Tony Rice is not a bad man, but he's cashed in on a shockingly dysfunctional system

This isn't an article about what a bad man Tony Rice is. It's an article about the systemic failures of unregulated capitalism when governments take a Laissez-Faire attitude to public safety.

The fact that Tony works for the homelessness and housing charity Shelter and runs a health and safety products company (Halma) suggest that he actually cares about issues like housing, poverty and public safety.

Tony probably thinks of himself as an upstanding citizen who has devoted much of his valuable time to make the world a better safer place, and he's probably right. But on the other hand the private equity group Xerxes that he chairs is the sole shareholder in Omnis Exteriors, which is the company that manufactured the flammable cladding that was stuck all over the surface of the Grenfell tower block.

In 2015-16 (the year the cladding was installed on Grenfell tower) Omnis reported profits of £1.2 million, £950,000 of which was paid to Xerxes Equity, where Tony is the chairman and biggest shareholder.

The kind of plastic filled cladding that Xerxes have profited from selling has been banned in countries like Germany and the United States for years, and has been implicated in high rise fires all over the world, but somehow the British government never saw fit to ban the practice of sticking highly flammable materials all over the surfaces of high rise buildings.

Apparently Omnis also produces fireproof cladding for just £2 extra per square metre which raises some serious questions.

1. Why did Omnis continue selling highly flammable cladding when they had the capacity to produce a non-flammable alternative?

2. Why was flammable plastic-filled cladding not banned in the UK when it has been implicated in so many rapid high rise fires across the world? 

3. Who signed off on the decision to save an estimated £5,000 in renovation costs by choosing the flammable cladding for Grenfell tower rather than the fireproof version?

The answer to the first question is that there was nothing to stop them. The answer to the second question is that public safety is terribly incompatible with Tory Laissez-Faire ideology. And the answer to the third will surely come out at some point during the criminal inquest.

Since 2010 the Tories have had an ideological fixation with cutting safety regulations. David Cameron's 2012 New Year's resolution was the extraordinary commitment to "kill off health and safety culture for good", so the idea of them actually impinge upon corporate profits by introducing new legislation to stop people coating high rise residential buildings in highly flammable plastic is beyond ridiculous. The Tories have actually been on an ideological mission to reduce public safety regulations in order to boost corporate profits, so the introduction of any new rules would have been seen as massively counter-productive.

I'm fairly sure that until it actually happened, Tony Rice never even thought about the possibility that scores of people would be burned alive as a result of the products his private equity group was making huge sums from selling, but that's where under-regulated capitalism fails.

When markets become under-regulated free-for-alls where companies can sell dangerous products, and governments blithely ignore repeated warnings from experts that such products are dangerous and should be banned, then companies will obviously choose the easy profits, and people will die.

I'm sure that Tony Rice is devastated that he had a hand in turning Grenfell tower into such a horrifying death trap, and wishes that someone in the chain of command that he topped had realised the unscrupulousness of selling such dangerous flammable products when the company actually had the capacity to manufacture the fireproof version, but this remorse is too late for the victims now.

All the sorrow and remorse in the world won't bring the dead back to life.

Omnis offered the option of saving a minuscule amount of money off the renovation costs by choosing the flammable option, the private equity owners considered that they had no corporate responsibility to put public safety ahead of their profits, the building owners decided to save a few paltry grand by choosing the flammable option, the government ignored expert advice and failed to intervene to outlaw such dangerous products and risky cost-cutting measures, and now people are dead as a consequence.

The horrifying tragedy at Grenfell tower is shocking and highly visible evidence that under-regulated capitalism, and uncaring governments cost lives.

Let's hope that the UK government takes measures to ban flammable cladding as soon as possible, and that Tony Rice does everything in his power to now take some belated corporate responsibility and ensure these flammable cladding products are removed from the market even before the government ban is put in place.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Tories sell NHS blood supply to vampire capitalists

On July 18th 2013 another part of the NHS was flogged off to the private sector with barely a whisper from the mainstream press. The lucky recipient of Plasma Resources UK was Bain Capital, a gigantic US based private equity fund that should be familiar to anyone that paid attention to the US presidential election in 2012.

The Republican candidate Mitt Romney was repeatedly slammed for his involvement in Bain Capital, because of their appalling record of hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts (borrowing vast sums in order to buy a company, then lumbering the company itself with the debt used to fund their own buyout), asset stripping, tax-dodging and exportation of American jobs to China.

Plasma Resources UK is responsible for the vital supply of blood plasma to the NHS and Bain Capital have now inserted themselves into the "blood market" and will use these blood donations in order to turn a profit for themselves. I'm fairly sure you don't have to be as left-wing as me to be appalled at the idea of a ruthless US based financial behemoth cashing in on the supply of blood products at the taxpayers' expense.

One of the most concerning things about the sale is that several reputable medical companies and one specialist blood supplies company were overlooked in favour of handing the contract to this unaccountable private equity group with an appalling reputation. Another extremely concerning element of the privatisation is that it was sold for just £90 million upfront (that's only 80% of the PRUK annual turnover). The few press outlets that bothered to report the sale stated £200 or £230 million, however these future payments are conditional on the profitability of the business. It's hardly beyond the realms of imagination to think that a pack of vampire capitalists like Bain Capital might be able to financially engineer huge paper losses, so that they never have to stump up the rest of the cash is it?

There was absolutely nothing in the Tory party manifesto about selling off this vital component of the NHS blood supply. In fact, David Cameron was still lying in May 2011 when he said "Let me be clear – there will be no privatisation, there will be no cherry-picking from private providers" (link to video).

The worst thing about this sale is not that it has happened, nor that Cameron lied. It is known to us all that Tories flog off the national silver and Cameron is a habitual liar. The worst thing is the craven complicity of the mainstream media.

The BBC failed to mention the sale at all, instead focusing on the usual distractionary flim-flam. They didn't bother to hold Cameron or the Tories to account because they didn't even bother to mention the completion of this privatisation at all. The right-wing Telegraph ran a financial piece, which was reasonably balanced, in that it offered very little overt praise and absolutely no criticism of the deal. The only negative coverage of this scandalous privatisation appeared on the websites of the Guardian and the Independent, where David Owen (a former health minister) was quoted as saying:

"It's hard to conceive of a worse outcome for a sale of this particularly sensitive national health asset than a private equity company with none of the safeguards in terms of governance of a publicly quoted company and being answerable to shareholders ... Is there no limit to what and how this coalition government will privatise?"

The story of this reckless privatisation has been completely ignored by TV news, and barely reported in the mainstream press. In my view this media silence must be considered as complicity. The government knows that the majority of the public would have grave concerns about a vital component of the NHS being sold off to a foreign company with a famous reputation as a "job destroyer". The Tories know it's bound to be unpopular, so it is of massive convenience to them that the BBC and the right-wing press have remained so silent on the issue. As far as the Tories are concerned, the fewer people that even know about it the better.

So it's been left up to a couple of low-circulation broadsheets and a few independent bloggers like myself and Éoin Clarke, to speak out against this reckless fire sale of a key component of the NHS.

*Note this article was amended to remove the mistaken assertion that blood plasma supplies come from charitable donations. All plasma supplies come from US donors, who are paid $20 - $25 per donation. The reason that British blood is not used to create plasma products is the theoretical risk of CJD (human "mad cow disease") contamination. Boycotting the donation of blood in response to this story is not advised. Such actions would only undermine the already hard-pressed UK blood donation service, and would do nothing at all to diminish the profitability of the Bain Capital blood plasma business.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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