As the Guardian notes this morning:
The bosses of some of Britain's biggest arms and oil companies have refused to attend a parliamentary inquiry into the use of hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to help dictators build arsenals and facilitate environmental and human rights abuses.
The businessmen, including Ian King, chief executive of BAE Systems, had been invited to an all-party investigation into the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD)'s underwriting of loans, including £35m to Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe to buy five Hawk fighter jets.
Good heavens! How impertinent of the committee. Fancy wanting to hold business to account for the funding it uses and the dodgy deals it does with it. Now that would never do, would it?
Odd how the boys (bound to be boys) closed ranks. Remember what Adam Smith said:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Do you think there might have been such a meeting to result in this blanket refusal? Maybe? No, of course not: silly me, that could not be true.
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I thought the committee had the power to make people attend.
So did I
The government deliberately make parliamentary committees toothless tigers.
There is a horrible example in Nigeria, where the effects of oil exploration have been to ruin the fishing areas for people who have, for hundreds of years, sustained themselves through fishing.
You can argue, environmentally, whether oil or fishing should take priority, but what seems obvious is that, if oil won, the oil giant should give large amounts to enable the local communities to establish alternative means of earning a living.
Instead, unfortunately, millions in petro-$ seem to have gone to a few high-ranking politicians, enabling them to put their children through Eton & Harrow & bid up the prices for London housing, while the unfortunates of the delta are left sans fish, sans water, sans tout !
Needless to say, Nigeria’s high-ranking politicians couldn’t have stashed away their millions in petro-$ without the help of lawyers, accountants & Company formation agents in the City of London & its many offshore secrecy hidey-holes.
You’d like to hope these people can’t sleep at nights but, sadly, I’m sure they do.