Paula
Vennells, the Golden Circle,
and the legacy of Thatcherism
By
Malcolm
Potter-Brown
Auksford,
2024
Thatcher’s
dogma
Margaret Thatcher once promulgated a pernicious doctrine, the
effects of which are only now becoming generally visible. The
Thatcherite dogma was that there are two classes of people: Managers,
who could manage anything and should be highly rewarded, and the rest
of us, people of no importance who had to be watched, controlled and
regularly assessed to make sure that we weren’t idling away
our
time.
The idea that managers could manage anything and should be
put in
charge of everything soon began to take effect. We know of at
least one major hospital, previously run by a committee of medical
staff with an administrator to carry out their instructions, where a
manager from a major supermarket chain was brought in above the
administrator. Within a few months the administrator left,
and he
was replaced by a whole team of assistant managers.
Worse was to come. Presumably still feeling the
remains of
the pressure to make a profit for shareholders, the manager succumbed
to the blandishments of a predatory polytechnic/university and sold it
the nurses’ home. A professional administrator
would have
been aware that, in a city with high property prices and rents, a
hospital would need a nurses’ home if it were to be able to
attract enough nurses. Recruitment problems eventually drove
the
manager to rent back part of the building for nurses, and it seems not
unlikely that that over the years the hospital has paid out more to
rent a few rooms than it received for the whole building.
Still,
who are we to criticise. We are just simple people who must
realise that a manager can manage anything.
In 1994-95 the boss of BT, Sir Ian Vallance, publicly claimed
that he and people like him (Thatcher’s managerial class)
worked
far harder than people like junior doctors. As far as he was
concerned doctors, nurses, paramedics, teachers, and other ordinary
people who did not belong to his circle were idlers and whingers and
deserved no consideration.
The Daily
Telegraph
shadowed him on a typical day and found that when the morning rush hour
had cleared, i.e. after the ordinary people had gone to work, he was
chauffeur-driven to his office. The remainder of the morning
was
spent reading the newspapers, signing letters already typed for him by
his secretary, and having a phone call, after which it was time for
lunch.
It’s hardly surprising that Robin Gordon penned a
set of verses called Privatisation.
"Snouts
in the trough, boys! Snouts in the trough!
Grab
all you can guzzle! Grab all you can scoff!
An
executive's life is incredibly tough."
No
wonder he thinks he's entitled to stuff.
He
is chauffeured to work, where he meets all his chums
for
a hard-working lunch – for their teeth and their tums
–
Then he's off to a meeting to talk about work
and
how to get more out of workers who shirk,
and
how to get more out of people who pay
for
water and lighting and heating each day.
These
cunning execs then award to each other
directorships,
bonuses - brother to brother -
to
keep the wheels oiled and the train on its track.*
When
evening has fallen they're all chauffeured back,
and
there between watching their doses of porn
they
look at the news. That's when they pour scorn
on
overworked doctors and underpaid nurses.
"They're
idle!" they cry. "Not just idle, what's worse is,
They're
greedy and out to grab all they can get,
like
teachers and miners, the whole leftie set.
"Privatisation's
the answer," they cry.
"Put
it all in the hands of people like I.
It's
we who make wealth, let us cream the best off,
so
snouts in the trough, boys! Snouts in the trough!"
*The train is of course the City
of London Gravy Express
The
City of London Gravy Express
is
a privatised train for those whose success
in
grabbing and guzzling their share of the spoils
of
privatisation continually foils
ideals
of society based upon justice.
Our
Government's policy's principal thrust is:
"Rewards
to the rich, let all of the rest
drop
out, die and rot!" No wonder we're stressed.
Paula
Vennells and the Post Office Scandal
The full extent of the damage caused by this dogma is only
now
fully visible. The most obvious example is the Post Office
Scandal in which the lives of over nine hundred postmasters and their
families were deliberately ruined to preserve the reputation of the
Post Office and its chief executive. Paula Vennells.
Over and over again she and her agents lied to the postmasters, to the
public and even to Parliament. Soon after the Fujitsu Horizon
system was installed, hundreds of discrepancies began to appear in the
accounts of Post Office branches. The directors of the Post
Office should have been alert to the probable cause of this:
computer-system failures. Instead they preferred to believe
that
hundreds of perfectly honest people, who had worked for the Post Office
for years, had suddenly all taken to theft. Over and over
again
they lied: You are the only one with these discrepancies; No-one but
you can make any input to your branch computer.
Fujitsu knew this was not true. Fujitsu operators were making
alterations all the time, and even, it would seem, using branch
accounts for training purposes and making random changes, which they
said they then reversed, instead of following the normal practice of
having a separate training database.
Was the chief executive of the Post Office ignorant of all this, in
which case she was totally incompetent, or did she know she was lying
and deliberately ruining the lives of so many hundred people.
Either way she is responsible for four suicides and hundreds of ruined
lives.
Paula Vennells was CEO of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019,
during which time she turned it round from loss-making to
profitable. Much of the money taken from postmasters
–
“clawed back” was the preferred term used by the
Post
Office, but since none of it was Post Office Money it would be more
correct to describe it as stolen from the postmasters – seems
to
have gone into a slush fund and from there into general profits, where
it doubtless justified generous bonuses for the senior executives.
Paula Vennells must have been aware that the gross injustices
over which she presided could not continue forever. In 2019
she
left to become chairman of the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust,
proving that once a person is a member of the Golden Circle of highly
paid Thatcherite Managers-who-can-manage-anything, not only can they
draw colossal salaries – apparently they pay themselves more
in a
single morning than the average wage-earner earns in a year –
not
only can they award themselves and each other huge bonuses no matter
how inefficient they have been, but when their misdeeds catch up with
them they will be spirited off to an equally prestigious position with
the blessing of the Golden Circle.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of the Paula Vennells affair is
that
she is also an ordained priest in the Church of England, which seems to
add an aura of hypocrisy to her conduct. How can she preach
the
Gospel of Christ when her conduct is far more sinful than the priest
and the Levite who failed to help the man who had fallen among thieves
in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Theirs was a sin of
omission: rather than inconvenience themselves to help an unfortunate
fellow human, they passed by on the other side. She, to
preserve
her own reputation, actively and wilfully persecuted hundreds of
sub-postmasters, driving them and their families into ruin and despair.
Despite all this, and despite her lack of experience in
church
administration, in 2017, doubtless feeling that her mismanagement of
the Post Office was about to catch up with her, she almost became
Bishop of London, apparently with the support of the Archbishop of
Canterbury, who must surely have been unaware, despite increasing news
reports, of her fraudulent persecution of innocent people.
The church has a well-defined administrative structure and
well-defined paths to higher office. An ordained priest
begins as
a curate, assisting a parish priest or a team-ministry
leader.
When he (or she) has progressed sufficiently in the job he becomes a
parish priest (vicar or rector) or leader of a team ministry covering
several parishes. Able priests may then be made canons, with
additional diocesan responsibilities, and may be promoted to
archdeacon, dean or suffragan bishop before being considered for the
post of full bishop. Mrs Vennells had held none of these
appointments, yet she was short-listed for the most important bishopric
in the Church of England.
Other people considered for the appointment were Christopher
Cocksworth, Graham Tomlin, and Sarah Mulally.
Christopher Cocksworth was ordained deacon in 1988 and priest
in
1989. He served as a curate then became chaplain of Royal
Holloway University (1992-97), then Director of the Southern
Theological Education and Training Scheme (1997-2001), then Principal
of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, a theological college (2001-2008).
He
became a Canon of Guildford Cathedral in 1999. He was Bishop
of
Coventry from 2008 to 2023, when he moved to become Dean of
Windsor. He was obviously an eminently suitable candidate to
be
Bishop of London.
Graham Tomlin read English at Oxford, then took another BA in
Theology (1985) and later did a PhD in Theology at Exeter
University. He was ordained deacon in 1986 and priest in
1987. He served as a curate in Exeter before returning to
Oxford
as chaplain of Jesus College and a tutor at Wycliffe Hall Theological
College, where he eventually became vice-principal. He became
Principal of St Mellitus Theological College in London, established in
2007, and in 2015 was consecrated as Suffragan Bishop of
Kensington. Obviously he was another very suitable candidate
to
become Bishop of London.
Sarah Mullally’s career was in nursing, starting
with a
degree at South Bank Polytechnic in 1984, followed by an MSc at what
had become London South Bank University. She held clinical
nursing posts, became a ward sister, then director of nursing at the
Chelsea and Westminster hospital. In 1999 she was appointed
Chief
Nursing Officer for England. From 1998 to 2001 she undertook
training for the ordained ministry and also took a Diploma in Theology
at the University of Kent (2001). She was ordained deacon in
2001
and priest in 2002, and served as a part-time non-stipendiary curate
(2001-04). In 2004 she resigned as Chief Nursing Officer, and
served two years as an assistant curate in Battersea while completing
an MA in pastoral theology. In 2006 she became team rector in
Sutton, London, undertook various other church duties and from 2012 to
2015 was canon treasurer at Salisbury Cathedral. In 2015 she
became Suffragan Bishop of Crediton in the Diocese of Exeter, and in
2017 she became Bishop of London.
How is it possible that Paula Vennells could even be
considered
as part of a short list along with candidates of this
calibre.
She was employed by Unilever, L’Oréal, Dixons
Retail,
Argos and Whitbread before moving to the Post Office as group network
director (2007), then became CEO in 2012. From 2002 to 2005
she
trained for holy orders, was ordained deacon in 2006 and priest in
2006, and served as a non-stipendiary minister at Bromham in the
Diocese of St Albans.
Compared with the other candidates she is obviously totally out of
place, even if her criminal behaviour was unknown to the Church, and it
is entirely due to the influence, control even, exerted by the Golden
Circle of Thatcherite Managers-who-can-manage- anything, that she was
ever considered. Members of the circle know that they can
draw
excessively high wages, reward themselves with efficiency bonuses no
matter how inefficient they are, leave with a golden handshake when
they see that their bungling is about to catch up with them and move on
to another prestigious and highly paid position in another institution
of which they have no professional knowledge. As Bishop of
London
Paula Vennells would probably have been untouchable, though she ought
to be on trial for fraud and perversion of the justice system.
The
Golden Circle
Paula Vennells is merely the tip of a very large and very
dirty
iceberg: the Golden Circle of Thatcherite managers, a sort of
hyper-wealthy mafia who have become wealthy at our expense and live
lives totally detached from normality. Sir Howard Davies,
currently the Chairman of NatWest Bank after a varied career moving
from top job to top job, announced that it was perfectly easy for young
people to get on the housing ladder, all they had to do was
save.
The price of an average house is now nine to twelve times the average
annual salary, but for Sir Howard it would no doubt be easy to buy an
above average house every year out of his salary of £750,000
p.a.
(not including any bonuses he pays himself or income from other
directorships.
Thames Water, the largest British water supplier, has failed
to
invest in infrastructure for many years and is now a major polluter of
rivers with raw sewage, not merely as emergency measures but on a
regular basis. Even so the company is £14.5 million
in
debt, but senior executives have taken large pay-packets and awarded
themselves efficiency bonuses. Chief executive Sarah Bentley announced
that she would give up her efficiency bonus. The previous
year it
had been £496,000. Why, one might ask, was someone
running
a company so badly even in line for any sort of bonus?). She
compensated for this by doubling her salary to £1.5 million
p.a. Seeing her mismanagement catching up with her, she left
the
company abruptly, and was “punished” for her sudden
departure by having her golden handshake reduced to a mere two to three
million pounds. Her successor is on a salary of a mere
£850,000 p.a. and appears to have no experience of water
companies.
Amanda Spielman was chosen by Nicky Morgan, the Minister of
Education, to be Chief Inspector of Schools and head of
Ofsted.
Her background is in accountancy, investment banking, American
management systems and Japanese financial holdings. In 2002
she
took an MA in Comparative Education and became a founding member of the
board of Ark Schools, a multi-academy trust. She has never
had
any teaching experience. This was pointed out to the Minister
of
Education, who overruled objections. Under Spielman Ofsted
seems
to have become more hostile and confrontational in its dealings with
schools, culminating in the suicide of a hard-working and much-loved
headmistress.
Amanda Spielman was interviewed on Woman’s Hour, when she
seemed
to live in an alternative universe. It was not that she
avoided
answering questions, as politicians do, she just did not seem to see
their relevance. In her view she was right, the organisation
she
headed was therefore above criticism, and the death of the headmistress
was simply being misused to discredit Ofsted. Perhaps the
most
shocking aspect of this case is that, following her disastrous tenure
of the chief-inspectorship, Amanda Spielman has been short-listed as a
possible Chairman of the BBC. The Golden Circle always
protects
its own, no matter what damage they do.
Spielman’s successor as Head of Ofsted has at least had the
sense
to suspend inspections while inspectors are given training about mental
health. Ofsted is still, however, unfit for purpose,
particularly
with regard to its single-word judgements system, under which a school
which offers outstanding education can be condemned as inadequate if
its record-keeping is not up to scratch.
Presumably this is part of the overall view that ordinary people are so
different from the managerial class, that, not only do they have to be
watched, controlled and assessed, but that they are unable to
understand nuanced verdicts and have to have everything reduced to
easily comprehensible single words.
What
needs to be done?
We have all noted that there are many organisations in the
United
Kingdom that are simply not fit for purpose. A major reason
for
this is the Thatcherite dogma that people are of two separate kinds,
shirkers who have to be controlled and kept up to the mark by
assessment and discipline (i.e. most of the population) and managers,
who have been blessed by God or Fate or their DNA with a talent for
management that is far beyond the rest of us, and who must be rewarded
and encouraged by colossal salaries and bonuses, and they move from top
job to top job in fields in which they have no qualifications, no
training, and no experience of rising through the ranks.
They are not professional in their fields, but nor are they amateurs,
for amateurs love their fields of interest and devote much time, effort
and money to improving them. They are simply meddlers,
brought in
from outside with little or no knowledge of their new fields, and
little or no interest beyond the size of their salaries and how they
can make the annual balance sheet look good enough to justify generous
bonuses – even if this involves asset-stripping.
Basically,
these Thatcherite Managers of the Golden Circle are a mafia interested
only in creaming off for themselves as much loot as they can get away
with, in granting each other immense salaries, in awarding each other
colossal bonuses, in taking huge golden handshakes when they leave, and
then being recruited, with golden helloes to a new high position for
which they are unqualified.
Often their management is incompetent, but they still take vast
salaries and large bonuses. Occasionally it is obviously
criminal, as in the case of the Post Office scandal, when hundreds of
thousands of pounds were stolen from innocent sub-postmasters, added to
Post Office profits, and then shared out among the mafiosi in
charge. This is a clear case for criminal prosecutions to be
brought and for all bonuses paid out to those in charge during the
period of the scandal to be clawed back.
The power of the Golden Circle of hyper-rich mafiosi must be broken if
the UK is ever to function properly again. Three reforms are
needed: (1) abolish the bonus culture; (2) abandon the Thatcherite
dogma that managers are a separate class who can manage anything and
return to the traditional route to top jobs through qualifications,
training and rising through the ranks by demonstrating talent and
commitment; (3) control the maximum size of top salaries so that they
can never exceed five times the average salary – the link
might
even persuade some of the high-income people that it is to their
advantage if average salaries rise
The idea behind bonuses was to encourage extra effort over and above
what would normally be expected and to reward success in improving the
organisation for which the recipient worked. Under the Golden
Circle this has become a means of creaming off for greedy mafiosi more
undeserved loot. The bonus system should therefore be ended.
It is apparent that, while there may be a few talented managers, most
are not able to swap from one organisation to another.
Managers
who are unprofessional meddlers do not contribute to the well-being of
their organisations. You would not recruit admirals or
generals
from the ranks of investment bankers but from officers who have risen
through the naval or military ranks and proved themselves capable.
You would expect bishops to be appointed from men or women who have
devoted their lives to their church and held both junior and senior
positions in the hierarchy, yet, in the case of Paula Vennells, we saw
how the Golden Circle attempted to parachute one of their own into the
third most senior position in the Church of England, despite her
obvious inexperience and the mounting criticism about her treatment of
sub-postmasters. That failed but she moved on to be chairman
of
an NHS trust, while the incompetent Amanda Spielman left her post as
head of Ofsted under a cloud and was immediately shortlisted to become
chairman of the BBC.
Our case is that people who have risen through the ranks in any
organisation may well reach their level of incompetence, but at least
they will know how their organisation works and understand its
functions, unlike the meddlers and bunglers who are parachuted in
simply because they belong to the hyper-rich Golden Circle
These meddlers, bunglers and greedy mafiosi, now award themselves
colossal salaries for occupying top positions for which they are
unqualified. They argue that, if they become ever richer,
wealth
will trickle down and the country as a whole will become
richer.
Try telling that to the hundreds of sub-postmasters and their families
impoverished, ruined and driven into ill-health or suicide by the
determination of Vennells and her gang to protect their own
reputation. Try telling it to the millions who have been
reduced
to dependence on foodbanks while working as hard as they can at
low-paid jobs.
The managerial mafiosi will argue that they are the creators of
wealth. A lie! It is the workers who are the
creators of
wealth, and the leadership they need is from real managers who
understand their fields, not from the meddlers and bunglers whose only
interest is in what they can cream off for themselves.
The Golden Circle will argue that their high salaries contribute to the
wealth of the nation – another obvious lie – and
that, if
they are not allowed to grab loads of loot for themselves, they will
take their magnificent talents to another country. Well, let
them
go. We are better off without them.
It will be difficult to break the power of the Golden Circle, given
that that have grabbed so many influential positions, but it must be
done if the UK is to avoid further miscarriages of justice like the
Post Office scandal and to function as efficiently as it ought.
Copyright Malcolm Potter-Brown,
2024
This particular essay
may be quoted in part or in full.
Essays by Marcolm Potter-Brown
Auksford website
e-mail: mpb.auksford@gmail.com
