Helen Thomas is blogging from the Treasury Select Committee hearing at Westminster on Wednesday, where the vexed issue of private equity is firmly on the British political agenda.
Live from Portcullis House, first up it’s the unions – notably Paul Kenny from the GMB, one of the private equity industry’s most vocal critics.
And, surprisingly perhaps, the unions are not being given an entirely easy ride. A suggestion that MPs really should not accept private equity propaganda on pensions matters draws an icy response: “I’m not going to accept this propaganda either.”
At the front of a packed and very hot room, Sion Simon, Labour MP for Birmingham Erdington, was among the first to give a bit back to the unions:
Hadn’t Mr Kenny, since taking on private equity over the AA, the motor assistance firm bought out by Permira in 2004, chosen private equity as a “soft and easy target”, a “naïve” industry, and enjoyed “kicking them around a bit just because you can.”
Oh, and hadn’t Mr Kenny had “been putting it around a bit?” asked Simon.
Nonsense, declared the seemingly unflappable Mr Kenny – repeating (for perhaps the fifth or sixth time thus far) that the unions were distinguishing between venture capital, entrepreneurship and management buy-ins (good on the whole in their book) and management buy-outs (evil, evil, evil). He pointed to the 3,400 job losses at the AA and questioned (or laughed at, rather) the notion of private equity as naïve.
Of course the cleaners, the new poster children for private equity bashers, got an early mention at the select committee hearing. It is quite wrong, a union voice declared, that cleaners who work in Canary Wharf and the City of London pay less than “the people they clean for” with their “minimal taxes and fabulous wealth.”
And how’s this for a union tagline: “No-one is safe: we’re sticking up for our members as you should stick up for your constituents.”
No argument from the politicians on that one.
The hearing continues.