price. Citizens can now enjoy the best freedom money can buy.

Not all citizens, of course. Only the ones who can afford it but, hey, that’s the way things are. Porsche and Dior aren’t available to just anyone, but I’m sure that the knowledge that some people can buy them has to be a comfort to everyone else. When you’re sleeping rough and scrabbling through restaurant bins, it must give you a little joy to know that some people at least can stay at the Hilton and dine out in the best places.

It’s the same with freedom. Ordinary citizens who can’t afford it for themselves should at least take pleasure in the fact that the upstanding individuals who can, are now entitled to buy as much as they want.

The Supreme Court decision means that, while the amount payable to any one candidate by any one individual remains limited, the aggregate amount they can contribute in any two-year election cycle has now been lifted. The man who brought the case, Shaun McCutcheon, is already close to the old limit, $123,200, small change to the people who want to buy themselves some essential freedom.

After all, it’s not a lot more than twice the median income in the US. Investing only the equivalent of two average people’s livelihood for a year might be regarded as small change in truly free circles. Practically the behaviour of a cheapskate.

But fortunately the fetters have been burst. From now on, men like McCutcheon can buy as much freedom as they want, or at least can afford. And will he take advantage of the opportunity?

“Oh, absolutely,” Huffington Post quoted him saying, “yeah, I'm well on the way to meeting [the old limits] already, so certainly I will now. Absolutely.”

A blow for freedom. People must be entitled to spend their money as they wish. And in a nation where lobbies and the super-wealthy had nothing like the influence on the political process that they would like, a great step forward has been taken in realising their ambitions.

The US Supreme Court that struck the blow for freedom.
Though only 5-4.
Against, back row: Sonia Sotomayor (left);
Stephen Bryer (second from left);Elena Kagan, (right)
Front row: Ruth Bader Ginsburg (right)
All the women were against