It’s almost 2.30am and I’m lying in my bed wide awake. It’s not insomnia or anxiety that’s keeping me from sleep, but a mix of rage and frustration at finding myself and my friends the victims of a seemingly undefeatable enemy. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, the object of my anger is no doubt sleeping soundly, or perhaps enjoying a drink on his luxury yacht, only mildly worried about the upcoming inquiry into the sale of the company that he plundered and destroyed.
Whatever the inquiry concludes, we BHS staff members know whom to blame for the company ending up in liquidation. And today the callousness of Green’s actions and the sheer depth of his greed have awoken something close to loathing in me. I’m a joker by nature and since we were given the news I’ve been mostly making light of it and trying to go about my business as usual, aware that my life is about to change, most likely for the worse, but unwilling to let the fact eat away at me. No amount of resentment or bitterness will improve the situation, so why expend energy on it?
It was while reading one of the many newspaper articles about the dealings of Philip Green that the anger and tears finally came. They were not born out of self-pity, but from disgust at a world where such sickening levels of avarice and injustice are commonplace. The final straw came when my eyes fell upon the line confirming that, as a creditor of BHS, Green’s Arcadia group would likely soon be receiving £35m from the administrators, Duff & Phelps.
As I stared at the figure (a mere drop in the ocean to the Greens, no doubt) my thoughts turned to the current set of woes faced by people such as me and my friends, who have worked hard day in, day out in dilapidated, run-down stores; filling the shelves, serving the customers, running the restaurants and cafes, through hot summers with no air conditioning without complaint, so that the money could continue to roll in and be squirrelled away in Mrs Green’s Monaco bank account, allowing the couple to enjoy their ever more gaudy and grotesque displays of wealth. And that’s when the red mist descended.
Hatred is a terrible thing, but I have no idea what other response there could possibly be to a man such as Philip Green. The man is like a cancer: seemingly determined to grow and spread his little empire with no concern whatsoever for the effect that it may have on others. I wonder if he has ever stopped to think for a single moment about the quality of life of the people unfortunate enough to work in the factories that produce the products he sells, or the day-to-day worries of his own minimum-wage employees as they struggle to make ends meet from one meagre paycheck to the next.
As long as there’s a supermodel by his side and the money’s still pouring in, it doesn’t seem to matter one bit to Phil. He is, it seems to me, nothing more than a money-obsessed sociopath driven by who knows what insecurities to worm his way into the glitzy yet ultimately vacuous world of moguls, models and movie stars. If it takes making 11,000 British workers unemployed to fund the next star-studded A-list shindig, then so be it.
There has been much talk of stripping Green of his knighthood. When I first heard it suggested, I couldn’t have cared less. After all, none of BHS’s betrayed staff would be addressing him as “Sir” in the near or distant future, either way. However, having given it some more consideration, I feel that revoking his title would at least offer a glimmer of hope to me and other BHS employees. It would serve as a sign that maybe we aren’t living in a country that values the vast wealth of a tiny minority over the welfare of its citizens and, more importantly, that perhaps the tide is finally turning in our favour.
There’s a long, long way to go to transform this world into a just and fair one – perhaps we’ll never truly get there – but, as the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The fall of Sir Phil, to my mind, would be an excellent place to start.
