Your Building Society ???

by Christopher Draper

BUILDING societies, like most good things, were invented in the North.

Founded by workers as mutual aid organisations, building societies provided a safe home for meagre savings so that in the long term members could secure homes for themselves and their families.  Over the decades the money men and city spivs moved in, privatised many societies and subverted democratic control of the rest.  You won’t see many millionaire money men walking the streets of Bradford these days but you’ll find a fair few if you pop into the Boardroom of the Yorkshire Building Society (YBS), a mutual aid for the wealthy.

Hell and Halifax

YBS isn’t the only example of the hollowing-out of the mutualist ideas and working class ideals of the original building societies.  The capitalist feeding frenzy that privatised the ‘Halifax Building Society’ (then Britain’s biggest) and then almost destroyed it shows YBS and other remaining ‘mutuals’ have further to fall from their idealistic origins.  A comprehensive analysis of every surviving mutual would be onerous to compile and boring to read so I’ll concentrate on contrasting the professed ideals of YBS with the actualite but the critique applies across the board.

'Our Society'

YBS ‘members’ who legally own the ‘society’ nowadays play no greater role in the business than they do in MacDonalds, Google, Asda or any other retailer yet YBS, like the other fake mutuals, constantly claims we do. ‘Our Society a Place Where We Belong', “Members…at the heart of everything we do’, ‘As a building society we are set up specifically to help people rather than make money from them’.  In the last few years YBS wasted millions of pounds of members’ savings settling fines and compensation claims imposed as a consequence of negligent and cynical trading practices. 

The Financial Conduct Authority discovered YBS indulged in mis-selling PPI; YBS neglected and improperly overcharged mortgage customers experiencing repayment difficulties and YBS promoted and sold bonds that promised financial returns that were virtually impossible to achieve.

Even a cursory examination of YBS documents reveals a focus on growth and expansion rather than member involvement. The truth is that bigger businesses bring bigger bonuses for bosses and for Mike Regnier, YBS CEO, this year’s bonus added a further £275,000 to his already massive salary. A YBS survey of “customer experience” over an identical period recorded a drop from 27^th to 87^th place (comparable organisations) yet had no negative impact on Mike’s bonus.

Once Upon a Time in Huddersfield

YBS started in the nineteenth century with the creation of 'The Huddersfield Equitable Permanent Benefit Building Society' by a handful of workers and tradesmen in a small building on the corner of King Street and Queen Street. In the twentieth century the 'Huddersfield' amalgamated with Dewsbury’s 'West Yorkshire' and then Bradford’s 'Self Help' to, in 1982, form the 'YBS'. 

 

From its foundation in 1864 until 1896 none of the Directors of the ‘Huddersfield’ drew any salary from the Society’s funds now the YBS Director’s trough is lavishly swilled with members’ savings.

The YBS Board comprises 9 directors and includes 6 non-executive directors. In 2017, the executive directors received a total remuneration of two million and fifty-six thousand pounds with CEO Mike Regnier alone getting almost a million (£930,000). As the average local wage is £20,929, Mike gets more every year than a Bradford worker would earn in a lifetime!

Keeping Members Informed

You’ve doubtless received one of those booklets that building societies send out to members as an annual report.  The first thing to note is that these documents are not actually ‘Annual Reports’ but selective, propaganda pamphlets that Directors employ to bamboozle members into thinking they’re involved.  For YBS the official 2017 ‘Annual Report’ is double the page size (A4 rather than A5) and six times the length of the ‘Annual Review’ sent out to members.  Both documents are essentially sales brochures boasting of how brilliantly the ‘business’ is being run but occasionally key details can be gleaned from the full document omitted from the dumbed-down version.   This year (2017/18) the YBS members’ pamphlet made no mention of the gender pay gap that all big organisations are legally obliged to publicly report but tucked away at the foot of the inner column of the ‘full’ document on page 71 we find that YBS operates a 31% gender pay gap but of course even here there’s no admission of guilt rather a statement of pious bullshit, ‘The Group strives to create an environment where diversity in all forms is encouraged and barriers in the way of colleagues fulfilling their potential are removed.’

The full 190 page Report includes lovely full-page, full-colour pictures of Chairman John (Uriah) Heaps and CEO Mike Regnier yet still doesn’t fully report YBS’s legally required analysis of its gender pay-gap (it’s available online).  This records women are very much in the minority among its highest paid employees (top quartile: 42% women/58% men) whilst down at the bottom end (quartile) the lowest paid YBS employees are overwhelmingly female (80% women/20% men).  In place of these facts the Report obfuscates:

‘In simple terms there are more females occupying less senior roles. It is this imbalance that results in the gender pay gap’.

YBS Democracy

Like all fake democracies YBS have the problem of manufacturing consent.  Pictures of people of all types and colour are an essential ingredient of all YBS booklets, sites and propaganda accompanied by slogans asserting ‘inclusivity’.   The aim is to make members think everyone else is involved and if you’re not it’s your lazy fault.  The truth is that YBS is as mutual as the Co-op is cooperative, it’s been captured and run by money men with no radical, socialist or even cooperative agenda.  Any claims to mutualism are utterly superficial.

In 1864, there was a plumber amongst the originators of the Huddersfield Building Society but you won’t find a ‘butcher, baker or candlestick maker’ amongst the directors now, most come from the banking world with a leavening of hotels, pubs and gambling directorships.

Directors know few members turn up at the AGM and there’s little likelihood they’ll be challenged.  Even if they were the Chairman wields thousands of proxy votes from members who returned their voting paper in response to whatever gimmicky inducement YBS offers that particular year (in 2018 it’s a donation to charity).  Few notice or understand the import of the inconspicuous phrase, ‘The Chairman will be your proxy unless you choose someone else by completing the box on the back of this form’.  Although almost fifteen thousand members voted against last years lavish directors’ emoluments with a further three thousand withholding their agreement the Chairman claimed the backing of 128,159 proxies as authorisation for the Board to stuff their wallets.  Business as usual and triples all round, Cheers!

Some more Equitable than Others

In 1864, the Huddersfield Equitable offered members the prospect of a home and interest on their savings of 5% interest (at a time that inflation was zero).  In 2018 Chairman Heaps claims YBS 'are proud of our 150 year commitment to our mutual values – delivering long term value' but consider what has been delivered by Heaps and his fellow buildings society money men.  'Our mortgage customers face average house prices that are almost eight times average earnings – an all-time high…By 2020 only a quarter of 30-year olds will own their own home, in contrast, more than half the generation currently approaching retirement were homeowners by their thirtieth birthday.'   Whilst consumer price inflation is running at around 3% per annum YBS savers are offered only 0.85% so even labelling them 'savings accounts' smacks of 'mis-selling'.

 

Branch closures reduce the service to members, increase centralisation and bring banks bad publicity but YBS is equally guilty with 48 branches closed last year with a further 18 closures already planned for 2018.

Progress?

YBS isn’t doing anything illegal and is typical of the building society sector and that’s precisely the problem, the rot is endemic.  What started as local mutual-aid societies founded by workers and tradesmen to shelter themselves and their families from the ravages of the marketplace have been gradually infiltrated by the values and personnel of commercialism.  Poorly paid, largely female, workers are welcomed at YBS to do the donkey work at the counters and computers but money-men run the show on classic capitalist lines. 

In 1994 YBS was the first building society to operate its own share-dealing service (subsequently sold) and members were encouraged to redirect their mutual saving into stock market speculation.

In 2018, as ordinary YBS members suffer miserable, below inflation, returns on their savings there’s rich pickings for the boys in the boardroom.  The members 'Annual Review' prominently boasts of £1.5m'contributed to our local communities' but fails to mention that this is less than the amount 'contributed' to board members Mike Regnier and Stephen White.

Re-building Society

The nineteenth century working class created a rich variety of mutual aid organisations, Building Societies, Benefit Societies, Trade Unions, Political Parties, Burial Clubs, Reading Rooms and much more.  Like YBS, most are now ideologically moribund zombies with some appearance of the original but devoid of humanity and political idealism.  The causes are complex but in almost every case a tendency to apathy and materialism amongst workers was exploited by lawyers and city slickers to gain control and extract value.  Hierarchies and huge pay differentials replaced equitable ideals and egalitarian practice. 

 

There’s no quick solution but we can all do a bit to reclaim our moribund organisations.  If you’re a building society member don’t ever return the paper giving the Chairman your vote, either tick all the 'against' or 'vote withheld' boxes. 

 

It’s optimistic to dream of reversing the decline in building societies and similar mutual aid organisations but we can at least try to stop the rot.  Recognise the rips-offs and speak out, don’t be complicit, expose the injustice and ridicule the rapacious.  Even YBS is not entirely immune to activism, every creative act of protest supports, encourages and incites others – You’d Be Surprised…

‘Down and Out in Paris ..,and Rochdale!'

by Andrew Wastling

'The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.' 
Henry David Thoreau , On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849  

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INSTEAD of being a progressive driver of positive social change Rochdale council still seems intent on moving our civil liberties back almost four hundred years to the time when beggars or those without visible means were forcibly taken to the Parish boundary and unceremoniously thrown over it onto the mercy of the neighbouring Parish for poor relief giving to the rise to the expression ‘From Hell, Hull and Halifax, may the Good Lord deliver us!'
These words form part of the infamous Thieves’ Litany, uttered in Mediaeval Yorkshire as a leave-taking ‘prayer’ between two thieves as they parted. Hell was to be feared, of course, as was Hull Gaol with its evil reputation. Halifax was one of those towns granted the right to a ‘gibbet’, (still visible at the end of Gibbet Street , in Halifax to this day ), a particular savage form of early guillotine, which  was notorious for its quick use against suspected villains. In the seventh century paupers were sometimes branded on the forehead with a letter 'V' for vagrant. 
Whilst in  the 1930's, local Socialist writer Jack Hilton was truncheoned into near temporary paralysis at the Town Hall Poor Relief Assizes simply for speaking out in support of the poor & needy of Rochdale in the Great Depression. In the preceding eighty odd years we have thankfully made considerable progress.  Or at least some of us have.

Hilton knew he was a link in a long chain going back to the Middle Ages and beyond of those who'd chronicled the lived experience of the poor and marginalised in this country when he described the treatment of vagrants in the late 1500's in Caliban Shrieks ,written 1935 ,he vividly described the medieval lived experience the poor:

'Vagabonds were sentenced to be branded, five to be hanged , and eight set to service .  Service was unvarnished slavery .And it was from the stress of such times that humanity set up it's workhouses. We still have them with us.'

We also have first hand descriptive evidence by Jack Hilton of the scene in the Rochdale  Means tests for Public Assistance  in the middle 1930's when he noted brutality to the poor remained , just in a different form:

'What sort of civilised action in such callousness. When you take away the last straw off the poor blighter, it's a punishment that eats into his bone ? '

What sort of 'civilised actions' indeed comrade?

Proving that history does indeed have an uncanny knack of repeating itself we read that in the twenty first century Rochdale Council seems to be again intent on a course of action that insure that far from being feared that they are widely ridiculed & locally despised.
Human rights are human rights.  We can not decide that some human rights are more important than others or cherry pick those we wish to preserve & those we wish to ignore. For that way lies Animal Farms proclamation by the pigs and the rank hypocrisy of governments that proclaim the absolute equality of their citizens but give power and privileges to a small elite : ' All animals are equal but some are more equal than others,' is the well known political phrase.
Or perhaps in Rochdale Councils  case : 'some human rights abuses less important than other human rights abuses' ?
Maybe our council could take us further backwards  still and bring back the use of St. Chads stocks , reintroduce the 'rack', public floggings with the birch ,put the building of a shiny new privately run Rochdale Workhouse up for tender to the highest bidder and while they are at it have the poor of our Borough sew a letter 'P' for Pauper on their clothing so they can be easily identified for ridicule by their fellow citizens & aid their imminent arrest by the Goon Squads of the State apparatus ?
As to imposing one thousand pound fines for begging just refer R v Ealing Justices ex p Cloves (CO/16/10/89) where the Court said:
'If the defendant cannot pay the fine within a reasonable time, it is an indication that the fine is too high.'
Owing money is of itself not a criminal act.'
Amongst the widely ridiculed ' swearing ban' we also have the deeply undemocratic : 'Unauthorised distribution of printed material/leaflets' - having to get each and every leaflet authorised before it's handed out smacks of the Stasi, the Police State & Orwell's Thought Police. 
Who exactly decides what is to  be authorised and approved and what passes or fails to pass the official State sanctioned Censor I wonder ?
In the Manifesto Clubs booklet, 'Leafleting: A Liberty Lost?',  it is argued that:  '27% of councils now restrict public leafleting.'
Prompting their call for 'a review of local authorities’ no-tolerance policies, and for a more liberal regime that recognises leafleting as part of a free and vibrant civic life.'

Equally in Areopagitica, published in 1644, John Milton argued that licensing laws were a dead hand on the search for understanding, with every creation passing under the licenser’s stamp and pen before  it could enter into the world. The criticisms of fellow citizens were a surer test of truth than friars or crown agents, he argued:
‘Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be  monopolised and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards.’
The pressure of liberal opinion won the day, and the licensing of printing was finally ended in 1695, a century or more before many continental states.
'Why are beggars despised?' , asked George Orwell in 'Down and Out in Paris and London' , 1933 .
'A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.'
In Austerity Britain where the Social Market Foundation (SMF) has just revealed the rich are 64% richer than before the recession, while the poor are 57% poorer .We have witnessed , and sometimes witness daily , since 2010 a year on increase in rough sleepers, a 60% rise in families living in temporary accommodation with 67% of children living in poverty from working families.  It should come as no surprise that at the same time the poor should be more visible on our streets .  Their cardboard pedestals a stark & constant reminder of the abject failure of neo-liberalism for many.  Equally we should not be surprised that those in power wish to demonise & scapegoat these inconvenient reminders that the glitzy consumerist utopia does not work for all.  Or even better sweep them out of sight and out of mind entirely.
Gentrification like urban poverty is nothing new. Just ask the sans-culottes driven out of their Paris quartiers in the 1860's by Barron Haussman in the 1860's , any barrios , favela , or slum dog millionaire dweller from Dickens to Dakar .Or simply ask any of the  29 mothers and expectant mothers from the E15 Campaign who received eviction notices and were told they would have to get out because the council’s funding stream to the mother and baby unit suddenly stopped by Newham Council due to Austerity and are now resisting gentrification across London.
Equally as Mike Davis points out in his excellent 'Planet of the Slums' , the 'brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalisation' have spawned :
'A proletariat without factories, workshops , and work, and without bosses, in the middle of the odd jobs, drowning in survival and leading an existence like a path through embers.'
Simultaneously we stand both despairingly distant from yet tantalisingly close to the post industrialism of Pyotr Kropotkin's 'Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow'.  It does not require much investigation to see that:  
'Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.'   Especially when we consider that  a massive £250 million pounds regeneration programme for Rochdale Town Centre it is that many of us who comprise the 'precariat' still remain 'drowning in survival' and feel alienated to and disenfranchised from the local democratic decision making process that seeks to map out our sparkling futures in which we are no longer citizens but consumers.  Mere spectators of the Theatre of the Absurd many steps removed from a dysfunctional local 'democratic process' that is neither transparent , inclusive or truly represents or involves the majority of local residents at all.
A neurotic  political climate in which we read dumfounded that a legitimate question about , 'the Labour Group wanting  to adopt a policy promoted by the local Green Party to create an additional 100 allotments in Rochdale.' Was refused on the dubious grounds that the question , 'How many allotments have been created over the 12 months since then?', was deemed too 'politically motivated' by our Big Brother Council ?
Rather than seeing 'reds under the flower beds', conspiracies and shady plots in legitimate questions about innocuous allotments our council should have a thumb through Peter Hall and Colin Ward 'Sociable Cities' since 'the birthplace of cooperation' seems far from sociable at the moment with it's  proposed a Public Space Protection Order.  They should take a lesson from Colin Ward when he pointed out that : 
'The terrifying breakdown of social cohesion in the American city, in spite of intense institutionalized police surveillance equipped with every sophisticated aid to public control, illustrates that social behaviour depends upon mutual responsibility rather than upon the policeman.'

We can not either divorce the issue of urban poverty from the question of private property & public space.  Attempts to marginalise demonise the poor go back to 1824 and further still to medieval times, with attempts to criminalise the urban poor at the height of the industrial revolution.  During this time, land privatisation was being rolled out on a mass scale, and hundreds of thousands of people who lacked the means to purchase property were displaced from their homes and the land some of them had lived on for generations.  The Enclosure Acts equally played their part:

'The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose.'

Or my preferred version of this 17th century protest rhyme :

'The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.'

These fundamental issues of land ownership & English liberty that can be traced back to the Putney Debates, & The Levellers when Cromwell's common soldiers took on their generals to argue for greater democracy and provided a platform for 'common people' to make their voices heard. These debates, forced by the Levellers paved the way for many of the civil liberties we rightly cherish and value today.

Fundamental to the birth of English liberty then  was the realisation by Colonel Rainsborough, (the highest ranking officer to support the ordinary solders) that:
“I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he” 

That was in Autumn 1647.  We're of course mindful that in 1649 Cromwell sent his mounted 'iron-sides'  in to brutally supress Winstanley's nascent communistic Digger Community at St. Georges Hill. Reminding us if we need one that where there are the seeds of liberty & dreams of utopia then we will find those willing to scythe such hard won liberty's & trample shared visions of a fairer society and a Better World into the dust simply to impose their own personal dystopia. In the future warns Orwell :   

'There will be no loyalty except loyalty to the Party. But always there will be the intoxication of power.  Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who’s helpless.  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.  The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen.  It depends on you.'

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