ONE of the biggest privatisation firms with their hooks into the NHS is led by a Labour lord who was given a top party role by Ed Miliband in 2011, and then put into the Lords. 

Charles Allen — or Lord Allen of Kensington, as he is known thanks to Miliband’s Labour putting him in the upper house in 2013 — is the chairman of cleaning and catering corporation ISS.

I personally welcome Miliband’s role in the shadow cabinet, because I think he is one of the more genuinely left members of the “soft left.” 

But it’s a sign of how long and deep Labour’s love of big business went on after Tony Blair started the “New Labour” process that even when Miliband was trying to steer the party away from high Blairism, he and the party were still in bed with multimillionaire executives. 

Labour only finally made a break with listening to exploitative bosses before workers under Jeremy Corbyn, so there is plenty of possibility the party will slide back that way.

ISS is a Danish multinational “facilities management” company — meaning cleaning, janitorial and catering services, with a £9 billion turnover. 

It is a giant but it makes its money out of squeezing profits from its low-paid workers. 

It has grown especially thanks to privatisation of public services. 

It has its hooks particularly strongly into the NHS and other public services in Britain. 

Privatisation of support services in the NHS is now so automatic that ISS was, without a thought, given the contract to run the cleaning, catering and support of the Nightingale Hospital set up as an emergency coronavirus unit in east London’s Excel conference centre.

Charles Allen started his career in television, and was chief executive of Manchester-based Granada TV in the 1990s. 

There was a strong crossover between television and “hotel services” in Britain, as Granada took over hotel company Forte in the 1990s and merged with catering and cleaning company Compass soon after.  

Allen’s move from TV to janitorial services is not as big a jump as it seems.

He became chief executive of ISS in 2013, shortly after Miliband put him into the Lords. 

Allen was a Labour supporter in the Blair years. Miliband first gave Allen a job reviewing Labour’s organisation in 2011, in what the Guardian called a move to “to underline” Labour’s “pro-business credentials” as Blairites accused Miliband of straying from New Labour’s true business-friendly path. 

Then Miliband created a new executive board to supervise Labour, chaired by Lord Allen.

When Miliband made Allen both a Labour lord and a member of the Labour executive board, he was already a director of ISS, a firm which was deeply involved in privatisation in general, including NHS PFI schemes. 

Allen was also then a consultant to Goldman Sachs. Even as Miliband tried to move a little away from New Labour, he still gave top jobs to executives running NHS privatisation and banking corporations. 

Allen was, and is, very obviously made rich by these interests. In 2015 Allen bought a £10 million mansion in Somerset. 

He had the spare cash, having sold his house in Holland Park for £55m. 

Allen currently gets £276,000 a year for chairing ISS, which is a part-time job. 

He also has many other corporate directorships, including being chairman of Moelis investment bank, and a director of Global Media, which runs radio stations like Capital and Heart FM.

While Allen does well from ISS, the firm is well known for treating staff badly. 

This March ISS cleaners organised by the GMB at London’s Lewisham Hospital had to strike — in the middle of the coronavirus crisis — because ISS would not pay them on time, with money due to the low-paid workers delayed by several weeks. 

In 2019 Unison organised strikes by ISS staff over pay in Liverpool hospitals, while PCS organised strikes by ISS cleaners in government departments including HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Business over pay — because privatisation of cleaning and janitorial services goes well beyond the NHS.

I think that Labour members who backed Keir Starmer for leader do want to move some way from Corbynism — but they also want to keep some of the Corbyn settlement. 

In particular they never want to go back to New Labour’s embrace of privatisation and the private-finance initiative. 

But the fact that the boss of ISS is a Miliband-era Labour lord shows that the leadership can be more easily dragged along that road than the members may want or realise.

Tory property

FOR a picture of how the Tory Party is, in a completely literal fashion, the party of property, take a look at Brandon Lewis’s entry on the Register of MPs’ Interests. 

Lewis is currently Northern Ireland secretary and he was Conservative Party chairman in 2019, having had several other ministerial positions. 

He’s well-liked in Tory circles, and they even arranged to get him a CBE in 2019. 

He is also heavily dependent on property interests: according to the register, in 2019 Lewis had five helicopter flights, worth over £20,000, thanks to Gallagher Developments, and £19,000 to his local party from Countrywide Developments. 

Both are companies run by property developer Tony Gallagher. Lewis’s local party also got £15,000 from property developer Bruce Ritchie and £20,000 from Ritchie’s firm, Residential Land. 

Ritchie’s company is a luxury-property developer that will rent you a flat in Fulham for £1,150 a week. 

Lewis’s re-election was funded by property developers, who also swished him around Britain in a helicopter. At the same time, according to the Register of MPs’ Interests, Brandon is personally a landlord. 

MPs must register any rent income over £10,000 a year, and Lewis and his wife are letting out a house in Essex for at least that much.