Green isn’t always positive. If you are so green you would make a cabbage blush; it means you are naive at best, ignorant and thoughtless at worst.
That seems pretty much to be us, the voters. If we had taken proper care to safeguard the short lived Green Investment Bank it might now still be doing its business of backing emerging green businesses and initiatives, and not lying bleeding, a corpse being hacked apart by Macquarie, the Australian bank known to its intimates as the Vampire Kangaroo.
It now seems that Macquarie are set to asset strip this once publicly owned bank, rendering it useless as a green engine, but rendering the companies senior management and shareholders even richer.
Various news sites leads their business sections this week baldly stating: “Worst kind of company: Alarm in Britain over Macquarie Bank’s proposed takeover of UK’s Green Investment Bank.” Apparently, buyers for the best bits of the Bank are already lined up, though the deal has not yet been finalised.
Started by the Coalition government – Vince Cable in the teeth of Tory opposition – the Bank had a primary green purpose. It was HQ’d in London and Edinburgh- which explains why yet again the Scots are spitting tacks at Westminster – and was allowed to do modest work in raising private capital for green expansion. It invested in biomass and between 2012 and 2015 it had invested £2.3 billion in 60 green projects. It quickly became profitable in financial year 2014-15.
So, like the East Coast Rail Line which was efficient and profitable (for the UK public purse), the Green Investment Bank was gifted to a famously avaricious part of the private sector in a series of squalid little moves. Sajid Javid, the Business Secretary, announced that the Bank would be privatised in a Written Answer in June 2015. Now, Written Answers are a scheming device for sliding out unpopular news in the House of Commons, constructed with the hope that no one will notice them. We voters were bamboozled by not one but two, both by Javid. In October 2015, another Written Answer announced that all public sector controls on the Bank’s capital raising would be removed. If it had announced that the gravy would be provided for free with the trussed up turkey it would at least have been honest.
Then, proceeding further into ‘you couldn’t make it up’ territory, the Government announced gravely that the Bank’s new owner would be the Macquarie Group. Now Macquarie are famous for many things – more in a moment – but not for being in the top gazillion green companies on the planet. They have just bought, with partners, a majority share in our UK National Grid.
Here’s the magnificent Aditya Chakraborrty of The Guardian.
‘I have come across Macquarie before through its handling of Thames Water, which some analysts cite as being among the greatest debacles in all of Britain’s history of privatisation. Just as with National Grid, it led a consortium to buy Thames. Two academics at the Open University examined the accounts between 2007 and 2012 and found that in four out of those five years, Macquarie and its fellow investors took out more money from the company than it made in post-tax profits. They crippled the firm with billions in debt, while Thames customers paid ever more in water bills and got among the worst service offered by any water company.’
So there we have it. A Green Bank turned into a feast for asset strippers. And in other news – most scientists are now saying that the planet’s chances of staying below a 2 degree increase in heat are virtually negligible. Might the two by any chance be related?