The Price of Shame

The Thames Water affair is a reminder that big bonuses beat public pressure. Also: why lifts rarely fall, but sometimes rocket; and a guide to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex.

A quick promotional note before we begin. On Wednesday 11 June, there’s an Oh God, What Now? liveshow in Soho, where Dorian, Ros and I will be joined by Marcus Brigstocke to talk about ~the news~. I’m not saying that Marcus and I are definitely going to take control of the stage and do a guerrilla Paper Cuts. I’m just not saying that we’re not. Tickets here.

One of the first things I ever wrote that I noticed going at least slightly viral was a post for Sunny Hundal’s group blog Liberal Conspiracy headlined, “Here’s how we regulate bankers”. This was 2009, when one of the most pressing political issues was – this feels very quaint – what to do about the fortune we’d just spent bailing out the banks, while many of their bosses seemingly got away scot free. My suggestion was that, if such bailouts were necessary to keep the economy going, we should offer them – but that, to rebalance the risks and rewards taken on by the financial sector, they should come at a price. Every time a bank needed bailing out, a randomly chosen member of its senior management team should be taken out and shot. I thought I was Jonathan Swift.¹

Coppermills Treatment Works, Walthamstow: where my dad used to work. Image: Russss/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0.

This came to mind this morning when I saw that Thames Water had been fined a record £122.7m by the industry regulator, Ofwat. Its management’s enthusiasm for continuing to pay shareholders dividends, and themselves hefty bonuses, at a point when the company is failing to upgrade infrastructure or reduce environmental damage, seems to have been less of a cause than the failures themselves: £104.5m of the fine relates to sewage spills; just £18.2 to “undeserved” shareholder payouts”. But bosses’ refusal to change their attitude to money, even when the company is in receipt of a £3bn public rescue loan, surely won’t have helped: it was forced to pause its bonus scheme following pressure from Downing Street literally last week.

I’ve been hating on Thames Water for nearly 30 years, ever since they made my dad redundant and to a large extent broke his spirit at a point in his life when he was (oh jesus christ) younger than I am now. It’s clear that the company has long seen its job as providing money for shareholders, rather than providing water for customers; although whether this is an inevitable result of privatised utilities, a specific outcome of a period of private equity ownership, or a symptom of regulatory failure, I don’t know.

I’m also not sure whether nationalisation would magically solve anything: on the one hand, it would just leave the taxpayer on the hook for the investment that the company hasn’t made; on the other, if we’re going to be funding that anyway, shouldn’t we at least get to own the assets? It doesn’t help that the “shareholders” in this equation are not, as one might like to imagine, fat men in top hats, but the public, via pension funds. All in all it feels like a mess I’m glad it isn’t my job to solve.

The thing about the story that interests me today, though, is that it’s a reminder that shame comes with a price tag. Thames Water’s management have been pilloried in the press, their greed and competence questioned pretty much daily, for well over a year now. If the amount of money on the table was smaller, a few thousand pounds say, they might have changed their behaviour. When it’s measured in millions, though, they’ll put up with the hate. They’d rather have the money.²

Which brings me back to my “taken out and shot” thing. I’m not seriously suggesting we should be executing executives, as tempting and etymologically pleasing as that sounds. But as with the bankers during the financial crisis, I do find myself wondering if there should be more personal risk in these high paying jobs. When a private company requires taxpayer funding simply not to collapse, there should be something – personal financial risk; a chance of prosecution – that places some of the cost on those who take home those lucrative bonuses.

Public shame hasn’t been enough to make these people think about the impact they’re having on the world. Perhaps the threat of a custodial sentence would be.

A Brief, Emotional Interlude

I remember exactly where I was when I agreed to be part of the New Writing North programme. It was that mad day when I decided to spend nine hours on London’s Superloop bus network for #content: somewhere in darkest south London I received an email from Substack’s Farrah Storr asking if I’d be interested in mentoring a writer named Matt Taylor.

I didn’t know what mentoring entailed. A whole year later, I still don’t, and have no idea either what wisdom I’ve had to offer or how best to go about imparting it; frankly, I’ve spent the whole year quietly worried I’m bullshitting. But yesterday Matt wrote about his experience of the programme and the results made me well up.

Are writing development programmes worth it?

Please do read it. And please do subscribe to Matt’s substack. Apart from anything else, one thing I have managed to teach him is quite how irritating it is to be just below a round number.

Lifts very rarely fall down. But they do sometimes shoot up

Sometimes in life you come across a fact so unnerving and counterintuitive that you find you can’t stop thinking about it – or at least, not until you’ve written about it for some kind of weekly newsletter. Such is my realisation, following extensive investigation, that – despite what both good sense and action movies would tell us – people almost never die because the lift they are in suddenly plummets towards the ground. The safety features are too good. It just doesn’t happen.

But they do occasionally die when their lift suddenly shoots up.

There is, I am aware, a lot to unpack here. Bear with me.

First, a note for the benefit of any elevatophobics reading: you are fantastically unlikely to experience either scenario. It’s difficult to put exact figures on the risk: since elevator use is incredibly widespread, and elevator ownership incredibly diffuse, the group best placed to collect statistics is the global elevator industry, and for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, they don’t bother. But considering the number of people who use lifts every day, and considering that the technology is fundamentally “a metal box on a rope”, incidents in which said box suddenly drops are almost miraculously rare.

Most incidents that do fit that profile involve one of more of the following: a construction site; a mineshaft; an elevator in the middle of maintenance because it’s already known to be faulty; a location in which, at risk of cancellation, one suspects building regs are rather less strong than they are in much of the west. These are all tragedies, don’t get me wrong – but they are not quite the same as getting into the lift in your home or your office and finding yourself on a speedy and unexpected trip to the basement.

One incident that does fit that profile is the story of Betty Lou Oliver, who went to work one day and found herself plunging a terrifying 75 storeys back to ground level. Even then, though, there were three mitigating factors that mean you probably don’t need to worry about repeating her experience. For one thing, this is going back a bit, to July 1945. For another, it only happened because someone had flown a USAF B25-Mitchell bomber into the Empire State Building.