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Jobs for the boys... and girls

The non-discriminatory, revolving door between state office and business continues at full swing for any and all would be ‘influencers,’ writes SOLOMON HUGHES

FORMER Tory energy minister Claire O’Neill – you might know her better by her former name Claire Perry – has been hired as a “senior adviser” by a top international lobbying form, which also employs former Labour Party ministers.

Claire O’Neill was David Cameron’s rail minister from 2014-16 and Theresa May’s energy minister from 2017-19 before standing down at the 2019 election.

This June she became a “senior adviser” to FTI Consulting: FTI is a major international management consultancy, with a big “strategic communications” or political lobbying arm.

FTI says “our specialists directly engage with elected and appointed policymakers” to help their corporate clients. FTI says “our firm reaches governments in mature and emerging markets to deliver results.”

As well as lobbying governments, FTI says it will get its clients’ messages over to “key stakeholders” like “the NGO community, academics” and “political peers.”

It relies heavily on former politicians and government insiders to help deliver its clients’ messages into the political arena – hence hiring people like O’Neill. The FTI deal is: pay us, and we will use the politicians we hired to help your corporation get political advantages.

FTI Consulting wants political insiders from across the spectrum to act as hired guns for its clients: former Labour health secretary Patricia Hewitt joined FTI’s public affairs team in 2014, and still works for the firm.

Public Affairs means political lobbying and influencing. Gemma Doyle was a Labour MP and shadow defence secretary until she lost her seat in 2015, when she became an FTI Consulting managing director.

FTI Consulting says it represents a host of ugly corporations including gambling giant William Hill, cigarette firm British American Tobacco, arms firms Babcock and MBDA, controversial computer company Palantir and Australian investment giant Macquarie – nicknamed the Giant Vampire Kangaroo because it comes from “down under” and aggressively sucks money out of investments, including in public utilities like Thames Water.

All these firms should be heavily regulated, so they all have an interest in hiring ex-politicians to help them avoid regulations.

Former Tory ministers like O’Neill joining former Labour figures as corporate lobbyists shows one way big business influences politics.

Reformers want to use political parties to change society on behalf of the people, giving voters the chance to influence how big corporations are treated. But by regularly hiring politicians, corporations and their lobbyists can reverse this process, so that political parties end up telling voters what the corporations want, rather than the other way round.

O’Neill was welcomed to FTI by Simon Lewis, vice-chairman of FTI Consulting in Europe and the Middle East, and one of its top strategic communications people, who said he was “delighted to welcome Claire to FTI Consulting” because “she has a track record of major achievements during her time in government.”

Lewis was himself Gordon Brown’s chief of communications when Brown was prime minister, so this is very much a “political insiders” club.

O’Neill likes to present herself as a “green” champion concerned about climate change. She said that FTI, which works for the big corporations, would be the “ideal platform” for her to continue as “sustainability is the top concern in many boardrooms,” and  “it is crucial to combine this focus with other business priorities to create lasting impact.”

FTI’s current clients include Drax, the power station operator regularly criticised for pumping out CO2 thanks to its controversial burning of wood pellets. However, I should think this won’t trouble O’Neill. She has another job which she has held since September 2002, as a director of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

This supposedly “green” corporate lobby group’s members include oil and gas firms like BP and Shell. It’s seen as a “greenwashing” group by many environmentalists, making environmental noises while preventing  genuine environmental reform

‘Something Will Happen, You’ll See’

Reading Christos Ikonomou’s short story collection Something will Happen, You’ll See, I was struck both by the quality of the work, and the – as far as I can tell – lack of much of an  equivalent in the UK.

Ikonomou’s short stories about people scraping a living around Athens in the wake of the economic crisis was rightly celebrated and awarded prizes in Greece. It was translated into English in 2016, and rightly praised again (although more reviewed in the US than in Britain).

Ikonomou’s tales of people trying to get by in casualised jobs, facing layoffs, rent arrears and debt are humane and darkly comic, as people try and hold together, or fall apart under the pressure. They reminded me of Bukowski’s short stories – for the black humour in the face of adversity. Except Bukowski wrote about individuals falling on the skids, and behaving both badly and well, where Ikonomou is describing a whole society falling into skid row.

Like Greece, Irish literature threw up novels of the crisis. 

Donal Ryan’s 2013 The Spinning Heart had a Steinbeck-y take on a small town left in the lurch when the big developers run off. Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012)  and Paul Murray’s excellent The Mark and the Void (2015) are both black comedies of the financial crisis that look at the crooks at the top. In France Edouard Louis’s End of Eddy (2014) was a literary gut punch about the poverty – financial and spiritual – of the blue collar small towns. 

I’d strongly recommend all these books, with Ikonomou’s Something will Happen, You’ll See collection at the top of the list.

I’d also be very pleased to hear about any British literary response to the crisis. It seems to me that there is less than there was in Europe, perhaps because novelists speak for the nation, and in Greece or Ireland, or to some extent France, the crisis was considered a national crisis. Where here it was “privatised,” with the better-off homeowners insulated from the effects.

Something will Happen, You’ll See by Christos Ikonomou is translated by Karen Emmerich, published by Archipelago Books.

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