Next in the stocks … the banks, Blair and the royals

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/22/philip-green-bhs-banks-tony-blair-royal-family

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A curious little cameo always plays out at the high court at the end of a day of evidence in the trial of a person accused of a serious sexual crime against women or young children. As the van carrying the accused sweeps out of the gates, a small crowd rushes forward, spitting venom at the alleged perpetrator. The police prevent the mob rushing the vehicle, but in a half-hearted fashion. After all, they seem to be saying, you can hardly blame these good, law-abiding and child-loving citizens for venting their fury at someone who has been accused of such heinous crimes.

You always wonder, though, what else motivates some people to make their way to the courtroom and hang around before their quarry appears. I’ve been at trials like this and watched the crowd surge forward. In the main, the throng is made up of people from edgy neighbourhoods of the type that make civilised people hold their noses.

The trial of someone accused of evil doings gives them the opportunity to say to politer society: “Look, you might think we are a thoroughly bad and disreputable lot, but at least we’re not as bad as him.” They feel better about themselves for a little while because they realise that they are not quite so bad after all.

It’s why sex offenders are targeted by other inmates. “You might think we’re hopeless criminals,” say the common thieves and murderers, “but we are still a few notches higher on the food chain than these nonces.” They compete with each other to land a blow on these dregs of society, knowing that someone will call the Sun or the Star, which will report that the sex offender got his “just deserts”.

In the Commons on Thursday, another mob gathered and assembled stocks, in which they placed the virtual character of Sir Philip Green before spending three hours lobbing rotten food at him. Green was like the former boss of the Mirror group of newspapers, Robert Maxwell; he was an “asset-stripper”. He was “a billionaire spiv” who ought never to have received his knighthood. In fact, to many who sat on the green benches, he was worse than all these things: he had “shamed British capitalism”.

The right honourable ladies and gentlemen were beside themselves with glee at being handed this rare opportunity to show the country that, whatever we might think of them, they are essentially decent coves. None of them would ever stoop to the levels of avarice that Greenp did, as he enriched himself at the expense of BHS and its 11,000 employees and their hard-earned pension funds.

The Tories, though, have a higher category of opprobrium in which to bank all the disdain they have for Green. It’s the one that they use for the crime of “getting caught”. Green, you see, had become too greedy and had been caught and this had led to unwelcome scrutiny of capitalism and its nature. In normal circumstances, the Tories and their camp followers in the rightwing press can brand the enemies of capitalism as “socialists” or “the hard left”, seeking to steal the hard-earned cash of successful people and break up their assets.

Green, though, is one of them and so he would have to be sacrificed. Best to do it in public and let people know that as well as “bad capitalism” there is a lot of “good capitalism” and that most people are “good capitalists”. Soon, everyone will forget it as quickly as they forgot about all those people and all those companies whose names appeared in the Panama Papers and whose money has paid for thousands of prizes at Tory fundraising dinners. These Tories at Westminster, ably supported by Labour’s Blairites, are famed for giving capitalism a good name. What is it they say again when, regrettably, a company is taken over, its name changed, its historic debts unpaid, its workers sacked, its assets liquidated and the business renamed with fresh funding? “A little pruning now and then is cherished by the wisest men.”

Why, the Royal Bank of Scotland avidly sought to fill its boots by going after small businesses and imposing impossible terms and conditions on loans and overdrafts in a practice known internally as “the dash for cash”. This bank and its brother institutions in the UK’s banking cartel, such as the Bank of Scotland, brought the nation to the brink of economic catastrophe. In the eight years since, not a single boss has faced criminal charges.

Perhaps next month Theresa May could organise another one of these fun-filled parliamentary occasions when MPs get to pillory people and institutions. I would go further and have an annual X Factor and Great British Bake Off-themed event in which the public gets to strip a handful of prominent people and venerable businesses that have been caught with their long-johns down. We could call it The Purge. Using our telephones and smart devices, we could gather around the television and vote for all the other Philip Greens (the UK supports loads of them). First up would be the aforementioned RBS. I would propose taking away its right to use the title Royal. As we have a Bank of Scotland, that would be the end of RBS… and good riddance. This institution has cost Britain much more trouble and money than Green.

Then, of course, we’d have Tony Blair. He doesn’t have any UK honours but he has loads of massive properties. For his great act of folly in leading us into an illegal war, one of his properties should be confiscated every year until he finally decides to apologise for misleading the nation and making us a puppet state of George Bush’s hillbilly administration.

For the royal family, we could have a royal It’s A Knockout-themed show, in honour of Prince Edward’s dismal attempt at breaking into light entertainment in 1987. Here, we could get several of the most pointless royals, such as their Edward, Charles and Andrew, to fight it out across a series of obstacles to avoid being removed from the civil list.

We could hold this every year until not a single one of this family, which has cost the country more than Sir Philip Green, took not another penny from the public purse.