David Cameron, Austerity & Regrater Lex Greensill
Regrater or Forestaller was the term used- particularly by radicals-in the eighteenth century to describe what has more recently been known as the middleman.
That is someone who inserts themselves between a supplier and a buyer and makes themselves a profit out of it.
That is essentially what the story of Greensill, the global financing company that has gone bust threatening thousands of jobs including 5.000 in the UK steel industry, is about.
It is a complex story, some parts of it as yet remain unclear. You can find what is known in the Murdoch Sunday Times (28th March) if you can find a way of getting access. The media in so far as they have picked up the story have focused on David Cameron who was PM when Greensill got Government business and then went on to work for the Company. Culture Minister and statue obsessive Oliver Dowden has defended Cameron as a ‘man of integrity’. As the Sunday Times Editorial notes Cameron doesn’t actually have a reputation to lose.
Greensill was from an Australian farming family that went bust after a bad harvest. He came to the UK and got employment at Morgan Stanley. Here he met Jeremy Heywood, a civil servant, who was on secondment in the private sector.
Heywood returned to Government as Head of the Civil Service in the Cameron-Clegg Government. He died in 2018.
In Government Heywood seems to have promoted Greensill to Cameron.
As the Sunday Times story indicates Greensill’s business was about supply chain finance. He would act between the supplier and the buyer and aim to speed up payments for a fee.
Only one scheme actually happened.
This allegedly was about addressing the issue of chemists receiving late payment from the NHS for prescriptions they dealt with.
Here we find the core of the issue and it was about austerity.
If there was an issue of late payment it should have been sorted out by the Government and the NHS. Greensill was entirely unnecessary to the matter. Indeed under the previous Labour administration a plan had been agreed to address it. It was not implemented.
This was the age of austerity and Cameron-Clegg wanted a Small State and public sector. Hence anything that could and should have been done by the Government that could be passed to the private sector was.
As the report underlines the scheme was not much used because the commission charged by the banks that were making payments to the chemists came to more than any loss they might have made through late payment.
It’s unclear how or whether Greensill made money out of this (though in due course his company took over the finance operation) which indicates that- as the current situation suggests- he may not in fact not even have been a successful middleman but simple a scammer.
It is the world of William Cobbett’s Old Corruption before 1832 in 2021.
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