On Sunday night’s news they announced that British Home Stores, BHS, was about to go into receivership. My first thought was: “are they still around??” I thought they’d gone the way of Woolworths decades ago. They were a store from my childhood and I curiously assumed they’d ended when I entered adulthood. I no longer needed ‘school trousers’ so didn’t understand that anyone else might. Apparently now they don’t.

So having realised that BHS did in fact still exist on many of the country’s best shopping streets that I strive so hard to avoid at any cost, this has now become the next tragedy.

And it is a tragedy. Always, when 11.000 people will lose their jobs. But that’s only part of the problem. There’s also the pension pot…

Like all companies, BHS had a large ‘pot’ in which the employees pensions sat. Hopefully growing, but as they say: ‘investments can go down as well as up’. Unfortunately, BHS offered ‘final salary’ pensions. These offer the retiree basically his income in perpetuity. As opposed to my pension which just offers to give me back what I’ve paid in, plus any ‘growth’. And there’s the problem. Growth.

My puny little pension pot dropped about 25% during the financial crisis of 2008. Shares plummeted, currency was worthless, there was pretty much no vehicle in which you could invest (legally) that wasn’t headed in a downward direction. So doubtless, BHS pension money went the same way. Direction: hell. Thus this 500 million pound ‘hole’ in the pension pot there is not necessarily because someone has taken the money away. More that the money has been invested in a way that didn’t, or even couldn’t, produce the level of sustained growth it needed to produce the arbitrary ‘projected target’.

Yet before anyone makes any other considerations, long before any facts have been properly examined, the first port of call is a scapegoat. Who can we blame? Ahhhh, there’s Philip Green. He’s a fat bastard billionaire, spends his greasy life cuddling up to Liz Hurley and Kate Moss, hobnobs with Simon Cowell, has not one, not two, but three of the world’s biggest private yachts, is based ‘offshore’ in Monaco, and he’s fucking rich. Even if I mentioned that, its worth repeating. RICH BASTARD. He used to own BHS, sold it for a quid. Bastard. Sold it to a man with ‘form’ in the backrupcy department. But before Le Green sold it, he paid himself 1.2 billion quid. Just, like, a bit of pocket money til his horse comes in.

And stating it in that way: BHS pensions down half a bil, Philip Green up 1.2… it implies the connection. It implies theft. It implies all sorts of bollocks that may or may not have happened but WE DON’T KNOW YET.

I don’t know Philip Green. I’m sure he is really, totally, irredeemably horrible. But put away the cross and nails for a while; let’s see what he actually HAS done before crucifiction begins.

Happy very late Wednesday.

A xxxx