THE WORSHIP OF DIVIDENDS

Dividends:  Holcroft Castings to Carillion & Capita  

 George Orwell said, I believe it was in 'The Lion & the Unicorn',
that 'England is a family with the wrong people at the top'.  
 The kind of people he had in mind were those who
spent their lives 'living off their dividends'.

IN the early 1980s, I was an electrical shop steward at Holcroft Castings & Forgings in Rochdale, which was in turn part of the Reynold Chain PLC group, and armed with a report from the Labour Research Department, I went to a meeting of shop stewards with middle management, and I questioned the high dividends being paid to shareholders by the company.  After an outburst from one manager called Eric Huff, the chair of the middle managers a bloke called Tommy Swan said that as he didn't understand 'dividends' he wasn't prepared to discuss them in the context of our pay claim.

Today, it is the reduction of shareholder dividends to a fetish that is being blamed for the collapse of Carillion, and the danger to business generally is now being blamed on the culture of the glorification of dividends.  

Last Saturday, in the FT, Miles Johnson wrote an article entitled 'Carillion collapse offers warning to dividend fetishists', arguing:

'Like many companies listed in the UK, Carillion held up its dividend payments as evidence of success and corporate virility.  In its 2016 annual report, the group finance director Zafar Khan boasted how "the board has increased the dividend in each of the 16 years since the formation of the company in 1999".'

No doubt it was this kind of smoke and mirrors that deluded the leader of Tameside Council and chair of the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, Kieran Quinn, into thinking that Carillion had the Midas touch and could do no wrong.  Certainly his bedazzlement with dividends can only explain his overwhelming passion for Carillion, which led him last August to urge other councils in Greater Manchester to engage more closely with the now derelict company?

Capita cuts Carillion risk by suspending dividends

This morning  in the FT the journalist Matthew Vincent writes:  'Capita copies Serco to avoid becoming Carillion'.

This morning the FT journalist Matthew Vincent asks:  ' 'What’s the most frustrating job in corporate Britain today?'

Then he answers his own question:  'Apart from middle manager at Carillion asking why on earth did the directors keep bidding for contracts?  And keep overlooking the pension deficit?  And keep reassuring the so-called auditors?  Arguably, it’s middle manager at any other UK outsourcer, trying to address similar questions.' 


Today his FT report continues:  'Capita [which today has] issued a profit warning for 2018 and new chief executive Jonathan Lewis - who only started in December - admitted that the outsourcing group had become “too complex” and “driven by a short-term focus” while “lacking operational discipline and financial flexibility”.  Mr Lewis has therefore suspended the dividend - a source of anger over misplaced priorities at Carillion - and instigated an overhaul of Capita’s finances.  This will involve sales of non-core assets and a emergency rights issue to raise as much as £700m from investors later this year. That is even bigger than the £500m fundraising needed at rival Serco a few years ago.  Dividends will not resume until the company is “generating sustainable free cash flow”,'

We all should clue-up on the dangers of overgenerous dividend payments and what is called 'short-termism' in the boardroom.  We shouldn't be like the middle manager Tommy Swan, who I knew as a shop steward while negotiating wages etc. at Holcroft Castings in the 1980s, and who seemed positively proud to not have grasped what shareholder dividends were.
 https://www.ft.com/content/f9a21332-065b-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5

******

Brian Bamford on Jim Petty

Seventy people or more attended the

Remembrance Service of James Petty

at Saint Alban the Martyr Anglican

Catholic Church in Salford, last Saturday.

I have reason to be eternally grateful  to Jim Petty, for over a decade ago he rendered a great service to me and my family, when he performed a funeral service for my Aunty Betty at Rochdale Crematorium. 

He did it as a 'Foreigner', as a job on the side or as the Spaniards say:  'Por Gratis!' or as some say 'A Thank you job'. 

That sums up the spirit of Jim Petty:  for whether we call Jim Petty an Anglican, or an Anglo-Catholic or the Father of Northern Anarchism, we haven't begun to describe his nature as a man and human being.  Radical anarchism and human decency grew in his soul as a remarkable human being.

 His early interest in politics was at one time  in the Labour Party, but he never voted Labour after the 1970s.  Though he later he joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and was active as a shop steward  in both textiles, where he worked as a stripper and grinder,  and later at Lucas as SHOP STEWARD in engineering.

 IN 2008, in an interview in NORTHERN VOICES,  I ASKED JIM PETTY 'WHY HE CAME TO DESPISE POLITICIANS?'   

JIM SAID IN 2008:

'I JOINED THE LABOUR PARTY IN 1947, WHEN I WAS 14.  THE WORKING-CLASS MEMBERS THEN ALL HAD VISION.  BUT THE PARTY COUNCILLORS & OFFICIALS

WERE ALL ON THE MAKE  NOT MONEY BUT POWER, THEY ALL WANTED TO BE BIG FISH  IN THE LITTLE POND OF THE BURNLEY PARTY..... IT WAS ALL ABOUT GETTING JOBS  & SAFE SEATS  & AT A MAYORS BALL  I SAW A MAN IN TEARS BECAUSE HE'D NOT BEEN MADE A  J.P.  

During this last twelve months Jim had been interested about the campaign of Tameside Trade Union Council in against the blacklist in the British building trade.  Particularly the Tameside TUC book 'Boys on the Blacklist'.  He told me only recently that when he'd been working at Lucas Aerospace that a bloke had come into the office and asked Jim if he could see the manager.  Jim had asked him why, and the bloke said:  'Do you know that you've got a man called Petty working here?' 

He then proceeded to outline a black-balling account of Jim's history as a trade union activist, not knowing who in fact he was talking to.   

But Jim had many interests, many causes to support, and wasn't just the bosses that wanted to to blacklist him for he had difficulties with his own unions;  the Transport & General Workers Union and earlier, in textiles, in the National Union of Textile & Allied Union.  Beyond that he was even ostracised by some of his own comrades in the Solidarity Federation and the Anarchist Federation. 

In 2003, Jim Petty was one of the people who went on to found the publication Northern Voices.  In the first issue of that journal that he wrote a six-page article entitled 'Labour's Unacceptable Architects of Urban Squalor'  about the Burnley riots of 2001; this was about the indefensible politics of race in Burnley. 

Then, in 2012, he enjoyed writing about the Burnley Liberal M.P., Philip Morel, who had bravely opposed the First World War in 1914.   Of the town itself, he wrote in Northern Voices in 2005:

'Burnley is decaying under the aegis of Burnley Labour Party's modern politics.'  And being asked by me in 2008 'How he reconciled being an anarchist with he religious convictions?' ,  Jim said: 'No problem!' and continued to say 'The basic idea of Christ was anarchism and to share all things in common.'  He then went on to describe the ideas of Gerrard Winstley from Wigan, where there is a Digger's Festival today!  Jim went on to refer me to the Bishop of Alba's ideas in Spain:  what some call the Holy Land of anarchism. 

When the Englishman Gerald Brenan wrote his book 'The Spanish Labyrith' he wrote about the attacks on the Roman Catholic Church by the anarchists and he wrote:

'In the eyes of the anarchists the Roman Catholic Church occupies the position of the anti-Christ in the Christian world.  They see the Roman Catholic priesthood as the fountain of all evil...'

And Brenan tells us to remember our own history  arguing 'one might describe anarchism as the Spanish protestant or protesting heresy which in the 16^th and 17^th centuries saved Spain.' 

And however violent these 'anarchists may be, Cromwell's independents were violent too, they speak the same language of love of liberty, of dependence upon the inner light that Englishmen used to do.'

This year, Jim Petty said that he didn't feel up to writing in the latest edition of Northern Voices.  He had written something in every other issue of the paper over the last dozen years or so. 

He was a very kind man and he told me shortly before he died that we ought to be very proud of Northern Voices.  I don't know about that, but I am proud to have known Jim Petty from Burnley; the Anarchist and Anglican.

National Construction Rank & File Meeting

Dear All,

Please note correction to time. Meeting commences at 12.00 noon, not 11.00am as previously stated. Could you please forward to all your contacts. 

National Construction Rank and File Meeting

Dear Comrades, 

You are invited to attend the next meeting of the National Construction Shop Stewards Committee meeting being held at the

The CASA BAR and VENUE,

29 Hope Street, Liverpool, L1 9BQ

(Opposite the Philharmonic Pub, Hope Street)

12.00 noon to 3.00pm on Saturday 10th May 2014.  

You are also invited to attend the peaceful demonstration outside Laing O’Rourke/Alder Hey Hospital site, East Prescot Road, Knotty Ash, Liverpool, Merseyside, L14 5NG at 8.00am on your way to the meeting. All three Construction trade unions have been invited to send two of their Regional Officials to attend the demonstration. We will remain outside the site until 9.30am and then leave for our main meeting. Please encourage others to come along to both events. 

Yours in unity,

Steve Kelly:  Chairperson,  National Committee.