DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Co-op, Labour and a betrayal of values

Co-op, Labour and  a betrayal of values Yesterday, as the Co-op announced losses of £2.5billion – the worst results in its 150-year history – the Group’s new chief executive spoke of a ‘disaster’ that would ‘shock’ its eight million members.

The brutal truth, however, is that this was a calamity that could have been predicted years ago, as the Co-op moved far away from the noble objectives of the 19th-century Rochdale Pioneers to improve the lives of the working classes.

Instead of focusing on running a solid business in the interests of its wider membership, the group’s Left-wing regional officials were more interested in lining their own pockets and pursuing a socialist, Labour-supporting agenda.

Money was poured into the Labour Party, including £1.2million of cheap loans, and donations to 40 MPs, including Ed Balls, who received £50,000 to help run his constituency office.

Rent boy-using Crystal Methodist Paul Flowers – despite being almost financially illiterate – was trusted to run and nearly ruin the Co-op Bank for apparently no other reason than his Labour credentials.

Meanwhile, the Group pushed through disastrous deals – partly funded by ordinary members – to buy the chronically under-performing Somerfield supermarket chain and the Britannia Building Society, which had made billions of pounds of bad loans in the build-up to the great financial crash.

Such acts of hubris made a mockery of the Co-op’s supposedly strong ethical code. But then, it is only too easy to spend other people’s money recklessly – as Labour has proved time and time again when it has been in power.

Price of stamp duty

As house prices continue to soar, the National Association of Estate Agents says the number of homes for sale is at its lowest for ten years.

One reason, say experts, is the punitive stamp duty regime, dubbed ‘a strong contender for the UK’s worst-designed tax’ by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Instead of upgrading and having to hand tens of thousands to the Exchequer, families are extending the property they already own – driving prices of the few homes which are on the market still higher.

The Treasury (whose Help To Buy scheme risks further fuelling a house price bubble) may consider stamp duty a nice little earner. But imagine how many more homes would be sold if stamp duty (paid from income which has already been taxed once, remember) were to be slashed?

Not only would such a bold move break the gridlock in the housing market. As the reduction in the 50p tax rate showed, cutting taxes raises more – not less – money for the Chancellor.

Shameful treatment

When Raj Mattu exposed dangerously poor care at a Midlands hospital, his superiors responded by suspending the whistleblower, spying on him with private detectives, then – a decade later – giving him the sack.

Yesterday, as a tribunal ruled he had been unfairly dismissed, it emerged the NHS’s chilling attempt to bully the ‘brilliant’ cardiologist had cost the taxpayer £10million.

This, of course, is the same NHS which – under the stewardship of Sir David Nicholson and the Labour Party – tried to cover up the needless deaths of up to 1,200 patients in the disgraceful and inhumane Mid Staffs scandal.

Whistleblowers, heroically trying to warn of potentially lethal incompetence at other hospitals across the country, were routinely gagged with public money.

Had Labour and Man With No Shame Sir David listened to the likes of Dr  Mattu, instead of shamefully ignoring or trying to silence them, countless lives  and money would not have been so unforgivably squandered.