RBS in Sport: Who’s Paying?
The RBS Six Nations championship kicks off today, for six weeks of thrilling encounters and nail-biting final minutes. RBS – which is 81% owned by the British taxpayer – has been sponsoring the tournament since 2003. Some lament that not so long ago it was simply “The Five Nations” (before Italy joined the competition in 2000), just as we had “The First Division” in football, before it became “The Barclays Premier League”. Should we be worried by the fact that almost every sporting competition, and many stadia and even personalities –Andy Murray is also sponsored by RBS these days – come with corporate money and sometimes a company name attached? Or should we reject such nostalgic feelings and simply accept that times have moved on?
Not at all – we are right to be concerned. RBS boasts a great deal about Rugby Force for example, its scheme to help community rugby clubs, paid for with Six Nations sponsorship money. It claims that it is “putting something back into the community”. Who could possibly argue with such a worthy project? But a brief review of RBS’s recent history and current activities shows quite clearly that it has taken a great deal more out of the community than it has put into it of late – and that it continues to do so today, whilst at the same time gaining a positive public image from its apparently generous sponsorship of a sport which is so close to the hearts of many in the six participant nations.
Fred “the shred” Goodwin gave RBS a bad name back in the noughties when his actions helped contribute to the financial crisis whose consequences we are all paying very dearly for even now. During his period at the helm, RBS was also, let’s say, a little careless about who it lent money to, helping finance international terrorism, resulting in a £5.6m fine from the authorities. We may well wonder who ended up footing the cost of this bill. Following the crash, a massive £62 billion of taxpayer money was injected into the Bank – money which ultimately was taken from ordinary people. We know the consequences: the lost benefits, the redundancies, the cuts to public services like libraries, education and the NHS. Most of this money will now probably never be recovered for the taxpayer.
Under new management, and supposedly under Government supervision, RBS promised to clean up its act – but unfortunately nothing of the kind has happened. First came the loan pricing scandal, for which it was fined – or rather we were fined – £28m. RBS was also deeply implicated in the recent LIBOR scandal: and once again, we – British taxpayers and users of services – will now have to pay up to £400m for the dishonest dealings of RBS’s traders. Meanwhile it has just been announced that RBS will be offering £250 million in bonuses in the next pay-round to staff in the very same investment banking division where the rate-rigging took place. These sums somewhat outweigh the relatively small sums which it has “given back” to the community.
On top of this – and this fact is less well-known by the British public – RBS for many years now been one of the major funders of the most environmentally destructive project on Earth: the Canadian Tar Sands, a project which has also been characterized as “ecocide”. Quite apart from tearing up vast expanses of unspoilt forest, if this oil resource is exploited, it is essentially “game over” as far as climate change is concerned, according to NASA scientist James Hansen. Here, not us mainly, but our children and grandchildren, would pay the heavy price, in terms of extreme weather, sea level rises, and all the devastating human consequences that would follow. Does the British public really want to see the bank in which it has a majority share, involved in this kind of reckless and irresponsible venture? And this is only one of many environmentally destructive projects in which RBS is involved – its claims to have an environmental set of policies are easily deconstructed.
A large corporation like RBS does not fund projects like Rugby Force – projects which in a decent society would in any case be publicly-funded and under democratic control – out of the pure goodness of its heart. By engaging in such worthy but essentially small-scale projects and sponsoring sporting events and personalities, RBS is essentially buying the good will of the public, whilst behind the scenes continuing to extract much greater wealth – both financial and natural – from the national and global community, in a thousand-and-one less visible ways. This is not to doubt that many of its employees are honest and decent people – only that they are part of a commercial system whose in-built logic is endless expansion and profit, and in which a concern for the public good or for nature has no place. But nor is the Government – which should be overseeing its activities – making sure that RBS operates in the public good. In the exchange of the renaming of iconic sporting competitions, for a few million pounds in cash, the British public – which owns the bank and in whose interests it is supposedly being managed – is clearly not the winner. We should indeed be worried about that, and we should in no way be fooled by what is at the end of the day nothing other than a charm offensive which continues to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
(First published in occupynewsnetwork.co.uk on 2/2/2013)
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