VW, News UK, Barclays Bank: ignorance isn't cheap

On 3 July 2012, we learned that Bob Diamond had stepped down from his position as Chief Executive of Barclays Banks. The Bank was beset by scandal, specifically charges that it had rigged the London interbank lending rate LIBOR.

A week later, we learned that he had generously waived his right to some £20 million of bonus payments, so he would be leaving with the pittance of a year’s salary, amounting to £2 million. That would barely cover the pay of 195 people on minimum wage, such as the cleaners who made sure that he had a physically clean environment to work in, however morally polluted it might have been.

Diamond made it clear that he knew absolutely nothing about the LIBOR rigging.

In 2002, the voicemail of a missing thirteen-year old schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, was hacked by journalists working for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Because they were listened to, messages on the voicemail were automatically deleted, giving Milly’s parents the hope that she might have deleted them herself and therefore still be alive, when in fact she had already been murdered.

In July 2014, Rebekah Brooks, editor of the News of the World at the time Milly Dowler’s and great many others’ phones were hacked, was cleared of all charges arising from the criminal activity. She claimed that she knew nothing of the practice, although she was editor at the time it happened.

Despite her blessed ignorance, Rebekah Brooks had to suffer the indignity of seeing the closure of the newspaper that she edited while it was hacking phones. She also had to step down as Chief Executive of News International, the representative on Earth, or at least in Britain, of the equally blessed Rupert. In consolation, all she could turn to was the £10.8 million payoff that Murdoch’s organisation gave her. That’s quite a long way short of what 1000 workers on minimum wage might make in a year.

Fortunately, however, the Sun on Sunday has filled the gap left by the loss of the News of the World. And, equally fortunately, we heard just this month that Rebekah herself was to be appointed as Chief Executive of News U.K., as News International is now known. It seems that the industry she graced for so many years is not to be deprived of her special skills any longer.

VW: a dirtier story than we'd been led to believe

On 23 September this year, the then Chief Executive of Volkswagen, Martin Winterkorn, stood down from his post, following the scandal over emissions test rigging. That took the form of fitting special software on the emissions monitoring system of diesel VW cars, so that it could detect when tests were being carried out, and run emission control systems that were turned off in normal driving.

He went despite claiming that he had absolutely no knowledge of the fraud. He was paid a little more than 15 million euros last year. That’s the equivalent of around 850 German workers on minimum wage.

What do these cases all have in common? They involve people who took massive salaries. Such payments are generally justified by the responsibility accepted by the senior executives who are paid that much. Responsibility, some might feel, requires an understanding of the organisation these people lead. But that’s the other point all three have in common: on their own admission – claim, actually – they had no knowledge at all of the wrongdoing in their teams.

Still. Who are we to question whether our major enterprises are making any rational link, between the remuneration they offer their top people, and their competence?

Banks and the NHS: the joy of numbers

Numbers are such fun.

Here are a couple. Barclays Bank has 481 senior staff who were paid over a million pounds last year. A large proportion of that money came out of its bonus pool that amounted to £2.4 billion.

Meanwhile, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which offers guidance on safe practice in healthcare, has reported that nursing levels have fallen to levels at which many hospitals can no longer operate separately.

Nurses: numbers are falling to levels where safety is compromised

The government maintains loudly and repeatedly that this has nothing to do with funding: “...hospitals must balance their books whilst ensuring compassionate quality care for all. We know this can and is being done – safe staffing levels lead to better care and can save the NHS money.”

Nevertheless, the service itself knows that faced with the challenge to save £20 billion by 2015, issued when the current government took office in 2010, many hospitals responded by cutting staff numbers. The Royal College of Nursing finds that there are hospitals now with 16% of their nurse posts unfilled. 

Ironically, the economy drive while damaging hasn’t even achieved anything like the savings wanted, as the service is spending several hundred million pounds a year on bank nurses. Just to avoid confusion, that’s not the same kind of bank: it’s the system by which nurses can earn more by doing extra shifts for a fee significantly higher than normal pay. That’s what hospitals are having to pay to make up shortfalls.

NICE now calculates that to get back to safe levels would require in the region of 20,000 more nurses in the service. The cost would be around £700 million: the rule of thumb figure used is £35,000 per year per nurse.

That’s what it would cost to make us all safer at those moments when we most need to be protected, when we’re ill enough to be in hospital.

Now let’s look at those figures again.

481 staff at Barclays bank made at least a million last year. That’s enough for nearly 30 nurses each. And that’s a minimum: many of those million-plus executives took a great deal more.

Barclays Bank set aside £2.4 billion to pay its staff bonuses for last year, a year in which the Bank’s performance actually fell. So for bad performance, it set aside nearly three and a half times what it would cost to make the whole of the NHS safe for all of us.

Barclays Bank has also just announced 19,000 redundancies. Those powerful executives, being paid enough to staff an entire hospital ward on their own, are going to earn their money by taking a lot of people paid a great deal less, and throwing them onto the unemployment scrapheap.

Meanwhile, the government is extremely unlikely to dig up the funds to find the 20,000 extra nurses our hospitals need.

It may, of course, just be me. But I feel these figures say just one thing: this society of ours has got its values into a complete mess.

And just one question springs to mind: how can anyone still be planning to vote again for the parties that make up the current ConDem government? Or, given that UKIP shares its stance on the NHS, its main challenger to the right either?

The things we do to Africa...

We used to rape the continent, for gold and slaves, and we still keep kicking Africa around like a football. We dump our worst products on it. We charge it more in loan interest than we give in aid. And every now and then we send in troops to various bits, usually from the former colonial power, to make sure the locals know they’re not really in charge.

Why, we even use it from time to time as a source of photo ops for our failing politicians. Did you see David Cameron, at the Mandela funeral, trying to get in on the Danish PM’s selfie with Barack Obama? The man’s shameless.

Is that Cameron trying to muscle in on Helle Thorning Schmidt's 
selfie with an actual world leader?

Now it’s emerged that ‘Boris Bikes’ are beginning to turn up in the Gambia. For the uninitiated, ‘Boris Bikes’ are bicycles available for hire in various places in London, which can be ridden to other places and dropped off again. They’re called ‘Boris Bikes’ in honour of the modest and self-effacing Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

You get what honour you can, I suppose.

It seems they’re now being stolen in large numbers and shipped off to the Gambia where they’re being spotted in villages. Perhaps we should be grateful that Britain is at last making a little restitution for all the exploitation of the past, even if only unofficially and as a result of criminal action.

Photo from the Daily Telegraph of a Boris bike in the Gambia

My only regret is that they’ve only taken Boris’s bikes, and not Boris himself. Still, the Gambia is run by an unhinged egomaniac convinced he’s God’s gift to mankind, so they really don't have a need for Boris, unlike his bikes.

Someone who does seem to be invading Africa in the near future is former Barclays Bank Chief Executive, Bob Diamond. You may remember that he had to leave Barclays under a bit of a shadow: the bank had just been caught fiddling the rates at which banks lend money to each other.

Diamond provided a striking demonstration of the principle by which senior executives only receive their astronomical remuneration because they take responsibility for what happens in the organisations they lead. On his watch, the bank lost about half its share value, and he claimed not to have known anything about the rate rigging. So he suffered the penalty of giving up some £20 million of bonus, meaning he left with only about £3 million. Practically destitute.

And now he’s back. He and a mate have launched a new company, Atlas Mara Co-Nvest, which is designed to go looking for exciting new prospects in Africa.

Aaah. Doesn't Bob Diamond look like an amiable rogue?
But I'm not sure of the amiability

Things don’t look promising. I mean, the company’s an investment vehicle and they can’t even spell ‘invest’. And it’s likely to focus on Financial Services, the field in which Diamond has won such a reputation. Or do I mean notoriety?

We blessed Africa with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, constant colonial wars, borders that don’t correspond to ethnicity, a white regime in South Africa that gave the world apartheid. 

And now we’re sending them Bob Diamond. Haven’t they suffered enough?