Lord Simon of Highbury: Why Was He in Government and Not Behind Bars?

Okay, I’m writing this because it’s left me furious ever since I read about it when putting up the article on Saturday. This was a piece on the ‘Fat Cats’ Directory’, the list of company directors and senior management, who had entered government under Tony Blair in George Monbiot’s book, Captive State. It was a long list of incompetents, who had run their companies into the ground; the self-interested – scientists on the boards of biotech companies, who got on the boards of the funding bodies to give themselves even more money; the environmentally negligent; and the simply exploitative. These last were various company directors, who had made masses of employees redundant, or cut wages, and had been put in charge of Bliar’s ‘welfare to work’ programme and the minimum wage board. But there was one person on the list, who struck me as particularly odious: Lord Simon of Highbury. Here’s what I wrote about him:

Lord Simon of Highbury

Chairman of BP
Vice-Chairman of European Round Table of Industrialists. Under his direction, BP assisted the Colombian government in forcing peasants off their lands, and imprisoning, killing and torturing trade unionists. Gave money to the 16th Brigade, notorious for murder, kidnapping torture and rape.

Minister for Trade and Competitiveness in Europe
One of the ministers responsible for implementing the ethical foreign policy.

By any standards, this resume makes the man a Fascist collaborator. So why is he in government, and not facing trial at the Hague for crimes against humanity? What does it say about our society, that a creature like this can breeze in and out of the halls of power in chauffeur-driven limousine, wining and dining with the highest in the land, when he has doubtless been responsible for some of the most horrific atrocities? Why has he escaped censure, let along prosecution, when others haven’t?

In the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi leaders at the end of World War II, many senior executives of the various firms that served the Nazi state were also tried, and convicted for collaboration. The firms they managed, like the horrific IG Farben, which produced the cyanide gas used against Jews in the death camps, were deliberately broken up into their constituent companies.

Unfortunately, too many Nazis escaped justice, and Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal spent their lives trying to hunt them down and bring them to justice. And it was apparently the same rage that spurred the Baader-Meinhof gang to commit some of their terrorist attacks. They were also outraged that members of the Third Reich had escaped justice, and were living very well in the Bundesrepublik. And so they began their campaign of murder and terrorism. I’m not trying to whitewash or glamorise them here. They were responsible for some of the most horrific terrorism offences of the 1970s. For example, they firebombed a Berlin synagogue, supposedly as part of a campaign against Israel, which they perceived as a colonialist state. They were violent criminals, but when it comes to killing the men, who ran the death camps and torture squads of the Third Reich, you can understand their rage.

It’s the same rage that motivates people to protest and physically fight the clowns in the various far-right Nazi parties – the BNP, National Action, EDL, National Front, North West Infidels and so on. Many of the members of these groups are violent thugs, guilty of the most horrific attacks on innocent people, including murder, simply because of their race or political opinions, and have rightly been jailed. But these are very small fry compared with monsters like Lord Simon. He has aided and abetted an organisation that has violently removed people from their land, and murdered and tortured trade unionists and left-wing activists. By the same standards we applied to the Nazis, and to Radovan Milosevic and the rest of the genocides in Serbia, he should be standing in a dock in a court room at the Hague, waiting for sentencing.

But he isn’t. Instead, I’ve no doubt he still pursuing a very lucrative career as the director of an extremely profitable multinational. Or else he’s taken up a very pleasant retirement. Either way, I doubt his troubled by either the consequences of his actions, or lawsuits from his victims. I don’t doubt that wherever he lives, it’s nice and quiet, very haute bourgeois, and exclusive. He’s probably thought a good neighbour by the others around him.

I am certainly not urging anyone to turn to terrorism and try to copy the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the violence of some of the Antifa street fighters. All I am trying to do is express my outrage that this man was given a place in government, and try to work out why someone with a record as odious as his was being given a gracious welcome at the highest seats of power. My guess is that it’s because he was a wealth businessman. He wasn’t directly responsible for the atrocities committed by the Colombian government, and his company is ridiculously wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. As for the murders and death squads of the various South American Fascist regimes, they’re protected by pretty much the same apathy expressed by Neville Chamberlain in his infamous comments about Czechoslovakia. They’re ‘far-away’ countries ‘of which we know nothing.’ And the only people, who get worked up about what goes on there are the ultra-left types Private Eye’s been satirising for years in the guise of Dave Spart.

Private Eye on Corporate Interests Favoured over Members 2013 Tory Party Conference

Jeremy Hunt, the man in charge of the NHS. He would rather talk to the private health care companies than grass roots Tories, it would seem.

One of the pieces I put up this week was on the group, Bite the Ballot, which tries to get young people interested in politics and voting. I remarked that if the government and other political partiers were serious about encouraging more people to vote, then they should actually try to expand their party’s membership amongst ordinary people, rather than simply give all their attention to wealthy donors from private industry.

I’ve also blogged on the similarity between the Tory’s policy of taking over experts from the private sector and putting them in charge of government departments and other concerns, in order to have them run according to the wishes of private industry, and the Nazis’ policy of ‘commission management’. This was the industrial policy in which the heads of private companies were co-opted into the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. Carl Krauch, the head of I.G. Farben, for example, was appointed general plenipotentiary for chemicals in 1938 and Director of the Reich Office for Economic Consolidation.

In their issue for the 23 August to 5 September of last year, Private Eye covered the way card carrying members of the Tory party were in a minority at their conference, and were even excluded from some events altogether. The article runs:

‘That only 38 percent of those attending the Tory party conference next month will be card-carrying Conservatives has attracted a lot of attention. But even they won’t be allowed entry to some key events.

The schedule for Reform, a think-tank with links to the party top brass, reveals a number of invitation-only talks paid for by those who really matter: the commercial and other lobbying interest who make up 36 percent of the attendees.

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt, for example, will have a “private roundtable discussion” on NHS reform, paid for by BMI Healthcare, one of the UK’s largest private hospital groups. Reform has also arranged a private chat with health minister Dan Poulter, paid for by Baxter Healthcare, a US firm that sells blood and kidney services to the NHS.

Elsewhere Damian Green MP will speak on “policing and technology” at a meeting “in partnership with” Airwaves, which sells radios to the police; Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester, will speak courtesy of private security firm G4S; and Hastings Tory MP Amber Rudd will discuss “infrastructure investment” thanks to train leasing firm Angel Trains. How cosy!’

Apart from showing us who some of the firms lobbying the Tory party for the privatisation of the NHS are – Reform, BMI Healthcare and Baxter Healthcare, it also shows how low the party’s view of their own grassroots membership is, when they are excluded from so much of their conference.

If the Tories really are serious about encouraging people to vote, as they claimed to be when backing Bite the Bullet, then they will have to start by listening to their own members and opening up their conferences to them fully.

But given the elitism and preference for the company of respectable members of private industry over the masses, that probably won’t be happening any time soon