Human decency lost as greed takes over

THAMES TRAINS was hit with a €2m fine in London’s High Court during the week for “serious omissions” in driver training that led to the deaths of 40 commuters and serious injury to a further 250 individuals.

The driver, killed also in the tragic event, was less than three weeks in the job. Due to cutting corners in training to save money he had not been alerted to a difficulty to see a red light just outside Paddington which caused the disaster in October 1999.

Paddington wasn’t the first. In 1988 the Clapham rail crash left 35 dead and in 1995 the Southall disaster caused seven deaths and 150 injuries. So what’s the connection to the business pages you may well ask.

Well, it was interesting in the wake of the Paddington disaster even right-wing British publications attacked the greed of those who, by cutting back on vital training, maximised their profits, at the cost of huge personal pain and loss.

Their reaction suggested some had finally started to catch up with the lurch to the right, so dramatically personified by the Thatcher era. That shift in attitude gave the pre-eminent place to capital and profits over people.

Then it tells us in company law, the main responsibility of any board of directors is to its shareholders. Not a word about the workers. In a scathing editorial following revelations that safety measures were ignored on cost grounds the Sunday Times, said: “this is a crime. Forget behaving with dignity and sensitivity. We need and we will scream and shout for justice. Let all those who put profit before people hang their heads in shame.”

Pretty strong stuff that coming from the stable of media barron Rupert Murdoch, who shamelessly cavorts with whatever political party will best-serve his own financial interests, Tony Blair being the current target of convenience.

Thatcher’s championing of big business and vested interests to the extent she did generated a new brashness in Britain, something that was adopted with glee also in an Irish context.

It created a shift in attitude and degraded the view that business/capital had a common interest with its workers. Instead of reinforcing the social contract approach, Thatcherism reinforced the view that the sole purpose of business was to reward shareholders.

In her rush to unleash free market forces, Thatcher targeted British Rail and other essential services written off as inefficient and ineffective.

We have seen the awful results in the rail fiasco that followed.

In the case of gas privatisation, its low point was the death of an elderly couple last year whose supply was switched off.

Too proud or too scared to look for help, they died, frozen and forgotten by free market Britain. Looking closer to home, the Eircom flotation of 1999, motivated by the view that semi-states have no place in a modern society, turned out to be a fiasco of the highest order. Nobody died, while just the lucky few have become rich in the process.

It is hard by any measure to argue that the sale of Eircom in 1999 has worked to the advantage of either the State, the economy, business or citizens.

Anyone who is honest about that escapade has to agree.

We have not been given the kind of competition we were led to believe the change in status of the group was going to deliver.

And those who made money are those in the golden circle, the fat-cat bankers, their advisers and all others sufficiently up the greed scale able to get their fingers in the honey pot. Basic human decency has been forgotten in the rush to free markets.

They have not solved all of our problems.

If society is to sustain itself in a civilised fashion, then a balance has to e struck between rewarding risk-takers, providing services at reasonable cost and giving living wages to workers.

Absolute faith in a particular system has been found wanting in the US, Britain and it is beginning to crack here, too.

Ralph Emerson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, put it pretty succinctly when he said if we failed to stand together we would hang separately.