On the surface, the extraordinary story of the ‘P&O 800’ – the ferry line’s summary firing, without consultation, in March of its entire seafaring workforce and replacement with agency workers earning a fraction of previous wages – is a simple if extreme tale of management ruthlessness. But investigated further, it’s more complicated with that, showing up some of the deep contradictions in the UK’s recent economic history.
Pushing a point, you might call P&O’s actions Putin-style management – brutal, contemptuous of ordinary norms and indifferent to public opinion. As it happens, this is not the only link to Russia. Leaving aside the mechanics of the operation, the shamelessly hypocritical reactions to it are remarkably similar to those that greeted recent revelations about the involvement of Russian oligarchs in the UK economy. Just as Johnson and his ministers were shocked – shocked! I tell you – to discover the extent of the Russian penetration of British economic and political circles that they themselves had not just tolerated but eagerly encouraged over at least two decades, so now they found themselves appalled, disappointed, dismayed, angered and astonished that a large international company should dare exploit the skimpy employee protections, feeble worker organisations and wider institutional incompetence that successive governments have deliberately engineered over an even longer period.
True to form, ministerial protestations were undercut by the subsequent discovery that they had been informed of the sacking the day before it happened in a departmental memo helpfully explaining that the job cuts ‘would align [P&O] with other companies in the market’ and ‘ensure that they remain a key player for years to come through restructuring’; that they themselves had eportedly changed the law as recently as 2018, engaging companies to notify authorities of job cuts only in the country ships are flagged in, and not automatically the UK even if they are based there; and that a letter expressing official disappointment to the previous P&O chairman who had left last year.
The follow-up has been little better. It beggars belief that ministers still had no idea whether the law had been broken at the moment the P&O CEO was admitting to a parliamentary committee that it knew exactly what it was doing from the start and had gone ahead regardless. What on earth is an attorney general for? Finger-wagging that contracts with the ferry company and Dubai owner DP World would be reviewed hardly cut it as retribution (from which state-owned DP World and its investment in UK freeports have in any case been expressly exempted). Nor do Johnson’s suggestion that seafarers take court action themselves, or transport minister Grant Shapps’ threat that ‘many customers, passengers and freight will quite frankly wish to vote with their feet and, where possible, choose another operator’. DP World ‘must be quaking in their boots,’ observed Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer drily.
Whatever happens next, the government’s hopeless response to a ruthless coup leaves it between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it can’t allow a large company to knowingly and deliberately flout the law – and say it would do the same thing again in a similar situation, to boot – and get away with it. But in that case it dares P&O, or more likely parent DP World, to cut the losses and shut the company down entirely, with the loss not only of the jobs of 800 unfortunate UK seafarers but many more dockside and in offices besides.
The oligarch and P&O crises that have now bubbled greasily to the surface wouldn’t have occurred without, respectively, Putin’s murderous Ukraine adventure, and the travel lockdowns brought about by Covid. But under the surface they share the same root: the increasinly servile nature of British capitalism. Oliver Bullough, author of the depressing and self-explanatorily titled Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tyrants, Kleptocrats and Criminals, locates the origins of its latest avatar in Suez and the loss of empire in the 1950s, at which point the City of London was forced to find new ways of leveraging its tentacular international financial reach.
After financing slavery and the empire, its business model would now be as a broker to the rich, selling anything to anyone if the price was right: reputation, social standing and access to political power as well as extravagant mansions and trophy companies ranging from football clubs to posh hotels and iconic British business names – Rolls Royce, Bentley and Jaguar, the Dorchester, Grosvenor House, the Ritz and Savoy, Harrods and Selfridges, technology companies like Arm and Deep Mind, and, as of course we now know, P&O, alongside all the most famous premiership football clubs.
The unwelcome consequences are now erupting in all sorts of places. One was the embarrassing ownership of Chelsea football club. Another is the row over the P&O seafarer sackings. Yet while the government has made much of its efforts to track, trace and immunise the assets of ‘bad’ foreign money, there is suddenly a deafening official silence over P&O – even in May when the DP World chairman warmly complimented P&O’s management on the ‘amazing job’ it had done in restructuring the company. The silence may have something to do with the fact that state-owned DP World just happens to be the largest investor in UK ports, with huge terminals at London Gateway and Southampton. Given that, it may be unwise to count on the avowed culprits suffering more than a token slap on the wrist any time soon.
Meanwhile P&O itself, while back in action, has suffered a number of publicised operating setbacks, including breakdowns and ships being taken out of service after inspections by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency that identified a number of safety and other drill issues It can stand as an apt metaphor for post-Brexit capitalist Britain: corner-cutting, mercenary, unrepentant about breaking the law and its effect on public opinion, and, like the government, not going anywhere very fast.