Former UK Parliamentary speaker John Bercow has made more than £500,000 in fees for public speeches and pundit appearances.
Bercow’s company Fedhead Ltd made £547,664 in its first year, although it owes £157,647 in tax and social security payments, the Daily Mail reported
The controversial former speaker, known for his booming voice and allegations of bullying his staff – which he denies – owns 76 per cent of the firm with the rest in the hands of his wife Sally.
Bercow reportedly earned over £60,000 for his one-night-stand as an election pundit for Sky News in December 2019.
He has also joined elite agency JLA Speaker Bureau, whose clients including former Labour Party spokesman Alastair Campbell and ex-government minister Ed Balls earn up to £25,000 per speech.
“After stepping down from Westminster John shares his insights on the future of our politics and the lessons learned about driving change,” reads Bercow’s blurb on the Fedhead website. “He is also a seasoned raconteur with countless stories from the corridors of power and an eye out for anyone ‘chuntering from a sedentary position’.”
In 2019 Bercow disregarded the century-old Erskine May rules of Parliamentary procedure to allow a series of indicative votes with multiple options. They were part of unsuccessful moves by opposition parties and Tory rebels to prevent Britain leaving the European Union (EU) in line with the 2016 referendum vote.
He stepped down as speaker in October 2019 as the Westminster wrangling to break the deadlock reached its endgame, with Tory Brexiteers openly accusing him of undermining the impartiality of the ‘Woolsack’ or speaker’s chair.
The following month he told a Foreign Press Association event in London: “I think that Brexit is the biggest foreign policy mistake in the post-war period,” after declaring “I don’t have to remain impartial now.”
Bercow was notably denied the seat in the House of Lords normally awarded to retired speakers by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, despite Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn nominating the former Conservative MP.
EU leaders will talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping seeking trade and investment Monday, despite tensions over Hong Kong’s freedoms and Beijing’s treatment of its Uighur minority.
Chinese officials, EU chiefs Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will hold a video-conference to replace a full summit with all 27 EU leaders cancelled because of coronavirus.
China says an investment deal — already seven years in the making — can be agreed this year, but EU officials warn obstacles remain and insist they will not swallow unfavourable terms simply to cut a deal.
“Even if there is a political objective to accelerate negotiations and conclude them by the end of the year, we will have this only if it is something worth having,” an EU official said.
Brussels says “significant progress” has been made in talks since a similar video summit in June, and officials hope to agree a roadmap to a deal by the end of the year — they also want Beijing to improve market access for European companies.
“The EU must define its own interests, and must be strong and independent of both China and the United States,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told the German weekly Welt am Sonntag.
Brussels wants to reinforce respect for intellectual property, to end obligations to transfer technology and to reduce subsidies for Chinese public enterprises.
China-US tensions –
No major breakthrough is expected on Monday but the EU side hopes to persuade Xi to give fresh political impetus to the talks — and to allow his negotiators more room to compromise.
The meeting comes as ties between China and the US deteriorate, with both sides locked in fierce recriminations over trade disputes, human rights and the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Washington and Beijing have imposed curbs on each other’s diplomats, after another tit-for-tat move in July when the two governments ordered the closure of consulates in Houston and Chengdu.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, right, and China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, left, address the media during a joint press conference as part of a meeting in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2020. Credit: AP Photo/Michael Sohn, pool
Both sides have sought to enlist the EU in their spat and, during a visit to Brussels by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in June, EU diplomatic chief Josep Borrell mooted talks to forge a common transatlantic front against China.
But little progress has been made on this initiative and broadly Brussels has preferred a middle path, treating Beijing as both a potential partner and a “systemic rival”.
“The EU stands firm on its interests and values but also wants to cooperate with China,” a senior EU official said.
Hong Kong –
The EU will press Xi on Hong Kong, where Beijing has imposed a controversial new security law — a move denounced by the West as an assault on the city’s freedoms.
After the June summit, von der Leyen warned China would face “very negative consequences” if it pressed ahead with the law and the EU would limit exports to Hong Kong of equipment that could be used for surveillance and repression.
European concerns about Beijing’s rights record are growing. During a visit by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to Berlin earlier this month, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called China out over Hong Kong and its treatment of minority Uighurs.
A polluted day in Beijing in January 2020. Brussels hopes to press China to be more ambitious in its efforts to cut emissions
But the European Union is far from united on how to deal with China, with some member states urging a tougher stance on rights and the environment, and others wanting to boost trade.
But China as its own concerns.
China announced Saturday it was banning imports of pork products from Germany after the European country confirmed its first case of African swine fever.
Germany is Europe‘s biggest pork producer and recently saw a surge in demand from China after it suffered an outbreak of the same disease.
Meanwhile, Beijing has used its mammoth “Belt and Road” infrastructure scheme to effectively pick off investment-hungry EU member states such as Greece, Portugal and Italy.
LONDON.— Former prime ministers Tony Blair and John Major said yesterday Britain must drop a “shocking” plan to pass legislation that breaks its divorce treaty with the European Union, in a breach of international law.
The British government said explicitly last week that it plans to break international law by breaching parts of the Withdrawal Agreement treaty that it signed in January, when it formally left the EU.
“What is being proposed now is shocking,” Major and Blair, who were adversaries in the 1990s as Conservative and Labour leaders, wrote in a joint letter published by The Sunday Times.
“How can it be compatible with the codes of conduct that bind ministers, law officers and civil servants deliberately to break treaty obligations?”
Theresa May, the predecessor of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has also questioned whether international partners would be able to trust Britain in future.
Johnson’s Internal Market Bill is aimed at ensuring Britain’s four constituent nations can trade freely with one another after leaving the EU, but the government says that requires overriding part of the withdrawal treaty it signed with Brussels.
British ministers say the bill is a “safety net” in the event there is no trade deal reached with the bloc, but top EU officials say it undermines both the withdrawal treaty and trust in future talks.
EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said yesterday that the Withdrawal Agreement on Northern Ireland “is not a threat to the integrity of the UK”, and had been agreed by the two sides to protect peace on the island of Ireland.
“We could not have been clearer about the consequences of Brexit,” Barnier said on Twitter.
His British counterpart David Frost responded by saying London had to reserve powers in the new bill in order to keep the peace in Ireland.
Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party, described the legislation as wrong yesterday.
“We have broken the trust of our international partners,” Starmer wrote in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, adding that his party would oppose the bill in parliament unless changes were made.
European lawmakers have warned they would not approve any new trade deal unless the withdrawal agreement was fully implemented, while there is also talk of possible legal action.
“The reputation of the UK . . . as a trusted negotiating partner on important issues like this is being damaged in a very serious way,” Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney told the BBC yesterday.
Greece’s Prime Minister is demanding the European Union take greater responsibility for managing migration, as authorities scramble to find new accommodation for 12,000 people left homeless after fire gutted an overcrowded camp.
Residents of Lesbos are unhappy with how migration has been handled
The 1,000 volunteers who will move into a new camp will be screened for coronavirus
It is expected to take days to move those who want to relocate into the new tent city
Kyriakos Mitsotakis blamed some residents at the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos for trying to blackmail his Government by deliberately setting the fires that destroyed the camp last week.
But he said this could be an opportunity to improve how the EU handles a key challenge.
“It [the burning of Moria] was a tragedy. These images were bad,” Mr Mitsotakis said.
“It was a warning bell to all to become sensitised. Europe cannot afford a second failure on the migration issue.”
Human rights activists have criticised the squalor at the Moria refugee camp, which was built to house 2,750 but became overcrowded with around 12,500 refugees and asylum-seekers who fled across the sea from Turkey.
Since the fires, which came after the camp faced a coronavirus lockdown, thousands of people have camped outside and on highways near Moria, under police guard.
Voluntary relocation to new camp in coming days
The army is setting up temporary accommodation while the new camp is being built.(AP: Panagiotis Balaskas)
Many have protested the Greek Government for refusing to allow the homeless migrants to leave Lesbos for the mainland.
Residents are also unhappy their island is being used as a dumping ground for migrants.
Mr Mitsotakis said he has spoken to French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the reallocation of at least some migrants from Moria, but he said there will be a new, permanent refugee camp on Lesbos.
The Greek army has been setting up tents at a former artillery range, about four kilometres from the old camp.
Migration Minister Notis Mitarakis said an estimated 1,000 Moria residents would be relocated to the new tent city.
“At the moment, it’s happening on a voluntary basis,” Mr Mitarakis said.
Mr Mitarakis said those entering the new camp would undergo rapid testing for coronavirus, and that five new cases have been found so far.
At the Vatican, Pope Francis expressed solidarity with the migrants on Lesbos and called for a dignified welcome for them.
Mustafa Ružnić, Prime Minister of the canton of Una Sana in Bosnia-Herzegovina, has called on Italy to help stop the flow of migrants in the Balkans as tens of thousands continue to pass through.
Una Sana, located in the north-west of the non-EU country, is one of the areas most affected by mass migration as it lies on the border to Croatia, which as an EU member-state marks one of the bloc’s common external borders.
According to Prime Minister Ružnić, at least a hundred thousand migrants have passed through his region in the last two years alone.
In an interview with Italian newspaper Il Giornale, he warned that the “over 100,000 migrants are largely illegal and if we look at their journey to [the EU], 85 per cent have gone to Italy and only 15 per cent to Austria, Germany, and other EU countries.”
He added that the only way to stop the influx was to close the Bosnian eastern border with Serbia — another non-EU country — saying: “We can do this in two ways: the first is to mobilise the resources available to our police agencies by sending 2,000 agents to the border to seal it and block arrivals. The second is to employ the army, but it could create problems with Belgrade,” referring to the seat of the Serbian government.
Tensions in Bosnia are high as many locals are angered over the presence of the migrants. Ružnić said the tensions are due to a huge surge in crime.
“Due to the constant and increased influence of migrants, criminal activity has increased with over 4,000 crimes in the last three years including theft, private house fires, and even more serious crimes. That’s why citizens are reacting through street protests,” he said.
Of the 100,000 migrants that have passed through his area, Ružnić suspected that just ten per cent were legitimate refugees and that thirty per cent may have criminal or even terrorist backgrounds.
The call for help comes just months after Bosnian security minister Fahrudin Radoncic warned prior to the Chinese coronavirus outbreak that as many as 100,000 migrants could head into Western Europe from the Balkan region.
Czech Prez: ‘Spread of Radical Islam in EU Candidate State Bosnia Funded by Saudi Arabia’ https://t.co/6MaWlXoagH
UNFPA, the agency specializing in reproductive and maternal health worldwide, is working with 12 partners on the ground to distribute dignity kits, which contain sanitary pads, soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste and towels. These items are helping women and girls maintain their personal hygiene even amid the destruction and displacement.
This is essential, community members have emphasized.
“Just like I would want my girls to be fed, I would also want them to have these basic hygienic needs”, said Hayat Merhi, a woman with three adolescent daughters whose family was affected by the blast.
The blast and its aftermath comes on top of the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic crisis, years in the making. Job losses have curtailed family spending, even as disease prevention is becoming more urgent than ever.
Too often, the needs of women and girls are the first to go unmet.
“There was a time when my daughters were using a piece of cloth instead of pads”, said Lina Mroueh, who also has three adolescent daughters.
UNFPA partners have been canvassing blast-impacted areas as they distribute the dignity kits, speaking with women and girls about their circumstances. The work is challenging, but rewarding, they say.
“Bringing light into their broken homes and telling women and girls that their dignity, safety and personal needs matter to the world in these difficult times is the least we can do,” described Rima Al Hussayni, director of Al Mithaq Association.
Life-saving information
The distribution of dignity kits is also an opportunity to address yet another crisis: gender-based violence, according to UNFPA.
Gender-based violence is known to increase in humanitarian settings and in times of economic stress. Amid the pandemic, many countries are reporting increased violence against women and rising demands for support services.
“It is very important to remember that dignity kits are helpful to women and girls, not only for the menstrual hygiene products, soaps and other items, but also as a way to reach women and girls with key messages about sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender-based violence, the prevention of sexual exploitation, and abuse services and information,” said Felicia Jones, UNFPA’s humanitarian coordinator.
UNFPA
UNFPA and partners are distributing dignity kits to women in Beirut following the devasting explosion.
The dignity kits contain referral information to connect survivors with help. The people distributing the kits are also trained to provide this information.
In some cases, they explain even more.
“We trained our staff to demonstrate how to use and maintain the items in the kit”, said Gabby Fraidy of the Lebanese Council to Resist Violence Against Women. “We had 11-year-old girls who came to us, and our role was to share information about menstruation and explain to them that it is a natural and a biological process that occurs, and that it’s a part of growing up.”
Additional vulnerabilities
Akkarouna and Al Makassed associations are also distributing dignity kits to women and girls with disabilities, who often face additional vulnerabilities and challenges accessing sexual and reproductive health services and commodities.
It is estimated that around 12,000 disabled persons have been affected by the blast.
Our historical understanding of Blackness is most commonly shaped by the story of the Atlantic slave trade – the forced movement of Africans to the West, in particular to the Americas. But this is a linear narrative that is dominated by American voices. It’s not just potentially exclusory; it doesn’t adequately take into account the diversity of black people worldwide. The same is true of Blackness studies, which continue to be dominated by and serve the interests of Western scholarship. Aretha Phiri asks Michelle M. Wright, professor and author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora, about her work in disrupting the slavery narrative.
Aretha Phiri: To start with a recent development, the Black Lives Matter movement appears to have gained global momentum. And yet its impact seems to be mainly in the global North. Does this suggest that black people’s experience of race and racism is not universal?
Michelle M. Wright: The fight for freedom is important, but it really has to include everybody. This requires some radical rethinking. We have to ask who gets to access contemporary spaces. Who has the time (and money) to join in the fight according to the times and places set by the leaders? Who speaks the language we have chosen to communicate in, and who is left out? Black folks are astonishingly diverse in their cultures, histories, languages, religions, so no single definition of Blackness is going to fit everyone. When we fail to consider this, we effectively leave many Black people out of the conversation.
Aretha Phiri: Slavery’s afterlife is central to Black Lives Matter’s important call for racial and structural justice and equality. Yet, in your paper, Black in Time: Diaspora, Diversity and Identity, you trouble the dominance of a corresponding “Middle Passage” epistemology as racially reductive. What is broadly meant by “Middle Passage” thinking and how is it disseminated by US-based scholars?
Michelle M. Wright: In most US (and European) academic conversations, the “Middle Passage” – also known as the Atlantic slave trade – is used interchangeably with the African “diaspora” – the dispersal of Black and African people from their “original”, typically (West) African locales to North America. This linear mapping is not just convenient, it is false. Ninety-five percent of enslaved Africans were transported to South America and the Caribbean, not the US; not to mention the millions of slaves who were transported east to places like Turkey and India. Reinforced by a linear timeline which is understood to “progressively” track history, this mapping further distorts history in service to the West. That is, because (West) Africa is the starting point, the tendency is to view it as embedded in “the past” and the West as aligned with “the future”.
In my book, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, I call this particular mapping of Blackness the “Middle Passage epistemology”. It’s a specific form of knowledge or way of knowing (the world) that is oriented to the West, specifically to America. This is problematic not just because it hierarchises or “ranks” Blackness, but also because (transatlantic) scholarship on Black African diaspora is often imagined through historical and cultural parameters in which “Middle Passage Blackness” is the norm, often the only representation of Blackness.
Aretha Phiri: Building on your observation, I am struck by the continued influence in South African universities of Paul Gilroy’s seminal text The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness in particular and US-based Black Atlantic studies in general. Where these foreground the global influences and contributions of Black peoples, they also unfortunately disseminate “Middle Passage” thinking which situates Africa in the past. What are the other challenges presented here?
Michelle M. Wright: Not only is what is typically represented in Black Atlantic scholarship narrow, it is almost always heterosexual and masculinist. It struggles to imagine race and racism outside of the threat of emasculation and racial futures and racial pasts outside of a heteropatriarchal norm.
Most recently, the famous 1619 Project in The New York Times aimed at documenting the impact of slavery on the US. But it focuses almost exclusively on Black men in African American history, eliding the achievements of women and queer folks. This leads to the assumption that it is heterosexual Black men who played the major contributory roles. But our earliest abolitionist movements were started by Black women, our first Presidential candidate was a Black woman, and it was Black queer activists like James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin who were central to the Civil Rights Movement. So yes, part of the ethical challenge, then, is to recognise that some Black people have much more privilege than others.
Aretha Phiri: I am struck, again, at how your analysis is relevant to Black African scholarship, where considerations of women and queer bodies have also historically been obscured or omitted…
Michelle M. Wright: Racial metanarratives are inherently limiting. It’s very difficult for Black Africans, much less Black Europeans and Black peoples of the Pacific and Central and South America, to read themselves through the dominant (US) framings of Blackness. For example, if you are a Kenyan living in Mombasa, chances are high that your greatest preoccupation is not racist white cops, but violence from Black Kenyan policemen. And here we are, one scholar Zimbabwean/South African, the other a US citizen born and raised in Western Europe, both women, myself queer. The “Middle Passage” epistemology fails because it dictates that you belong to the past and I belong to the present and future. But history, nationality, gender, class and sexuality intersected us here at this exchange even as we came through different paths and bring different experiences, outlooks and philosophies.
Authors: Aretha Phiri – Senior lecturer, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University | Michelle M Wright – Professor of African Diaspora Studies, Northwestern University
Several large fires razed Moria last week leaving 13,000 men, women and children without shelter. In response, the former inmates of Europe’s largest refugee camp have made makeshift shelters out of plastics, vegetation and garbage.
Now, Greek authorities have begun relocating some migrants and refugees who were left homeless.
A new camp set up at an Army firing range will house about 3,000, which still leaves over 8,000 with a roof over their heads.
Most migrants are from Afghanistan and Syria.
On Saturday, there were clashes with security forces after some migrants attempted to march to the island’s port.
According to local media, many refugees are refusing to be relocated to the new camp and are requesting transit to Greek mainland in the hope of moving to other EU countries.
On Friday, the German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said 10 EU countries had agreed to participate in taking in the unaccompanied children from the camp. Other countries that would help include Finland, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Switzerland.
European Commissioner in charge of Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic, pictured in June 2020, said the EU had mobilised €64 million for the emergency response in Lebanon. — AFP pic
BEIRUT, Sept 13 — The European Union’s commissioner for crisis management yesterday called for the urgent formation of a “credible” government in Lebanon before a second phase of financial support for the crisis-hit country can be released.
Janez Lenarcic said the EU had mobilised €64 million (RM314.9 million) for the emergency response to a devastating port blast that killed more than 190 people and wounded thousands in Beirut on August 4.
The next round of funding would be for reconstruction, he said, but warned it would have to go hand in hand with reforms because the international community was not willing to support practices “that led to financial collapse and economic crisis”.
The tragedy occurred when hundreds of tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser that had been left unattended in a port warehouse exploded.
It came as the Lebanese people were already reeling from the country’s worst economic crisis in decades and rekindled smouldering rage over official neglect and a political class accused of corruption.
The government resigned in the wake of the disaster, but Lebanon has rejected an international investigation, saying it would carry out its own probe aided by foreign experts.
“We need a credible government that enjoys the confidence of the Lebanese people and is determined to take the country in the right direction,” Lenarcic told AFP after arriving in Lebanon on board a humanitarian aid flight.
“Lebanon’s political class has to provide what people demand and this is also what the international community expects. I’m talking about governance, not only economic reforms. There has to be a change in the way this place is governed,” he said.
Lebanon’s worst economic crunch since the 1975-1990 war has seen the local currency plummet against the US dollar and poverty double to more than half of the population. The government has blamed central bank governor Riad Salameh for the crisis, though he has rejected all charges.
Lenarcic said reaching an agreement with the IMF should also be an early priority for the next government.
The IMF said on Thursday it was ready to “redouble its efforts” to help Lebanon “overcome the social and economic crisis” once a new government was in place.
“The EU commission supports reaching an agreement with the IMF because that would unlock substantial resources that Lebanon desperately needs to revive its economy,” Lenarcic said.
Referring to the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, he said it was a “reality in Lebanon”, adding that “we would like to see the entire Lebanese political class unite behind the task”.
Hezbollah has long been targeted by US sanctions and blacklisted as a “terrorist” organisation, but the Shiite group is also a powerful political player with seats in Lebanon’s parliament
“We believe it should play its part in this effort,” he said. — AFP
There was a consistent message from business leaders to international trade secretary Liz Truss’s claims that she had signed a “historic” deal with Japan to lower tariffs and gain access to previously restricted markets.
Thank you, they said, but could you please sign a deal with the EU because that is our most important export market.
Truss is not a minister to be moved by such demands. The former chief secretary to the Treasury has a mission to bolt together as many trade deals with non-EU countries as she can while No 10 takes on the task of signing a comprehensive agreement with Brussels. Officials at the signing ceremony with Japan confirmed that the deal was expected to boost UK trade with the world’s third-largest economy by an estimated £15.2bn, though there was no date by which this figure would be achieved.
It would also add only 0.07% to UK gross domestic product, which compares with forecasts by government economists of a 5% loss of GDP from leaving the EU customs union and single market.
No wonder Mike Hawes, the boss of car lobby group the SMMT, and Adam Marshall, head of the British Chambers of Commerce, were quick to point out that a deal with the EU was far more important.
Truss was undaunted, though her attempts so far to sign other significant deals, and especially with the US, have proved fruitless.
Under normal circumstances, a deal with the US is not a priority. It might be the largest economy in the world and the single largest destination for UK goods and services exports outside the EU, but it is an open market characterised by low import tariffs. That was the situation until Donald Trump began his bruising battle with China over what he claimed were trade barriers damaging to US companies. In the last couple of years this trade war has expanded to take in the EU.
Importantly for Truss, the UK has been one of the biggest losers. In particular, single malt Scotch whisky has suffered from a 25% import tariff, pricing it out of the US market.
Liz Truss holds a video conference call with Japan’s foreign minister, Toshimitsu Motegi. Photograph: British Department Of Trade/EPA
Truss needs to win over the US to push trade tariffs back down to more normal levels, or better still to zero. However, there is a high price to be paid for favours in Washington. Farmers are an especially powerful lobby group in the US and want full access to foreign markets as the price of any trade deal. They expect Congress to abide by this maxim, and it usually does.
Before the US pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal that included Australia, Vietnam and Japan, Washington had extracted concessions for US beef and other farm produce that were effectively banned in many TPP countries up to that point.
The former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, who last week officially joined Truss’s advisory board, has long wrestled with criticism that his determination to sign trade deals meant that many domestic industries were thrown overboard, including agriculture and manufacturing.
Truss is under pressure to protect UK agriculture from being steamrollered by cheap US produce. If she is to uphold farming standards – ones that would allow the continued export of livestock and food to the EU – Truss must not lower UK rules in order to give access to industrial-scale farmers in the US who use growth hormones on their beef and chlorine washes on their chicken.
Whether to comply with the US or the EU rules is not a question that troubles business leaders. It is the EU every time.
This makes sense when you consider the numbers. If you include services industries, imports and exports between Britain and the EU were worth a total of £672.5bn last year, more than 20 times the value of UK-Japan trade and three times the £200bn sent back and forth to the US. A deal with the EU will be the historic prize.
A woman has got to the top of Wall St. But others still face a climb
The appointment this week of the first female leader of a Wall Street bank was greeted with a roar of approval. Jane Fraser, the Scottish-American banker from St Andrews who will lead Citi, is “a pioneer”, declared David Solomon over at Goldman Sachs.
It is indeed a landmark moment. But, now that a breakthrough has finally happened on Wall Street, a bastion of corporate maleness, should we expect a rush of female appointments? Don’t bet a cent on it. That hasn’t been the wider experience in the US or the UK.
The first woman to become chief executive of a FTSE 100 company was Dame Marjorie Scardino in 1997, and her appointment at Pearson was similarly hailed as groundbreaking. Almost a quarter of a century later, one can say the predicted rush of female FTSE bosses was a trickle. The highest number within the 100-strong club at any one time has been seven. Within banking, the first female chief executive of a UK top-four firm was Alison Rose at NatWest Group, appointed as recently as last year.
It’s true that the UK’s top boardrooms overall have become less male over the years. A third of board positions at FTSE 100 companies are held by women, the Hampton-Alexander Review found this year.
Yet the review also highlighted a “concerning lack of female representation in senior leadership and key executive roles” in FTSE 350 companies: only 15 female finance directors among FTSE 100 firms, for example.
In the US, the picture is similar: progress, but painfully slow. Only 31 women lead S&P 500 firms. On Wall Street, there are two men for every woman on banks’ operating committees, according to Bloomberg. Fraser’s success is a personal triumph, but the corporate world has not undergone a revolution.
Rio resignations signal the end for profit without accountability
When Rio Tinto announced last week that its chief executive, Jean-Sébastien Jacques, would be stepping down, it marked a new low for the mining giant – but potentially also an inflection point in corporate accountability.
Jacques resigned, alongside two other senior bosses, after investors lined up to condemn the company’s leadership for overseeing the destruction of an Australian heritage site of importance to Indigenous communities.
The world’s biggest iron ore miner destroyed two ancient caves in Pilbara, Western Australia, after blowing up the Juukan Gorge rock shelters, which held irreplaceable artefacts.
The executive clearout was by “mutual agreement”, according to a statement, but it should send a clear signal to others culpable for environmental destruction in the pursuit of corporate profit.
Environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) may once have been regarded as a box-ticking exercise for company executives, but growing public intolerance of shoddy ESG standards can no longer be ignored. Investors, too, are unwilling to turn a blind eye to poor practice.
If the 2015 Samarco dam disaster, which resulted from a joint venture between miners BHP Billiton and Vale, had happened today it is difficult to imagine that executives would be let off as lightly as they were at the time.
The dam’s collapse left 19 dead, hundreds homeless and is considered the single worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history. For Andrew Mackenzie, BHP’s then boss, it meant sacrificing a short-term bonus, even though hundreds living near the dam are still without homes.
The past loss of life and natural heritage at the hands of mining companies can never be replaced. But the swift condemnation of reckless corporate greed today could help safeguard the future.
