Even to a jaundiced observer of the mainstream UK media like yours truly, it is sometimes surprising how much bias there is against private property and privately owned business. The left just about tolerates big listed companies, I suspect because socialists imagine that such companies are easier to harass and bully via large shareholder groups like pension funds. This has certainly been part of the thinking in the United States, where large state pension schemes, such as the Calpers fund in California, have used their shareholder voting power to hammer the boards of firms they dislike or think are letting investors down. It is odd, as I remarked a few months ago, that the left, in the form of writers like Observer columnist Will Hutton, used to wax indignant about the short-term investment horizons of listed firms, and now regard them as the finest business model that there is, while regarding companies that are owned by private equity firms as somehow bad, even evil. Well, we had another example of the sort of prejudice against non-listed companies today in the Observer:
Britain’s leading bookmakers, including the private equity-owned Gala Coral, face serious allegations about the vulnerability of thousands of staff who are regularly attacked during robberies and by punters who have lost huge sums on new-style gaming machines. Gala Coral is owned by Permira, the private equity company headed by Damon Buffini.
Union officials paint an ugly picture of betting shop staff regularly abused and intimidated by gamblers, with hundreds of employees experiencing serious attacks. Staff have been injured and murdered as robberies of shops become an increasing occurrence.
The implication, lazily expressed, is that the horror of being robbed and murdered is somehow connected to the private ownership of the firms in which these people work. The Observer has been among the most vociferous attackers of private equity firms – firms that buy businesses and restructure them, usually with large amounts of borrowed money – and its criticisms are usually wide of the mark. Various studies, such as from Nottingham University, have shown that private equity firms invest for the longer term, create more jobs in total, and generate more profits, than listed businesses. But these firms are mega rich and their owners are very wealthy men (it is a male-dominated world) and so are clearly evil in the eyes of the left-leaning media. But even I was struck at how casually the Observer has tried to link the problems of robbery to private ownership in readers’ minds.
Of course, with interest rates rising and debt markets getting a lot rougher due to the sub-prime mortgage SNAFU in the US, the ability of private equity firms to borrow money will drop, so those economic illiterates at The Observer can rest easy, and go back to bashing publicly-quoted firms.
An interesting article and commentary. The fact the Observer even mentions the ownership details of Coral is totally irrelevant and rather bad reporting.
That said, I worked for a number of years for Coral while paying my way through university (this was only a couple of years ago) and my younger brother is still employed by the company. As such, I understand a large amount of the article is actually factually accurate.
Most shops are now open from 8 or 10 in the morning until 10ish at night, the later hours that were once confined to the summer months now common across the year, as increasing amounts of money are taken from roulette machine gambling. Shops are usually short manned and single staffing is very common, I’ve been threatened leaving shops and my bro has been robbed 3 times and physically attacked twice. The company takes very little notice of such attacks and makes little or no effort to increase staff safety. Management are less than sympathetic, my brother being expected to open up at 8, the morning after being attacked and spending 4 hours in a police station, as the area manager wouldn’t attend the scene is just one example.
I have no moral problem with the gambling industry, and can’t deny they served me well, but the facts of the article are true and 100% accurate, you just need to ignore the pathetic lefty reporting.
In a piece on violence in the NHS or on London Underground, which are also fairly dangerous places to work as far as contact with the general public goes, Mr Hutton wouldn’t mention their being publicly-owned and a public-private partnership respectively as if it were relevant.
Though a sense of entitlement might not help, I wouldn’t either. More likely it has something to do with the clientele in each case. Deregulation there hasn’t created a great embourgeoisement of betting shops in a hadful of years any more than liberalised drinking hours have magically changed the great British drunken oaf.
Maybe Coral needs to get a refund from the state personal-safety monopoly and spend the refund money on privately funded security.
So Gala Coral pays taxes to fund the police, but when the police fail to provide the security they are supposed to, Gala Coral is also to be held responsible and pay for their staff’s safety as well; talk about double taxation!
And what if Gala Coral decided to provide firearms to their employees so they can defend themselves; do you think they would be thanked for it: oh no! They would be taken to court for breaking the law. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
The truth is that the single and only 100% accurate fact about the situation is that the State is failing to produce the goods they are supposed to be taxing us for, and as a good apologist for the State, The Observer is trying to deflect the blame onto someone else.
Surely, this is just a testable hypothesis. Is it the case that staff at Coral are more vulnerable to attack (controlling for other things like location and opening hours) than staff at the state-owned Tote? If so, then perhaps ownership does matter for staff safety.
But does empiricism matter?
Chris: surely there are many other variables.
Frederick Davies’ analysis is spot on.
Wait just a goll’durn minute here! The state owns totes? How come they don’t have this problem?
Could it be that maybe the police provide differing degrees of service?
If so, I wonder why.
A good post.
Ayn Rand noted sixty years ago (in “The Fountainhead”) that leftist journalists can put in attacks on the concept of private property in almost any story (if they twisted it enough). And with the rise of college educated journalists in the U.K., I suppose this stort of “journalism” was to be expected.
Sadly even conservaitive newspapers (such as the Daily and Sunday Telegraph) are full of people with these sort of “college boy” attitudes.
Even many people who think they have rejected the things that were taught at school and then university are influnced by them to a certain extent.
Formal education still matters – it is rotten, so the ideas and attitudes of many people are also (at least in part) rotten.