Frank Field, the former Labour MP for Birkenhead, where many of his former constituents work for Shop Direct, said that the Commons business committee should consider looking at how such huge private business empires are run. He said that while public companies could be called to account by shareholders and by City investors, many large private companies were controlled by wealthy individuals.
“Can’t have people run their own businesses with their own money. We must intervene. For the poor.”
And when the Barclay brothers tell you to fuck off, what’s the plan, Frank?
His concern for people who work for John Lewis, legal and accounting partnerships, innumerable unlisted companies is so obvious, isn’t it?
Most of the time most people running businesses (or anything else) find that the difficult bit is attracting and retaining good staff.
That is the key constraint on the tendency of people in authority to misbehave. It’s when there is a surplus of talent – e.g. pretty actresses in Hollywood – that the ogres get off with their antics.
What we need is companies run by poor individuals (That’s easy to achieve – the Sage of Ely’s an expert)
If they are wealthy, then they probably ran the business okay.
‘The billionaire Barclays’
I rest my case.
‘… many large private companies were controlled by wealthy individuals.‘
Like Government then, except the wealthy individuals in Government are not risking their own money, nor do they produce anything anyone willingly buys.
And you can guarantee that a small number of wealthy individuals will be a damn sight tougher shareholders to please than the huge number of smaller shareholders (or as is more likely to be case, large groups of uninterested nominee shareholders) of a public company.
Chains of accountability are a very great deal shorter and much less principal/agent problem in the former case
Get you own house in order.
Government run “businesses” treat their underpaid staff shockingly bad in miserable working conditions, the spectacle of seeing Sport Direct come under the scrutiny of the same folks who run the NHS is irony at its best, Mike Ashley might have been a bit of a sh*t but he pales into comparison with the numpty at Basildon Hospital who killed off 2,000 people and then cut wages by 25%.