The politicians' turn

They're enjoying this, aren't they?

With opinion polls showing that the British public are getting angrier with the direction the country is going under the coalition government, it's no surprise that the politicians are casting around for someone to blame. And with conspicuous parts of the private sector suffering a meltdown in competence or integrity (or both), our elected representatives have plenty of targets to attack.

This morning the CEO of the security firm G4S, Nick Buckles, was subjected to ritual disembowelling by a parliamentary committee.  Buckles's firm has totally botched a huge contract to supply security guards for the Olympic Games, forcing the government to call up thousands of military and police personnel at short notice to fill the gap.

It doesn't help matters that Buckles looks like everyone's caricature of a used car salesman, and it certainly didn't help this morning when he boldly asserted that despite all the problems, G4S still intended to claim its management fee of over £50 million for the Olympics contract.  Even so, it's just a bit too convenient for the politicians to have Buckles and his company as a scapegoat.  After all, it wasn't Buckles who decided, seven months before the Games, that the number of security guards needed was not the 2,000 originally agreed, but something north of 10,000: that was the fault of the organising committee, LOCOG, which reports to the Home Office. Looking further back, it wasn't Buckles who allowed Lord Coe and his posh pals to bid for the Games in the first place, with an entirely fictitious budget of £2.4 billion, only to land the taxpayer with a tab of about £10 billion.  That was Tony Blair.  But that's all forgotten now.  

Then there's the banking scandal, which rumbles on without anyone in the media ever quite seeming to understand the issues.  The behaviour of Barclays was certainly underhanded, but it almost certainly wasn't illegal, and nobody is having much success in proving (as opposed to asserting) that anyone other than Barclays' wholesale market counterparts was injured in the process.  That hasn't inhibited the politicians.  Nor has the fact that it's the "light touch" regulatory regime that seems to be making London something of an epicentre for financial shenanigans -- a regime that has had the enthusiastic support of Labour and Tory politicians alike. (I'm not saying this to excuse the bank's behaviour.  However, it's the lax regulatory regime that causes this sort of thing to be concentrated in London, rather than in other global financial centres where the regulators actually pay attention to what's going on).

One particularly grating aspect of all this is that politicians now seem to be arrogating to themselves the right to decide who may or may not be suitable to run big public companies.  Even before the G4S and banking foofaraws, Rupert Murdoch was blithely informed by a group of pols that he wasn't a fit and proper person to be running News International.  Political pressure has removed the top management from Barclays, leaving one of the most important companies in the UK leaderless at a time of continuing financial peril.  And this morning, Nick Buckles was told in no uncertain terms that he should "consider his position" once the Games are over.

Wow.  Is there anything these politicians don't know best about?  Oh, that's right: running the country.